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By Root 932 0

to the speed and surprise of the English attack, and sent them back to England to the war ministry of Lord George Germain. Two American agents of the Continental Congress, by name Isaac Gouverneur and Samuel Curzon or Courson, who had handled the purchases were sent with the papers as prisoners, in the hope of seeing them tried as traitors. Acquainted though he was with loose practice in English office, Rodney placed too much trust in government. When he needed the evidence to defend himself in court in lawsuits brought against him by the accused, the documents revealing the practices and profits of the British merchants trading with the enemy, which had been deposited with William Knox, Germain’s under-secretary for the Colonies, and would have been injurious to the government if made public, were found to have disappeared, proving the usefulness of the right “connections.” Rodney was able to produce in court only one which showed the trade at work. Goods would be shipped by English merchants across the Channel to Holland, where they would be transshipped to St. Eustatius and sold there to American agents, for use on the firing line against English soldiers. The two American agents were in fact tried for high treason, but in camera, and were afterward imprisoned. When the war in America was over, they were released and one of the two died soon thereafter. Their correspondence and business documents, which had been turned over for the trial to the House of Lords and might have proved embarrassing if not incriminating to important persons, could never be found. By this time the British surrender in America was embarrassment enough, leaving no one anxious to pursue the scandal of the traitorous merchants’ missing papers.

In gathering up the treasure of St. Eustatius, Rodney well knew that unlike a naval prize, which was customarily divided among admiral, captain, crew and shipowner after its value had been realized at an advertised auction of ship and cargo, the spoil of territory or treasure seized in the name of the nation belonged to the sovereign. Yet, eager to feel the clink of real money in his hands, he greedily or foolishly adopted the prize-court process, and advertised auction sales of the goods seized from the inhabitants. Because the sales allowed the goods to go below cost, the owners entered claims against Rodney for the deficits, creating the lawsuits that were to sour his victorious hour and harass his life thereafter.

For the moment all was glory. “Joy to you, my dear Sir George,” wrote his wife happily, “equal to what you have given your friends at home and I may say the whole nation, on your glorious successes.… Every countenance is lighted up with joy, every voice rings with your praises.… My house has been like a fair from the moment” his express arrived, on the 13th.… “Every friend, every acquaintance came.” At the drawing room on Thursday, “the attention and notice I received from their Majesties were sufficient to turn my poor brain. In the evening I went to Cumberland House, where the congratulations were equally warm and flattering.… This glorious news has been a thunderbolt to the Opposition, very few of whom appeared in the House of Commons. It is reported that you are to be made a peer.”

Equal and opposite was the shock in the Netherlands at the fall of St. Eustatius. “You can have no idea,” wrote John Adams, “of the gloom and terror that was spread by this event,” which also distressed, as Rodney was glad to report, the French West Indian islands “beyond conception. They are greatly in want of every species of provisions and stores” and he hoped “to blockade them in such a manner as, I hope, will prevent their receiving any.”

By his capture of St. Eustatius, Rodney reminded their Lordships, “the loss to Holland, France and America is greater than can be conceived.… The capture is immense and amounts to more than I can venture to say. All is secured for the King to be at his royal disposal.” By this time, in fact, the entry of France in the American war as an ally of the Colonies supplied most