The siege did not begin with the Dutch alone. On 23 May 1638, the Kingdom of Kandy -- the last independent Sinhalese kingdom, holding the mountainous interior of the island -- signed a treaty with the Dutch East India Company. Both parties wanted the Portuguese gone, though for very different reasons. Kandy's King Rajasingha II sought to reclaim sovereignty over the coastal lowlands that Portugal had controlled for over a century. The VOC wanted access to Sri Lanka's cinnamon trade, the most lucrative spice commerce in the region. It was an alliance of convenience that would serve the Dutch far better than the Kandyans. The Portuguese had already suffered a devastating defeat at Gannoruwa on 28 March 1638, where their army was annihilated by Kandyan forces. Galle, commanding 282 villages across the island's most fertile cinnamon-producing lands, was the next target.

On 8 March 1640, Commodore Willem Jacobszoon Coster sailed into the Bay of Galle with a Dutch expeditionary force and Kandyan allies. The Portuguese fort of Santa Cruz de Gale sat on the rocky peninsula that juts into the Indian Ocean -- a natural defensive position reinforced by earthwork ramparts. Captain Lourenco Ferreira de Brito commanded the garrison. For four consecutive days, Dutch guns hammered the fortifications from land and sea. The Portuguese fired back and held. When the final assault came on 13 March, the fighting was brutal. Portuguese sources estimated 450 Dutch dead, including 15 captains, with 500 more wounded. Bandanese and Malay troops serving alongside the Dutch suffered an additional 700 casualties in the battle for the ramparts alone. The numbers, even if inflated by Portuguese pride, point to a garrison that refused to yield cheaply.

The fort fell, and Coster became the first Governor of Dutch Ceylon on 13 March 1640. But neither the Dutch victory nor the alliance that produced it would last cleanly. With Galle secured, the VOC gained a deep-water port from which to project naval power against Portuguese holdings in Goa and along the Indian coast. The Dutch made Galle their headquarters in Ceylon, a role the city held until the capture of Colombo in 1656. For the Kandyans, however, the partnership soured almost immediately. When King Rajasingha II realized that Coster had no intention of returning the conquered coastal territories, the alliance collapsed into hostility. In August 1640 -- just five months after the siege -- Coster and seven companions were killed near Nilgala while traveling from Kandy to Batticaloa, likely on Rajasingha's orders. One colonial occupier had replaced another, and the Sinhalese people found themselves no closer to controlling their own coastline.

The fort that the Dutch seized in 1640 was not the one visitors walk through today. Beginning in 1649, the VOC transformed the crude Portuguese earthworks into a sophisticated fortified city encompassing 52 hectares. Massive ramparts of coral, granite, and limestone -- up to 10 meters high and several meters thick -- encircled the entire peninsula. Fourteen bastions with names like Sun, Moon, Star, and Utrecht provided overlapping fields of artillery fire. Galle Fort became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1988, recognized for its blend of European architecture and South Asian traditions. The Queiroz quote that survives in the historical record captures the Portuguese anguish at losing it: he compared the fall of Galle to the image of Christ as Ecce Homo -- a figure of suffering and humiliation. For the local population who lived in those 282 villages, who harvested the cinnamon that made the fort worth fighting over, the siege was simply the moment when one foreign flag came down and another went up.