terms, the engagement was renewed with great warmth.  News was brought to the Portuguese that the maharaja was killed and that the king of Pahang was approaching with a hundred sail of vessels to reinforce them.  Still the Achinese kept up a dreadful fire, which seemed to render the final success doubtful; but at length they sent proposals desiring only to be allowed three galleys of all their fleet to carry away four thousand men who remained of twenty that came before the town.  It was answered that they must surrender at discretion; which the laksamana hesitating to do, a furious assault took place both by water and land upon his galleys and works, which were all effectually destroyed or captured, not a ship and scarcely a man escaping.  He himself in the last extremity fled to the woods, but was seized ere long by the king of Pahang’s scouts.  Being brought before the governor he said to him, with an undaunted countenance, “Behold here the laksamana for the first time overcome!” He was treated with respect but kept a prisoner, and sent on his own famous ship to Goa in order to be from thence conveyed to Portugal:  but death deprived his enemies of that distinguished ornament of their triumph.

1635.

This signal defeat proved so important a blow to the power of Achin that we read of no further attempts to renew the war until the year 1635, when the king, encouraged by the feuds which at this time prevailed in Malacca, again violated the law of nations, to him little known, by imprisoning their ambassador, and caused all the Portuguese about his court to be murdered.  No military operations however immediately took place in consequence of this barbarous proceeding.

1640. 1641.

In the year 1640 the Dutch with twelve men of war, and the king of Achin with twenty-five galleys, appeared before that harassed and devoted city; which at length, in the following year was wrested from the hands of the Portuguese, who had so long, through such difficulties, maintained possession of it.  This year was also marked by the death of the sultan, whom the Dutch writers name Paduka Sri, at the age of sixty, after a reign of thirty-five years; having just lived to see his hereditary foe subdued; and as if the opposition of the Portuguese power, which seems first to have occasioned the rise of that of Achin, was also necessary to its existence, the splendour and consequence of the kingdom from that period rapidly declined.

The prodigious wealth and resources of the monarchy during his reign are best evinced by the expeditions he was enabled to fit out; but being no less covetous than ambitious he contrived to make the expenses fall upon his subjects, and at the same time filled his treasury with gold by pressing the merchants and plundering the neighbouring states.  An intelligent person (General Beaulieu), who was for some time at his court, and had opportunities of information on the subject, uses this strong expression—­that he was