They framed the famous act of navigation; which prohibited all nations from importing into England in their bottoms any commodity which was not the growth and manufacture of their own country.

By this law, though the terms in which it was conceived were general, the Dutch were principally affected; because their country produces few commodities, and they subsist chiefly by being the general carriers and factors of Europe.

Letters of reprisal were granted to several merchants, who complained of injuries which, they pretended, they had received from the states; and above eighty Dutch ships fell into their hands, and were made prizes.

The cruelties committed on the English at Amboyna, which were certainly enormous, but which seemed to be buried in oblivion by a thirty years' silence, were again made the ground of complaint.

And the allowing the murderers of Dorislaus to escape, and the conniving at the insults to which St.John had been exposed, were represented as symptoms of an unfriendly, if not a hostile disposition in the states.
The states, alarmed at all these steps, sent orders to their ambassadors to endeavor the renewal of the treaty of alliance, which had been broken off by the abrupt departure of St.John.Not to be unprepared, they equipped a fleet of a hundred and fifty sail, and took care, by their ministers at London, to inform the council of the state of that armament.