Yet, however cringing the general policy of the Dutch East India Company, their trade, through the folly of a single individual, was near being exposed to a violent interruption. In the year 1626, Conrad Kramer, the head of the Dutch factory, was extremely well received on his visit to Yedo, and was allowed to be present at Miyako during the visit of the emperor to the Dairi,—an occasion which drew together an immense concourse, and which, according to the account that Kramer has left of it, was attended with vast confusion[116]. The annual visit to Yedo was made the next year by Peter de Nuyts, who gave himself out as ambassador from the king of Holland, and at first was treated as such; but the Japanese having discovered that he had no commission except from the council of Batavia, sent him away in disgrace. Shortly after, Nuyts was appointed governor of Formosa. The Dutch, following in the footsteps of some Japanese adventurers, had formed an establishment on that island, about the year 1620, with a view to a smuggling trade with China; and, by erecting a fort at the mouth of the harbor, had speedily obtained the exclusive control of it. Not long after Nuyts’ appointment as governor, there arrived two Japanese vessels, on a voyage to China. They merely touched at Formosa for water, but Nuyts, to gratify the spite he had conceived against the Japanese nation, contrived to detain them so long that they missed the monsoon; and having required them, as the sole condition on which he would allow their entrance, to give up their sails and rudders, upon one pretence and another, he refused to return them, till at length the patience of the Japanese was entirely exhausted. They numbered five hundred men; and at last, all their reiterated and urgent applications for leave to depart being refused, they attacked the governor by surprise, overpowered his household, and made him prisoner; nor did the garrison of the neighboring fort dare to fire upon them for fear of killing their own people. Thus the brave Japanese extorted liberty to depart and indemnity for their losses, to which the Dutch assented, notwithstanding their superior force, for fear of reprisals in Japan. These, however, they did not avoid, for, as soon as the Japanese reached home, the emperor put under sequestration nine vessels with their cargoes, then at Hirado, belonging to the Dutch East India Company, and forbade any further trade with their agents. Things remained in this state for three years, the Japanese, however, receiving as usual Dutch vessels which came from Batavia, under the assumed character of belonging not to the East India Company, but to private merchants. At last it was resolved to seek an accommodation by surrendering up Nuyts to the mercy of the Japanese, which was done in 1634.