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years of the nineteenth century, it will be more conven- ient to continue the narrative in a later chapter.

Turning finally to Indo-China—namely, Cochin-China, Kambodia, Annam, Tongking, and the Laos country in the valley of the Mekong,—we find that after the first settlements had been formed by the Portuguese during the sixteenth century, as has already been related, the British and Dutch East India Companies both established factories in this region. The English had their factory on Pulau Kondor, now the penal settlement of Saigon, establishing it there in 1616, but a mutiny of the Com- pany's Macassar troops, who had been kept on after the expiration of the terms of their agreement, led to its abandonment. This, and the English factory at Pĕtâni, from the possession of which we were ousted by the Dutch, were practically the only ventures of the Com- pany on the shores of the China Sea. The East India Company of Holland founded a factory in Cochin-China in 1635, in competition with the Portuguese, who had been established there some fifty years earlier, and the Dutchmen had also a trading-post at Pnom Penh, the cap- ital of Kambodia. To them, moreover, belongs the dis- tinction of having been the first to explore the interior by the Mekong route. In 1641 some Laos traders having come from Pnom Penh to Batavia in one of the Company's vessels, Van Dieman, the Governor, decided to attempt the establishment of commercial intercourse with their country. To this end he deputed a sub-factor named. Gerard Van Wusthof to visit Laos, then more or less. united under the King of Vien Chan. The story of this