rather as a gallant privateer than as an able seaman, though in truth he
was both.

After these follow Schovten and Le Maire, who were fitted out to make
discoveries; and executed their commission with equal capacity and
success. If Le Maire had lived to return to Holland, and to have
digested into proper order his own accounts, we should, without question,
have received a much fuller and clearer, as well as a much more correct
and satisfactory detail of them than we have at present: though the
voyage, as it is now published, is in all respects the best, and the most
curious of all the circumnavigators. This was, very probably, owing to
the ill-usage he met with from the Dutch East India Company; which put
Captain Schovten, and the relations of Le Maire, upon giving the world
the best information they could of what had been in that voyage
performed. Yet the fate of Le Maire had a much greater effect in
discouraging, than the fame of his discoveries had in exciting, a spirit
of emulation; so that we may safely say, the severity of the East India
Company in Holland extinguished that generous desire of exploring unknown
lands, which might otherwise have raised the reputation and extended the
commerce of the republic much beyond what they have hitherto reached.
This is so true that for upwards of one hundred years we hear of no Dutch
voyage in pursuit of Le Maire's discoveries; and we see, when Commodore
Roggewein, in our own time, revived that noble design, it was again
cramped by the same power that stifled it before; and though the States
did justice to the West India Company, and to the parties injured, yet
the hardships they suffered, and the plain proof they gave of the
difficulties that must be met with in the prosecution of such a design,
seem to have done the business of the East India Company, and damped the
spirit of discovery, for perhaps another century, in Holland.