The Portuguese had been in Ceylon since 1505, ruling the maritime provinces with what the sources consistently describe as oppressive authority. The Sinhalese kingdoms fought them constantly but could not dislodge them alone. Meanwhile in Europe, Portugal had fallen under the Spanish crown through the Iberian Union of 1580, and the newly independent Dutch Republic -- itself in revolt against the Habsburgs -- was hunting for colonial footholds to replace the Lisbon trade routes the union had severed. Ceylon's cinnamon and pepper were the draw. King Rajasingha II signed the Kandyan Treaty of 1638, inviting Dutch military aid against the Portuguese. But both parties were playing a double game from the start. Rajasinghe simultaneously offered the French the Trincomalee fort as a counterweight to Dutch power. The treaty of 1638 was never fully implemented. Its most crucial clause -- that captured Portuguese forts would be garrisoned or demolished 'as the king thought fit' -- appeared only in the Sinhala text, not the Dutch version. This convenient omission would poison relations for decades.

The early Dutch-Sinhalese relationship had an even darker precedent. Shortly after van Spilbergen's friendly visit, a second Dutch fleet arrived under Sebald de Weert -- a commander who had previously discovered the Falkland Islands while seeking a route through Cape Horn. Sebald de Weert reached Batticaloa in 1603 with six ships and an agreement to help oust the Portuguese. But when he captured four passing Portuguese vessels and then released the crews, the Kandyan king was furious. After a perceived insult to the king's wife, the order came: de Weert and 50 of his unarmed compatriots were killed on the beach. The massacre froze Dutch-Sinhalese cooperation for more than three decades. The Dutch turned their attention to the spice islands of Indonesia, and it was not until 1637 that Captain Jan Thijssen Payart returned to Ceylon to negotiate a new treaty. The following year, Admiral Adam Westerwolt decimated the Portuguese fleet off Goa and then attacked the fort at Batticaloa -- the same shore where de Weert's men had died -- conquering it on May 18, 1638.

The Dutch advance was methodical. In February 1640, Philip Lucasz captured the Portuguese fort at Negombo, north of Colombo. When Lucasz died suddenly, command passed to Willem Jacobsz Coster, who had fought under Westerwolt on the east coast. Coster besieged the formidable fort at Galle against heavy odds and stormed the city on March 13, 1640, taking it within hours. For the next eighteen years, Galle served as the center of Dutch power in Ceylon. The Dutch retained every territory they captured, claiming compensation for their war expenses -- expenses the Kandyan kings disputed but could not force them to abandon. The cinnamon trade became the economic engine of Dutch Ceylon. Tamil workers from Tanjore were brought to labor in the cinnamon gardens of the Western Province and tobacco farms in Jaffna. In the 1700s, the Dutch sanctioned caste-based slavery in Jaffna, a system of discrimination so deeply rooted that legislation in the 1950s and 1970s could not fully eradicate it.

Dutch Ceylon ended not with a battle but with a bribe. When the French Revolutionary Wars erupted in 1792, the Dutch Republic was conquered and its stadtholder, Prince William V, fled to Britain. His colonial governors faced an impossible choice: obey the exiled prince or the French-installed Batavian Republic. The last Dutch governor of Ceylon, Johan van Angelbeek, initially accepted William's orders to place the colony under British protection. Then he reversed course and ordered his troops to resist the British. He did not realize that British intelligence had already hollowed out his defenses. The De Meuron Regiment -- 1,000 mercenaries, two-thirds of them Swiss -- formed the backbone of Ceylon's defense. On March 30, 1795, British agent Hugh Cleghorn paid the regiment's proprietor, Count Charles-Daniel de Meuron, six thousand pounds to switch sides. After token resistance, van Angelbeek surrendered. His own officers, feeling betrayed, turned their heavy guns on the governor's palace. On February 14, 1796, Pierre Frederic de Meuron -- the Count's brother -- peeled off his blue Dutch uniform, put on a red British one, and became Military Governor of Ceylon.

The Dutch controlled Ceylon's coast for 156 years without ever conquering its interior. The Kingdom of Kandy watched from the highlands, alternately allying with and resisting each European power that claimed the shoreline. When the British finally absorbed the entire island, the Dutch legacy persisted in unexpected forms. Some 230 Dutch loanwords survive in the Sinhala language -- terms for potatoes, hospitals, and screws, the vocabulary of trade and daily life rather than governance. About 50 Dutch loanwords remain in Tamil. The islands of the Palk Strait still carry Dutch names: Kayts, Delft. A community of mixed Dutch-Sri Lankan heritage, the Burghers, maintained a distinct identity into the twentieth century, with many migrating to Australia after independence in 1948. At Point Pedro, a granite inscription marks where the Dutch priest Philippus Baldeus once preached to Tamils under a tamarind tree -- a tree uprooted by a cyclone in 1964, its absence now as much a part of the story as the words Baldeus spoke beneath it.