The First Salute Read online

  With some glee, the entertainment for Captain Robinson was reported on December 26, 1776, in an American journal, Purdie’s Virginia Gazette, based on an account in a St. Kitts newspaper, which would certainly have been forwarded to London. There was no glee in London on learning of Dutch recognition of the rebel flag, denounced by the King’s Ministers as “a flagrant insult to His Majesty’s colours.” Indeed, wrath in London, when informed of the salute by observers in the roadstead, was tremendous, and exacerbated by a report that the Andrew Doria on departing had taken on arms and ammunition for the Americans.

  Admiral James Young at Antigua, British commander of the Leeward station, informed de Graaff in a letter of his pained “surprise and astonishment to hear it daily asserted in the most positive manner that the Port of St. Eustatius for some time past had been both openly and avowedly declared Protector of all Americans and their vessels whether in private trade or armed for offensive war” and that even “the colours and forts of the States General have been so far debased as to return the salute of these pirates and rebels and giving all manner of assistance of arms and ammunition and whatever else may enable them to annoy and disturb the trade of His Britannic Majesty’s loyal and faithful subjects, and even the Governor of St. Eustatius daily suffers privateers to be manned and armed and fitted in their port.” It needs only this letter to convey the throb of British indignation at the insolence of rebels who “annoy and disturb” the sacred trade of the British Empire, and, worse, that a friendly nation—a member of the club, as it were—should not only condone but assist them. Now it was the Dutch more than the Colonies who were raising British blood pressure. Because the Colonies were not a recognized state, they had in the British view no belligerent rights and thus their sea captains no valid commissions, which explains why the British were so free with the term “pirates.”

  De Graaff’s salute to the Continental flag was by no means a mere complimentary bow to the anticipated victor in the war, for the Governor fired his guns almost a full year—eleven months, to be exact—before Burgoyne’s surrender at Saratoga (October, 1777) supplied evidence that the raggle-taggle colonial forces might actually prevail. It was this victory at Saratoga that persuaded France in 1778 to enter into the open alliance with the Americans that was to change the balance of the war.

  Statia and her Governor, prospering in the bold disobedience of their enterprise, were not intimidated by the rising wrath of Britain—too little, perhaps, for their own good, as coming events were about to demonstrate.

  *Following the practice of the 18th century, Holland, as the chief of the United Provinces of the Netherlands, is the name used here for the whole of the country.

  II

  The Golden Rock

  THE teapot of this tempest, St. Eustatius, a rocky meager spot less than seven square miles in area, hardly more than a volcanic outcropping above the waves, was an unlikely place for a rendezvous with history. Nevertheless, by virtue of an unexampled devotion to trade on the part of a virtually landless nation, and location at the hub of the West Indies, where it was a natural meeting place for trade coming from North and South America and for ships coming to the West Indies from Europe and Africa, the little island had made itself the richest port of the Caribbean and the richest territory per acre in the region—if not, as some boasted, in the world. Holland’s declared neutrality in the struggle between Britain and the American Colonies had assisted its enrichment.

  Geography favored Statia with a splendid roadstead that could shelter 200 ships at a time and an invaluable position at the center of a multinational cluster of territories—English (Jamaica, St. Kitts, Antigua and Barbados), French (Ste. Lucie, Martinique and Guadeloupe), Spanish (Cuba, Puerto Rico and Hispaniola, the last divided between Haiti and Santo Domingo), and Danish (Virgin Islands). Taking advantage of Statia’s neutrality, these nations, as well as British merchants of the area who were actually sharing in the trade with the enemy, made Statia’s shores the principal depot for transshipment of goods to and from America.

  Called the Golden Rock for the flood of commerce that flowed through its free port, stuffing its warehouses with goods for trade and the coffers of its merchants with the proceeds, it “was different from all others,” said Edmund Burke in a speech of 1781 when Eustatius in sudden fame leapt into public notice. “It had no produce. no fortifications for its defense, nor martial spirit nor military regulations.… Its utility was its defense. The universality of its use, the neutrality of its nature was its security and its safeguard. Its proprietors had, in the spirit of commerce, made it an emporium for all the world … Its wealth was prodigious, arising from its industry and the nature of its commerce.”

  Two factors besides geography accounted for the prodigy of the Golden Rock: Holland’s enterprising neutrality amid the ceaseless and circular wars of her larger neighbors, and Statia’s role as a free port without customs duties.

  The pressure of the merchant class represented by the formidable Dutch West India Company, which held a monopoly over trade with America, induced the States General to declare neutrality in the war of the British Crown against its Colonies. Neutrality, as the Dutch knew from experience in the preceding Seven Years’ War of Britain against France, was good business, although in the American war it went against the natural bent of the States General, which favored the British as fellow-rulers. Popular opinion, however, in a rare combination with business interests, added its pressure for neutrality. Out of inherited pride in their own revolution to overthrow the sovereignty of Spain, the mass of the Dutch people openly sympathizied with the American rebellion.

