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By Root 883 0

When a plan was proposed to send a squadron of twenty ships to the Caribbean to protect Dutch Colonies of the West Indies and the shipping that provisioned them, the navy did not have 20 ships available nor the sailors to man them nor the money for competitive wages. In fact, in 1767 William V had urged the States General to implement previous resolutions for building and equipping a fleet of 25 ships, but the provinces had refused to bear the cost. Ten years later, the province of Holland, declaring that the navy was near to ruin unless something was done, proposed construction of 24 ships of the line, the largest class, at a cost of 4 million guilders. Endlessly discussed for seven years, the proposal was only adopted in 1778, when Holland threatened to disband its land forces to enable the admiralties to pay for the ships. By then the hour was already late.

Foreign visitors to the Netherlands at this time felt a noticeable decline from the extraordinary ascent of the United Provinces to major power. What was left of Holland’s dynamic energy, said Sir Joseph Yorke, who, while certainly not objective, was not alone in his judgment, “was the passion of her people for money making. They were all literally merchants or money getters at present.” Sir Joseph, like the English gentry as a whole, equated commerce with avarice without noticing that the same could be said of politics in England, where greed for office and its monetary potential was as intense as commerce in Holland. Continental and even American visitors to Holland, with the snobbery of people who adopt the values of those who look down on them, reflected the English scorn of Dutch commercial success and saw it as a sign of decadence. A German visitor, Johann Herder, in 1769 thought Holland “is sinking of its own weight … the Republic counts for less in the balance of Europe.… There will come a time when Holland will be nothing more than a dead warehouse which is emptying out its goods and is unable to replace them.” John Adams, disgruntled by his frustration in failing to persuade the Dutch to risk investment in a loan to his country, and disenchanted after his first enthusiasm, wrote, “This country is indeed in a melancholy situation; sunk in ease, devoted to the pursuits of gain, incumbered with a complicated and perplexed constitution, divided among themselves in interest and sentiment, they seem afraid of every thing.” While deteriorating in their economy and lack of national unity, as Adams now saw it, and with a deep gap between rich and poor, they remain “too complacent,” with a faded pride in the “strong sense of independence and republican temper” that was once so vital a trait of the national character.

From the perspective of a century later, the 19th century Dutch historian Herman Colenbrander acknowledged the urge to make money as the national passion, but said that in the period of William V it was “no longer the necessity which in earlier days drove profit-seeking Dutchmen over the whole world. They did not have to go abroad any more to gain gold, it could be found at home in the heritage from the fathers and they wanted only to increase it by piling interest upon interest.”

Even more than Dutch complacency, it was the growing competition and new enterprise of other nations in foreign trade that started the slide downhill. The British had chartered a competitive company to enter the herring fisheries of the North Sea, and were luring Dutch fishermen into their employ; the countless fishing boats of the Dutch herring fleet that had employed thousands were reduced to a scattered few. The British were also taking the trade and, in some cases, the territories of the East Indies; Horace Walpole waxed lyrical over the products from Ceylon when the British, with the aid of local Rajahs, opened trade with the Island in 1782. Ceylon “is called a terrestrial paradise,” he wrote, “we expect to be up to the ears in rubies, elephants, cinnamon and pepper. It produces … long pepper, fine cotton, ivory, silk, tobacco, ebony, musk, crystal, saltpetre, sulphur,