First Salute - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [55]
Further indignity was added by the secret treaty as the case of a friendly nation treating with rebels, and also by the flow of contraband which the British could not stop, except by a drastic measure: the seizing of St. Eustatius to stop it at the source. This measure was suggested to his government, it is said, by Sir Joseph Yorke. Admiral Rodney was selected for the mission.
A rejected ultimatum requires some action by the party that issues it. On December 20, the British, as predicted, declared war on the United Provinces. They were able to convey instructions to their commanders at sea, in particular, Admiral Sir George Rodney, who was instructed to proceed against St. Eustatius, before the Dutch could notify the island to prepare for attack. In his speech to Parliament announcing the war, Lord North listed the wrongs suffered by Britain at Dutch hands. “In open violation of treaties” they had refused assistance to Britain to which she was entitled, they had furnished France with warlike stores, they had countenanced by Amsterdam an “insult upon this country by entering into a treaty with the rebellious colonies,” they had allowed John Paul Jones, a “Scotchman and a pirate [apparently equal offenses], to bring British ships into their ports and refit there,” they had permitted a “rebel privateer” to be saluted at St. Eustatius after it had captured two British ships “within cannon shot of their forts.” While Lord North exaggerated the crimes of the Andrew Doria, which had not, as we know, captured any British ships, much less two, his citing the salute of the Continental flag as one in his list of causes for war showed that de Graaff’s gesture rankled deeply in the British mind, not only in having given recognition to “traitorous rebels” but in treating the Americans, whom the British regarded as in some way lower-class, as equals.
Curiously, what seemed to annoy Lord North the most was the Dutch lack of preparedness, as if it made him feel guilty in taking the offensive. In spite of their provocations, he told the House, “they had not acted with any degree of prudence, made no preparation for war, in case of being attacked; and although they must have been aware that, in direct violation of every acknowledged law of nations, their merchants had constantly supplied Britain’s enemies with warlike stores and provisions, of which they had made the island of St. Eustatius the depot, yet they had not thought it necessary either to take any precautions against detection, or to guard against surprise by the British naval and military commanders in those seas, of whose vigilance and activity they could not have been ignorant.” Clearly, North would have felt better if Britain had declared war on a ready-to-fire opponent.
The peripheral, almost disregarded, war that followed, called by the Dutch the Fourth English War, was in world terms a small affair with disproportionate consequences. Locally, in the continued saga following de Graaff’s salute, it would bring down St. Eustatius and bring in a major actor, Admiral Sir George Brydges Rodney—a central figure of British sea power, who by an act of omission was to play a critical part in the fate of the American war.
For Holland it would lead to capture by the British of colonies, trade and ships, and to the ultimate destruction of the Prince’s prestige when he was blamed for neglect of the navy, for delay in joining the Neutrality League and for everything else disastrous. As a result, the French party of the Patriotes secured political control,