  Neutrality on the high seas, always the most contentious element in international relations, balances on a tightrope of mutual contradictions. According to the much-disputed doctrine of “free ships, free goods,” a neutral had the theoretical right to pursue a normal trade with either belligerent so long as its supplies did not cause a military disadvantage to the other side. At the same time, the theory allowed a belligerent to prevent the subjects of a neutral state from sending military supplies in aid of the enemy. Between these two assertions—the right of a neutral to trade and the right of the belligerent to interfere to stop the trade—there could be no reconciliation.

  Determined to take advantage of this condition, Dutch merchants and mariners, alert to every opening for commerce, braved the physical and financial risks of seaborne commerce to make it pay richly. Wealth filled their warehouses. The American Colonies sent rich cargoes of their products—tobacco, indigo, timber, horses—to exchange for naval and military supplies and for molasses, sugar, slaves and furnishings from Europe. Their agents in Amsterdam arranged the purchases and the delivery to St. Eustatius for transshipment to the American coast. Vessels loaded with 1,000 to 4,000 pounds of gunpowder per ship, and in one case a total of 49,000 pounds, made their way to Philadelphia and Charleston (the nearest port). To the rebels with empty muskets, St. Eustatius made the difference.

  As a free port, Eustatius had reaped the profits both as marketplace and as storehouse where goods waiting sale or transshipment could be safely housed against predatory foreign fleets in search of loot.

  The measure of profit in the munitions traffic can be judged from the price of a pound of gunpowder, which cost 8.5 stivers of the local currency in Holland, and 46 stivers or almost five and a half times as much on Eustatius, because its proximity saved American customers time and the risks of a longer passage. Trade swelled to and from the Colonies. On a single day in March, 1777, four ships from the Colonies came via Statia into Amsterdam bringing 200 hogsheads of tobacco, 600 to 700 barrels of rice and a large shipment of indigo. An English customs officials in Boston recorded, “Daily arrivals from the West Indies but most from St. Eustatius, every one of which brings more or less of gunpowder.”

  The second factor in Statia’s golden growth came from her avoidance of the restrictive cult of mercantilism that prevailed among other nations.

  Mercantil
ism was born of the belief that national power depended on the accumulation of hard currency to pay for the era’s increasing costs of government and of maintaining armies and navies for constant conflict. In pursuit of the favorable balance of trade necessary to earn revenue, the mercantilist policy laid strict limits on imports of foreign and colonial goods and on the carrying trade of other nations. The rule applied to a nation’s own colonies, which were considered to exist to serve the prosperity of the mother country and were therefore prohibited from exporting manufactured articles that could compete with the mother country’s industries. Except for loot in wars and simple seizures of property from disestablished monasteries or expropriated Jews or from Spanish treasure ships carrying silver and gold from the New World, the excess of exports over imports was the only source of external revenue. Hence the century’s overriding and pervasive concern with trade.

  Subject to infinite variables of winds and currents, of supply and demand, of crops and markets, trade has a way of carving its own paths not always obedient to the mercantilist faith. The faith was embodied in Britain’s Navigation Act, enacted under Oliver Cromwell in 1651 in the interests of the rising middle class and the industrial towns and major trading ports—the so-called Cinque Ports, so long influential in British history. Aimed specifically at the Dutch to protect British trade against its most dangerous rival, the Act raised a wall of customs duties, and permitted transshipment of goods only in British bottoms calling at British ports. The natural result had been maritime war with Holland and bitter resentment of customs duties in the Colonies, feeding the spirit of rebellion which led to the American war. For Britain, the expense of fighting the Dutch and trying to suppress the American revolt was more costly than anything that could be gained by the trade laws, causing higher taxes at home and their natural consequence, a rise in domestic disaffection. That was not the least of Britain’s afflictions in her embattled time.

  The instinct of the Dutch for commerce early persuaded them that profits were more likely to come from a free flow of trade than from restrictions. Did something grow within the narrow limits of St. Eustatius that bred a greater need for open doors and looser rules? Whatever the reason, Statia became a free port in 1756 when she abolished customs duties in order to compete with St. Thomas, which had become her only trade rival in the Caribbean. From then on her prosperity flourished extravagantly. As the neighboring islands could not trade with each other in wartime when their principals were entangled in the various belligerencies of Europe, as they were most of the time, they brought their goods to buy and sell in St. Eustatius and to purchase edibles from foreign sources, for no one of the West Indies, concentrating on sugar and slaves, was self-sufficient in food. In the next twenty-five years, Eustatius enjoyed its golden era. Population, which had numbered only a few thousand before the American war, rose to 8,000 by 1780, owing to the explosion of trade and storage service. Residences crowded up against each other along the shore of the Lower Town and were doubled by a row of stone warehouses occupying every space. Mercantile adventurers from all over flocked to St. Eustatius to store their goods, which otherwise might be lost on their own islands through the constant seizures of territory by naval predators in search of booty and land. Warehouses of the Lower Town overflowed with goods awaiting transshipment. The traders often took the precaution to become Dutch citizens while using the island as their depot. British blockade of the American coast and French entry into the war rendered American and French ports subject to attack, further encouraging the use of St. Eustatius for storage.

