Guidelines for Reading Report Three Writing

History ReportNameInstitutional AffiliationDate
In his book the Lost Colony, Tonio Andrade seeks to answer some of the common questions that have always been asked in history. Such questions include the ways in which the Chinese defeated the Dutch even though they had a superior military technology and organization. He also answers another question how the Dutch managed to hold on to Koxinga’s large army as they did. The Dutch had a military advantage over their Asian adversaries. On one side, the Dutch ships were much heavier and they carried more cannons. This helped them in giving them an upper hand in the prevailing water conditions that were affecting them during the war. On the other side, the Koxinga ships also used their familiarity with the coastline and they would launch surprise attacks. Andrade shows that the ability of the Dutch to move fast played a great role in their defeat of the Asian adversaries. He says that the multiple sails of their ships against the winds gave them an upper as compared to the Chinese ships. In that case, the agility rather than the firepower of the Dutch played a great role in their success.
The historical figures that have been used in the book have been portrayed in different ways in terms of character and origin. Koxinga was the son of Zheng Zhilong and a Japanese woman by the name Tagawa Matsu. In his descriptions, Andrade has used Koxinga as a parable on why the Chinese defeated the Dutch on Taiwan. Koxinga has been presented as creative and adaptive to each of the situations that he was go...