Page:Further India; (IA furtherindia00clif).pdf/153

were accordingly prepared to give a warm welcome to any Europeans who were enemies of the hated race. Lancaster not only carried on his trade in Acheh with- out molestation under the protection of its king, but actually used the place as his base of operations for a piratical raid which he presently made upon the Portu- guese in the Straits of Malacca—an expedition which resulted in the capture of one very rich prize. On his re- turn to Acheh a treaty of friendship was made with the King, and Lancaster coasted along Sumatra, passed through the Straits of Sunda, and opened a factory at Bantam. Thence he sailed for England, leaving behind him eight men and two factors, the chief of whom was Master William Starkey, whose purely mercantile charge must be regarded as the germ out of which there grew in the course of time Great Britain's enormous empire in the East.

Bantam itself had been first visited by the Portuguese in 1511, when, immediately after the fall of Malacca, Henrique Lemé, one of Dalboquerque's captains, touched at the port. Houtman, as we have seen, established a trading-post there in 1596, at which time a Portuguese factory was already in existence, and the station now founded by Lancaster became later the principal Presi- dency of the British East Indies to which the agencies of Madras, Bengal and Surat were alike subordinate. The importance of Bantam for both the English and the Dutch lay in the fact that it furnished a convenient centre from which to trade with Sumatra for pepper, and especially with the Moluccas for spices, the latter being