On April 18, 1667, Lord Hollis and Sir William Coventry, who were selected as the English envoys to treat for peace between England and the United Provinces, were instructed to propose that each country retain whatever places were in its possession on the 25th of the previous December. On the other hand, the English were also directed to induce the Dutch to give back Kormentine if possible[152]. How vigorously the envoys urged the return of Kormentine cannot be ascertained, but at any rate they were unsuccessful in obtaining it. When the treaty was concluded at Breda, July 21, 1667, it provided that each country should retain the territories which it held on the tenth of the previous May[153]. Thus ended the war which had in so large a measure been caused by the troubles between the Royal Adventurers and the West India Company. At the conclusion of peace between the two countries, the English cannot be said to have been in a better position on the Guinea coast than they were before the war. On the other hand, it would not be difficult to rebuild new factories at the places which they had lost during the war. Indeed at the time peace was made factories had already been settled in several places occupied before DeRuyter's expedition. Nicolas Villaut, a Frenchman who made a voyage down the coast of Guinea in the years 1666 and 1667 mentioned an English factory on one of the islands in the Sierra Leone River, another at Madra Bomba just north of Cape Mount, and still another just below Cape Miserado[154]. He also mentioned the strength of the English fortress at Cape Corse, and declared that, although there was war in Europe between England and Denmark, the English factors at Cape Corse and those of the Danes at the neighboring fort of Fredericksburg made an amicable agreement to commit no acts of hostility against one another; and that this agreement was so punctually observed that the soldiers of the two nations mingled freely at all times[155]. Villaut failed to describe the condition of the company's fort in the Gambia River, but on October 30, 1667, an attack on it by the natives was reported to the general court of the company[156]. The Negroes succeeded in obtaining possession of the island but were presently dislodged by the company's factors after the loss of a number of white men[157].