  The Lower Town ended at Gallows Bay, where there was a sloping beach suitable for the bizarre business of cleaning ships’ bottoms. Barnacles and marine growths had to be scraped off and the bottom repainted every few months in an excessively awkward process called “careening.” It required hauling the vessel up on the beach and turning it over from one side to the other while masts, ballasts, guns and other equipment were removed or lashed in place. The fighting machine itself was out of action for the duration of its humiliation. Provided it had not bogged down in mud or been damaged by a squall while it lay helpless, it might then be relaunched. Rarely did human ingenuity fall so short of requirements as in this preposterous, almost farcical procedure. The only alternative, for navies which could afford it, was to sheathe their warships’ bottoms in copper.

  Through the 1770s and ’80s, Dutch merchants continued to defy their government’s embargo on contraband, and the Americans to ignore as before the Navigation Acts, to which as British Colonies they were subject. So tempting was the opportunity to get rich quickly, complained Sir Joseph Yorke, that munitions were loaded in Dutch harbors as publicly as if no embargo had been declared. He tried to insist to the States General that they must enforce their orders, but he could get nothing done. Writing to a colleague, he came to the sore point that galled the British the most: “… the Americans would have had to abandon their revolution if they had not been aided by Dutch greed.” He did not see greed in the British merchants who were selling supplies to the enemy, for greed, like better qualities, often lies in the eye of the beholder.

  III

  Beggars of the Sea—The Dutch Ascendancy

  AT THE TIME of de Graaff’s salute, his fellow-countrymen had already registered and passed the peak of dynamic accomplishment in almost every realm of endeavor—in hydraulic engineering to make their own land habitable, in the longest successful revolt for political independence sustained against the greatest imperial power of the age, in flourishing commerce, business and banking, in maritime enterprise covering the oceans, in the supreme art of the Golden Age of Rembrandt, in everything but government, where they contented themselves with a paralytic system that would not have been tolerated by a primitive island of the Pacific. For all these qualities—positive and negative—the Dutch were the most interesting people in Europe, although few contemporaries would have said so. Except perhaps an American, specifically John Adams, our first envoy to the Netherlands, who wrote to his wife in 1780, shortly after his arrival in Holland, “The country where I am is the greatest curiosity in the world.… I have been here three or four weeks and … I am very much pleased with Holland. It is a singular country. It is like no other. It is all the Effect of Industry, and the Work of Art.… This Nation is not known any where, not even by its Neighbors. The Dutch Language is spoken by none but themselves. Therefore They converse with nobody and nobody converses with them. The English are a great nation, and they despize the Dutch because they are smaller. The French are a greater Nation still, and therefore they despize the Dutch because they are still smaller in comparison to them. But I doubt much whether there is any Nation of Europe more estimable than the Dutch, in Proportion.” Jealousy of the extraordinary Dutch ascendancy in commerce clouded the European view from a similar appreciation.

  As the primary ship-builders of Europe, the Dutch had added one more element of mastery in their lifelong contest with water. In prehistoric times when Europe was settled by Germanic tribes advancing from the East, one tribe called the Batavi, whom the Dutch in later centuries came to consider their ancestors, had pushed onward, seeking a secure area of their own, and kept going until they met the sea and could go no further. Here on the wave-flooded, water-soaked edge of Europe, having no other choice, they settled where the ground was too wet and life too difficult for any other group to wish to dispute the territory. By building mounds for the foundation of homes above water level and ramps to let their livestock enter and dikes to hold back the sea, by learning through practice and experiment to put windmills to work as pumps to drain the water eternally seeping from springs and streams and marshes, they put dry ground under their feet. Soon they were able to lift land from the bottom of lakes and swamps to create areas called “polders” for agriculture and habitation. By directing the drained water into ditches, they made canals for transportation. Maintenance of the drainage system required constant attendance and renewal; the work never stopped and
was never finished. In a stupendous feat of labor and engineering, a nation succeeded in creating land for itself to live on, doing by the hand of man what only God had done before. If they could match the work of Genesis, they need fear no man nor element of nature and were infused by a sense of accomplishment. A people few in numbers on an insecure footing was enabled to launch a revolt against the rulership of Spain, the greatest empire of the day, and to persevere in a successful war of resistance lasting eighty years, from 1568 to 1648, against an enemy not as far removed as Britain was from the American Colonies, 3,000 miles and an ocean away, but on the same continent, an overland distance from Barcelona to Antwerp of about 900 miles. Eventually winning independence, the Dutch within one generation of autonomy had transformed themselves into the greatest trading nation in the world, holding the commercial center and financial heartbeat of Europe and resting on a seaborne empire that stretched from the Indian Ocean to the Hudson River.

  The amazing growth and expansion of Holland was a phenomenon that causes historians to stutter and even caused wonderment to Dutch scholars. Like the draining of the country and the overthrow of the Spanish colossus, it may be a mystery only in the sense that the extreme exertions possible to the human spirit can never be wholly elucidated. Nevertheless, in the Dutch phenomenon some causes are discernible. Partly their rise grew from necessity—the need of a people on the edge of nowhere to find the means of livelihood and survival—and partly it came from the will and energy of a figurative little Napoleon moved to outdo his larger brothers, and partly from the impulse stemming from what they had already achieved.