The enterprise was pursued, as it seems, with satisfactory results until the year 1643, when, in the Straits of Malacca, two richly-laden vessels of the COURTEN fleet were seized by the Dutch. Subsequent proceedings show that the value of the ships and their cargoes, with the contingent losses, exceeded £150,000. Along with this severe blow came the interruptions and injuries to trade at home, which were the inevitable accompaniment of the Civil War. Soon after it, there came indications that the loss to Sir William COURTEN’S representatives by the misconduct of Peter BOUDAEN at Middleburgh would but too probably prove to be a loss without present remedy. It appears to have been established by the evidence adduced in the course of the almost interminable litigation which ensued that there was due from BOUDAEN to his partners a sum of £122,000; none of which, it may be added, seems ever to have been recovered. And the debt which had been contracted by JAMES THE FIRST and his successor, though less grievous in amount, was at this time even more hopeless. Under the pressure of such a combination of misfortunes, William COURTEN found himself practically and suddenly insolvent. He met some of the most pressing claims upon him by the sale of available portions of his landed property. He assigned other portions of his estates to trustees, and became himself an exile. He survived the ruin of the brilliant hopes and expectations to which he had been born about ten years; dying at Florence in the year 1655. He left, by his marriage with Lady Katherine EGERTON, one son and one daughter. [Sidenote: WILLIAM COURTEN, FOUNDER OF THE SLOANE MUSEUM.] The fourth William COURTEN was born in London on the 28th March, 1642. He was baptized at St. Gabriel Fenchurch, on the 31st of that month. The downfall of his family was therefore very nearly contemporaneous with his own birth, and makes it explicable that no record can now be found of the places of his education, or of the course of his early years. But the first trace which does occur of him is in exact harmony with the one fact which makes his existence memorable to his countrymen. [Sidenote: _Museum Tradescantianum_, (1656).] He appears, at the age of fourteen, in the list of benefactors to the Tradescant Museum, at Lambeth, a collection which afterwards became the basis of the Ashendean Museum at Oxford.