After touching, trading, negotiating and fighting, at Socotra, Mocha, and other ports of the Red Sea, Saris arrived at Bantam in October, 1612. Soon after his arrival the letter of Adams was re-read in presence of the assembled merchants; and doubtless it encouraged Saris in his project of visiting Japan. Having taken in seven hundred sacks of pepper, in addition to the broadcloths, gunpowder, and other goods brought from England, Saris sailed on the 14th of January, 1618, in the “Clove,” his crew consisting of seventy-four English, one Spaniard, one Japanese, to serve as an interpreter, he speaking also the Malay language, which Captain Saris understood, and five Swarts, probably Malays. Passing in sight of the south coast of Celebes, Saris touched at several of the ports in the group of the Moluccas, occupied at that time, some of them by Dutch and others by Spanish factories,—the Spaniards from Manila having come to the rescue of the Portuguese, whom the Dutch had driven out. Regarding all new comers (if of any other nation than their own) with scarcely less suspicion and hostility than they did each other, and both of them joining to oppress and plunder the unhappy natives, “who were wrought upon,” so Saris says, “to spoil one another in civil war,” the Dutch and Spaniards, secure in strong forts, sat by and looked on, “prepared to take the bone from him that would wrest it from his fellow.” The Dutch fort at Buchian had a garrison of thirty Dutch soldiers, and eleven Dutch women, “able to withstand the fury of the Spaniard, or other nation whatsoever, being of a very lusty, large breed.” The Dutch commander would not allow the natives to trade with the English, even to the extent of a single _katty_ of cloves, threatening with death those who did so, and claiming all the Spice Islands held by them as “their country, conquered by the sword they having, with much loss of blood and money, delivered the inhabitants from the tyranny of the Portuguese, and having made a perpetual contract with them for the purchase of all their spices at a fixed rate,” in the case of cloves at about eight cents the pound. This claim of exclusive right of trade Captain Saris declined to acknowledge; at the same time he professed his readiness to give the Dutch, “as neighbors and brethren in Christ,” a preference in purchasing any part of his cargo of which they might happen to stand in need. The English and Dutch had been ready enough to join together in breaking up the Portuguese and Spanish monopoly, and in forcing a trade in the Indian seas; but it was already apparent that the Dutch East India Company, which in the amount of capital at its command very far surpassed the English Company, was bent on establishing a monopoly of its own, not less close than that formerly maintained by the Portuguese. The Spaniards, on the other hand, professed friendship, and made some offers of trade; but Captain Saris, suspecting treachery, did not choose to trust them.