In this memorandum, the senior legal official in Batavia, the bailiff, responded to English complaints about waterboarding. He explained, first, that torture was common and was used widely (and legally) across the Dutch empire in Asia. But he also attempted to distinguish waterboarding from other kinds of more severe torture. In this way, he asserted “that the torture with water” is the “most civil” of all such techniques because it causes “less pain than the torture generally used across Europe, which is always considered more severe, heavier and more dangerous than the one with water, in which neither the health of the person nor any limb of their body is hurt or mutilated.” Thus it was fundamentally different, this document, asserts from other kinds of more brutal torture that might result in the breaking of bones or the severing of limbs.