First Salute - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [31]
Pleading reasons of health and family responsibilities, and the burden of official duties and, strangely for a Dutch subject, a “fear and aversion for the sea,” being subject “to sea-sickness to an amazing degree” so that the whole voyage he would not be able to hold his head up to eat or drink, de Graaff tried to avoid going home. He was not excused. Seasickness, as a contemporary observed, “is a disease which receives no pity, though it richly deserves it.” Though managing to postpone the voyage for more than a year, he had to go. Surviving seasickness, he returned in 1778 to Amsterdam, where he was examined by a committee of the West India Company on three main charges: the smuggling of contraband, the permitted capture of an English ship and the salute of the rebels’ flag. In response to the third charge, he maintained that the salute to the Andrew Doria was a regulation courtesy to passing vessels with no regard for nationality and that it did not imply recognition.
The central question—whether de Graaff had known the identity of the flag he was saluting—was not cleared up. Greathead claimed, without specifics, that the flag “was already known as the flag of the American rebellion.” He probably drew this conclusion from a deposition of a young sailor from the Andrew Doria named John Trottman, who, on being examined by the Council of St. Kitts, testified that the Andrew Doria on arriving at St. Eustatius saluted Fort Orange with 13 guns and, after an interval, that salute was returned by the said fort by 9 or 11 guns, he did not remember which, and the ship during this time “having the Congressional colours then flying.” The testimony suggested that if seventeen-year-old Trottman knew the Congressional colors, so must others. In fact, Trottman had been shanghaied aboard the Andrew Doria at Philadelphia, the birthplace of the flag, where he might well have witnessed the raising; thus his knowledge of the identity proved nothing about de Graaff. The likelihood is that de Graaff did recognize the flag when he saluted it; otherwise why would he have insisted to the commandant of the fort on a salute to an unknown flag? De Graaff did not either affirm or deny having recognized it; he simply asked how his accusers could show that he had recognized it. Considering that it had been flying in combats on land and on sea for the previous ten months and could hardly have escaped the notice of a busy port like St. Eustatius, his reply was disingenuous.
On the whole, his document for the defense of 202 pages with 700 pages of appendices was not a resounding challenge but a careful—almost a lawyer’s—defense. Citing repeated British interferences with Dutch shipping, de Graaff reminded the Company that though he had a right to repel British searches and seizures by force, he felt that he had to “be cautious owing to want of sufficient means.” His realism picked out the central Dutch flaw—that with regard to the trade with American vessels, as he said, St. Eustatius depended on outside sources for all its supplies and he believed it was his duty to do nothing to disturb its commerce. Outgoing cargoes were examined as strictly as possible, but there were always men who would violate the rules. He denied the charge of equipping American vessels, except to let them take on provisions and water for a period of six weeks, and declared that to call the Dutch “avowed collaborators” of the Americans was “an insult of the most ungracious and shameful kind.” If that was protesting rather too much, he hurried on to demand witnesses of alleged wrongdoing and asserted that it would violate his commission as Governor to prosecute anyone without a plaintiff or condemn without evidence. With regard to relative insults, he felt himself to be the person insulted by being addressed as “Mynheer,” which