82 Ceylon: Dutch to British colony island He saw that this would provide an important counterbalance to the Portuguese The first Dutch settlement was established in 1640 with William Jacobszoon Coster as the governor In June 1640 Coster was murdered and replaced by Jan Thyssen Payart, who had started establishing farms to grow cinnamon for export to Europe It was the fifth governor, Adriaan van der Meijden, who decided to move decisively against the Portuguese In 1658 he managed to drive them off the island, and the Dutch then gradually took over the south of the island, then the southwest and western coast When they took over the entire east coast of the island in 1665, even though Kandy remained independent, they controlled all the ports By 1765 the Dutch were in control of the entire coastline, and Kandy only held the isolated highlands in the center of the island that were too difficult to attack Officially the island was a possession of the Dutch East India Company, and it appointed a governor based in Colombo who ruled Ceylon as a colony Most governors were only in Ceylon for short periods, but some had a lasting effect on the place Jan Maetsuyker, governor from 1646 until 1650—before the Dutch took control of the whole island—relaxed laws on mixed marriages to try to encourage Dutch merchants to marry, assimilate, and remain on the island He felt that this might allow them to compete with local merchants on a much stronger basis In contrast, Jacob van Kittensteijn, his successor from 1650 until 1653, regarded the local wives of merchants as being “vicious and immoral.” The situation changed again after the capture of Colombo and Jaffna in 1656–58 with some 200 Dutch soldiers and merchants marrying into the Indo-Portuguese community—many of these being the wives of Portuguese who were unceremoniously deported Rijklof van Goens, one of the longest serving governors (who had captured Jaffna), governed 1662–63 and again 1665–75 He encouraged mixed marriages—or indeed any marriages—to try to build up an indigenous Dutch settler population However, he legislated that daughters of mixed marriages should marry Dutchmen This had the result of ensuring that there were large numbers of people on the island with Dutch surnames Rijklof van Goens was succeeded as governor by his son and then by Laurens Pijl from 1679 until 1692 These three governors provided much stability for the colonial infrastructure of the island, which was divided into three parts: Colombo, Galle, and Jaffna The latter two parts had commanders who reported to the governor, whereas the governor ruled the area around Colombo himself, with the assistance of a small nominated council Lower levels of the bureaucracy were staffed by Sinhalese or Tamils who originated from southern India The Sinhalese nobility kept their privileges, and, with no worry of invasion or civil war, they actually considerably increased their wealth The Dutch recognized Portuguese land titles (in contrast to their actions in Malacca and elsewhere), and they widened the private ownership of land, which for the Portuguese had only operated in urban areas This resulted in the massive settlement of fertile land, with Dutch and largely Sinhalese businessmen and farmers being able to establish considerable land holdings There were attempts to codify the local laws, but this proved much more complicated than expected The result was that Dutch laws gradually came to apply to the cities and much of the coastal regions, especially in areas dominated by the Sinhalese Muslim laws applied to Muslims on the east coast, and the Thesawalamai laws used by the Tamils of Jaffna were codified in 1707 and used there, although Christians there were subject to Dutch laws RELIGION In the area of religion, when the Dutch took Ceylon there were, nominally, about 250,000 Sinhalese and Tamil Roman Catholics, a quarter of these from the region around Jaffna The Dutch banned Roman Catholicism, ejected all Catholic priests, and made it illegal for any to operate on the island They also set about converting many of the local people to Calvinism Roman Catholic churches were changed into Reformed churches, and many Catholics converted to Calvinism in name only, while others reverted to Hinduism or Buddhism However, a shortage of Dutch ministers held up these plans, and Roman Catholics operated underground, especially from the Portuguese-held port of Goa, in India Although the Portuguese had made much revenue from Ceylon, the Dutch set about methodically expanding the revenue base of the country The Portuguese had relied heavily on tariffs and obligatory labor for a certain number of days each year by the poor (in lieu of taxes); the Dutch maintained these but started establishing large plantations for cinnamon, which rapidly became the mainstay of the Dutch colonial economic structure in Ceylon The Dutch East India Company maintained a monopoly not only over the export of cinnamon but also over areca nuts, pearls, and elephants They were particularly anxious to control the Ceylon economy tightly, and imports from India were so heavily restricted that