First Salute - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [50]
Popular songs were composed in Jones’s honor, and ballads celebrating his presence in Amsterdam were sold in the streets. His presence—and even more that of the shorn Serapis, which had nothing left abovedeck and lay rocking meekly in the harbor in sad solitude like a lost dog—was a daily unpleasantness for the British Ambassador, who began at once to assert his usual demands for retribution and his insistence that Jones be expelled. As a subject of the King, he informed the States General, Jones could only be considered a rebel and a “pirate” and, together with his ship and crew, should be surrendered to His Majesty’s government. He told the Prince that he believed Jones’s entrance into the Texel was “a plan formed to embroil the States with Great Britain,” an outcome he professed to welcome, for it was better, he said, to have an outright enemy than one masquerading as a neutral, although the popular enthusiasm displayed for Jones was a constant distress.
“A thought struck me yesterday,” Yorke wrote to the Admiralty on October 8, 1779, that “we could arrest him …” when he left his ship to come into the city. Sir Joseph was not a man to worry about the propriety of an ambassador arresting the guest of a neutral country. “I despatched a friend on purpose to attempt it,” he continued matter-of-factly, but found himself thwarted by the High Bailiff, who said that “without proofs and affidavits of robberies and demands of moneys all of which we had not at hand,” it was not in his power, as the affair would immediately become a political one, “I was obliged to give up that scent to my great regret.” There is something irresistible about the straightforward methods of this ornament of the British foreign service.
If he could not effect a physical arrest, he tried next for a court order to force Jones’s eviction, but that too was refused, because of the strong sentiment of the Amsterdam and other merchants. Jones’s efforts to obtain care for the wounded—including the wounded English prisoners—became highly complex, because the problem of guarding English prisoners by American soldiers on neutral Dutch soil defied a solution. Finally, Jones was allowed to land a number of wounded prisoners on the Texel island and “to guard them by our American soldiers on the fort of that island with the drawbridges hauled up or let down at our discretion.” Food and water and repairs of the ship, without which she could not sail, absorbed further discussion and were finally obtained with the help of Jean de Neufville, chief of a prominent merchants’ firm of Amsterdam, who was deeply engaged in another American matter of greater moment.
While Jones was waiting for a wind that would let him leave the channel and escape the British who were lying in wait outside, de Neufville was negotiating a project that would break through the morass that clogged Dutch affairs and precipitate decisive action. The year before, France had signed a treaty of amity and commerce with America to take effect when the Colonies should become independent, and Franklin, Silas Deane and Arthur Lee, the American Commissioners in Paris, had sent a copy to the Grand Pensionary, Van Bleiswijk, suggesting