Giles Milton

The Dutch, he said, they pissed and shat on our heads.

And in this manner we lay until such time as we were broken out from top to toe like lepers, having nothing to eat but dirty rice and stinking rainwater.

And so the Dutch treated their prisoners and the native population with absolute contempt and brutality.

And that was to be the story that unfolded for the next few years in the band.

So when I was researching the book in the India Office archives, I came across the diary of a factor, one of the merchant adventurers based in Bantam by a man called Edmund Scott.

The fact the English factory had come under attack at one point, the native inhabitants had tried to burn it down, in fact.

And Edmund Scott captured one of these guys.

And in his diary, over the course of about five or six pages, he describes in...

gruesome detail how he tortured this man to death.

First of all, he ripped out his fingernails.

Then he burned him.

Then he crushed his bones.

Then he pulled out his bones.

Then they blew off bits of his body with dynamite.

The poor man was still alive.

They tied him to a stake, got the horrendous white ants and put them into his wounds.

So this, of course, was an age of great brutality.

Everyone was brutal.

And when I read that, the fact that he recorded it so matter-of-factly in his diary truly shocked me.

And when one realises that the Dutch were even more brutal than the English, no one comes out well out of this period of history.