First Salute - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [47]
Dutch vessels carrying supplies to France were every week being stopped at sea by the British, deepening the anxiety of Dutch naval officers about their inferiority in a possible war. Advocates of the navy had urged the addition of more ships as convoys to protect the trade, but the reluctance of the inland provinces to vote for the cost and the ensuing prolonged debate had brought no additional naval guardians. At the same time, Admiral Bylandt, a commander of convoys, reported on the lack of island defenses in the West Indies, mentioning especially St. Eustatius, which he warned must have added arms and installations to enable her to resist attack and protect her flourishing commerce. No adequate response was made to his demand. Eight ships, not 24, were put under Bylandt’s command for convoy duty when the building program produced its results.
Ease and quiet for the Dutch were not to be had in the new decade. As a means of bringing pressure for additional convoy, France was threatening to cancel import privileges granted to individual cities and provinces, doing injury to the Dutch pocketbook. On second thought, recognizing that a gift is always more persuasive than a threat, France instead granted exemption from import duties to Amsterdam and Haarlem and reaped a reward in the form of Holland’s vote in March, 1779, in favor of unlimited convoy. But the controversy was kept alive when the States General, anxious about the British reaction, failed to confirm the provincial vote.
Ignoring this negative, which amounted to a prohibition, a convoy that had been waiting for permission to escort merchantmen with naval stores from the Baltic set sail anyway, under Admiral Bylandt, with four men-of-war. On December 31, 1779, the last day of the year and of the troubled decade, Bylandt met, off the Isle of Wight, a British squadron of six ships commanded by Commodore Fielding, who was under orders to examine all ships, convoyed or not. When his intention was signaled, Bylandt refused to permit the search, declaring on oath that none of the merchantmen under his escort carried contraband or timber. Asserting that iron and hemp could also be considered contraband, Commodore Fielding dispatched a sloop to conduct the search. As a warning to stop, Admiral Bylandt fired two shots and was instantly attacked by a heavy broadside from Fielding’s squadron. Whether fearing to be overpowered by superior strength or to risk being the cause of war, Bylandt signaled to his captains to yield and, refusing to abandon his charges, was taken with them by the enemy to a port in England. In the Netherlands, disbelief was followed by furious indignation at England as the tyrant and scourge of the seas, and talk began of maintaining neutral rights, if necessary by force of arms. Still hoping to enjoy the profits of neutrality, the Dutch did not want war, but Britain’s interference with her trade and maritime rights, and apprehension that Britain meant to destroy her life as a trading nation, made her reckless. When combined with indignation in the Fielding affair, this recklessness led the States General as a whole to vote defiantly in April, 1780, for unlimited convoy.
Admiral Sir George Brydges Rodney at forty-two, by Joshua Reynolds, 1761
St. Eustatius, copperplate engraving by C. F. Bendorp, Dordrecht, Holland, 1782
Southeast view of New York Harbor in the years just preceding the Revolution, by an unidentified artist, 1757
Sir Joseph Yorke, by Perroneau
Admiral François Joseph Paul de Grasse at Yorktown, from London magazine, 1782
Action between the Serapis and Bonhomme Richard, September 23, 1779, line engraving by Lerpinière and Fittler, 1780
Sir Henry Clinton in 1787, miniature by Thomas Day
General Count de Rochambeau, by Charles Willson Peale
The Battle of Cowpens, 1781, by Frederick Kemmelmeyer, 1809
“America Triumphant and Britannia