First Salute - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [12]
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