First Salute - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [2]
New London, Connecticut, Historical Society and The National Maritime Museum, London, for naval records.
The MacDowell Colony, which has understood and arranged the perfect conditions for a place for uninterrupted and consecutive work away from the distractions of home.
The Dana Palmer House, at Harvard University, for a working residence next door to a great library.
Mary Maguire and Nancy Clements of Alfred A. Knopf and Barbara DeWolfe for indispensable aid in the publishing process.
Notice
A NUMBER of difficulties and discrepancies exist in the narrative: the first is the peculiar peregrination of Windward and Leeward islands in the Caribbean whose location and designation find no agreement among various atlases and current sources on the West Indies. The cartographic division of the National Geographic Society explains one reason for the confusion, namely that there is a “slight overlap” of the islands at the mid-point of the West Indian chain. According to the National Geographic, Dominica and the chain extending north of Martinique belong to the Leeward group and those south of Dominica down to and including Barbados and Tobago belong to the Windward group. I leave this problem to the controversy that will inevitably ensue, knowing that the definitive is elusive.
A SECOND problem is the continual elasticity in the given number of ships in a squadron or fleet. As explained in the footnote on this page, the count suffers from uncertain visibility at sea and depends upon whether frigates and merchant ships are counted along with ships of the line and whether a certain number may have left the squadron or been added to it after the count was made.
MONEY, that is, the value of a foreign currency in the late 18th century, or its equivalent to a better-known currency or to our own in contemporary terms, is of course a perennial problem in all historical studies. I can do no better than quote what I wrote in the foreword to A Distant Mirror, a book on the 14th century, that because value and equivalency keep changing and are impossible to make definite at any one time, I advise the reader not to worry about the problem but simply to think of any given amount as so many pieces of money.
FINALLY, the problem of non-agreement among authorities: e.g., on the identity of the Dutch Admiral who, in a famous incident of the Anglo-Dutch wars of the 17th century, sailed up the Thames with a broom tied to his mast. The English historian Wingfield-Stratford says it was Tromp, while Professor Simon Schama, historian of the Netherlands, says the admiral was de Ruyter.
Or, the case of King George II as godfather to Admiral Rodney, so stated by Rodney’s biographer, David Hannay, while a second biographer, David Spinney, says that claim “is a myth.”
Or, the utter confusion surrounding the battle or battles of Finisterre in 1747. The naval historian Charles Lee Lewis deals bluntly with one aspect of the problem by saying other accounts “are all incorrect.” (That’s the spirit!) The confusion among historians arose in this case because there were several battles of Finisterre closely following each other, and there are two Finisterres, one in France and one, the true land’s end of Europe, in Spain.
I
“Here the Sovereignty of the United States of America Was First Acknowledged”
WHITE puffs of gun smoke over a turquoise sea followed by the boom of cannon rose from an unassuming fort on the diminutive Dutch island of St. Eustatius in the West Indies on November 16, 1776. The guns of Fort Orange on St. Eustatius were returning the ritual salute on entering a foreign port of an American vessel, the Andrew Doria, as she came up the roadstead, flying at her mast the red-and-white-striped flag of the Continental Congress. In its responding salute the small voice of St. Eustatius was the first officially to greet the largest event of the century—the entry into the society of nations of a new Atlantic state destined to change the direction of history.
The effect of the