It is not necessary to give implicit credit to all which the contemporary letters and memoirs related, and which the Catholic historians and martyrologists have repeated, of the ferocity of the persecutors, the heroism of the sufferers, and especially of the miracles said to be wrought by their relics. Yet there can be no question, either of the fury of the persecution, or of the lofty spirit of martyrdom in which it was unavailingly met. Catholicism lingered on for a few years longer in Japan, yet it must be considered as having already received its death-blow in that same year in which a few Puritan pilgrims landed at Plymouth, to plant the obscure seeds of a new and still growing Protestant empire. CHAPTER XXIV _Collisions of the Dutch and English in the Eastern Seas—The English retire from Japan—The Spaniards repelled—Progress of the Persecution—Japanese Ports, except Hirado and Nagasaki, closed to Foreigners—Charges in Europe against the Jesuits—Fathers Sotelo and Collado—Torment of the Fosse—Apostasies—The Portuguese confined to Deshima—Rebellion of Shimabara—The Portuguese excluded—Ambassadors put to Death—A. D. 1621-1640._ Already the relation of the Dutch and English in the East had assumed the character of open hostility. A letter from Cocks, of March 10, 1620,[105] complains that the Hollanders, having seven ships, great and small, in the harbor of Hirado, had, with sound of trumpet, proclaimed open war against the English, both by sea and land, to take their ships and goods, and kill their persons as mortal enemies; that they had seized his boat, fired at his barks, and had beset the door of his factory,—a hundred Dutchmen to one Englishman,—and would have entered and cut all their throats but for the interference of the Japanese: all because Cocks had refused to give up six Englishmen who had escaped from two English ships[106] which the Dutch had captured, and whom they claimed to have back, representing them to the Japanese as their “slaves.”