The Amboyna Massacre, as it came to be called in England, took place in 1623 in Amboyna, an important clove-producing island in modern-day Indonesia. 10 Englishmen, 10 Japanese, and one Portuguese were executed by the local authorities of Dutch East India Company.
Portuguese were the common enemy of the English and the Dutch when the last two entered the East. However, the commercial rivalry between the English and the Dutch led to the massacre at Amboyna (currently Amboyna).
Spice trade has been very lucrative throughout the history. In the ‘Age of Discovery’ (a period of European overseas exploration from the 15th to 17th century), the European powers - Dutch, Portuguese, English and Spanish, had been in a fierce struggle for supremacy of the spice trade.
The English poet and dramatist John Dryden had written a dram called Amboyna, or the Cruelties of the Dutch to the English Merchants in 1673.