To sustain the English interest in the eastern seas, the English East India Company, by great efforts, had fitted out, in 1617, the largest expedition yet sent from England to the East Indies. It consisted of the “Royal James,” of one thousand tons; the “Royal Anne,” of nine hundred; the “Gift,” of eight hundred; the “Bull,” of four hundred; and the “Bee,” of one hundred and fifty tons; and sailed from London under the command of Martin Pring, who, twelve years before, following up the discoveries of Gosnold, had entered and explored—the first Englishman to do so—Penobscot bay and river, on the coast of what had since begun to be known as New England. Pring sailed first for Surat, where the Company had a factory, and where he assisted the native prince against the Portuguese, with whom he was at war. On the 17th of June, 1618, he arrived at Bantam, whence he proceeded, in September, to Jacatra, a city of the natives, the site of the present Batavia. There he received news that the Dutch in the Moluccas, not content with driving out the Spaniards, had attacked the English also, making prisoners of the merchants, whom they had treated with great harshness. News had also reached England of these Dutch outrages, and to make head against them, the Company, not long after Pring’s departure, despatched Sir Thomas Dale—also well known to readers of American history as high-marshal of the colony of Virginia, one of its first legislators, and for three or four years its deputy governor—with a fleet of six large ships, with five of which he joined Pring in November, 1618, in the Bay of Bantam, assuming the command of the whole, including others which he found there. Both fleets were in a very leaky condition, and after some skirmishing with the Dutch, and the capture of a richly laden Dutch ship from Japan, the English sailed for the coast of Coromandel, to refit and to obtain provision, which could not be had on the coast of Java. Having arrived at Musilapatam, Dale died there August 9, 1619. Toward the end of the year, Pring, who succeeded in the command, returned again towards the Straits of Sunda, and on the 25th of January, 1620, met, off the coast of Sumatra, three English ships of a new fleet, from which he learned that four others of the squadron to which they belonged had been surprised while at anchor off the coast of Java, and taken by the Dutch; that another had been wrecked in the Straits of Sunda; and that the Dutch were in pursuit of two others, with every prospect of taking them.