46           THE  DUTCH  AND  QUAKER COLONIES
company whose shares were bought and sold from hand to hand ;" and so remarkable was its prosperity that it soon paid dividends of sixty per cent.1 So fast grew the Dutch colonial empire at Spain's expense that by 1619 it was found desirable to bring it together under a general system of administration, and in Java the city of Batavia was built to serve as a colonial capital, a kind of Oriental Amsterdam. From Java Tea and tne Dutch dealt with China. One memorable result coffee of their presence in the East was the introduction of tea and coffee into Europe. They bought tea at Chinese ports, but presently took the island of Formosa and worked it for themselves. At first they carried Mocha coffee from Arabia to Europe around the Cape of Good Hope, but after a while they took the Arabian coffee and planted it in Java, thus originating a new and excellent variety. Within half a century the numerous cafds in Paris and coffee-houses in London testified to the social virtues of the new beverage. The monopoly of the tea and coffee trade was a source of great wealth, and not less so was the trade in pepper and spices. The possession of the Moluccas was worked for all it was worth from the monopolist's point of view. The Dutch in the islands were too few to occupy all the cultivable soil; therefore they occupied the best spots, and destroyed the spice trees elsewhere as far as possible, so as to keep all European rivals out of the field. Moreover, if their crop happened to be very large they would burn a part of it in order to keep up the price. When they had ousted the Portuguese from all their old settlements on the coast of Malabar, they acquired a similar control of the market for pepper. To this day on the mainland of India, in such towns as Chinsurah and Negapatam, and in sundry ports on the Malabar and Coromandel coasts, may be seen canals bordered with quaint brick houses roofed with tiles, relics of the time when the Dutch were masters in those neighbourhoods.8
With the Malay peninsula and the island of Ceylon in their
1 Payne, European Colonies, p. 55.
* W. W. Hunter, Imperial Gazetteer of India, vi. 363.