First Salute - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [9]
With some glee, the entertainment for Captain Robinson was reported on December 26, 1776, in an American journal, Purdie’s Virginia Gazette, based on an account in a St. Kitts newspaper, which would certainly have been forwarded to London. There was no glee in London on learning of Dutch recognition of the rebel flag, denounced by the King’s Ministers as “a flagrant insult to His Majesty’s colours.” Indeed, wrath in London, when informed of the salute by observers in the roadstead, was tremendous, and exacerbated by a report that the Andrew Doria on departing had taken on arms and ammunition for the Americans.
Admiral James Young at Antigua, British commander of the Leeward station, informed de Graaff in a letter of his pained “surprise and astonishment to hear it daily asserted in the most positive manner that the Port of St. Eustatius for some time past had been both openly and avowedly declared Protector of all Americans and their vessels whether in private trade or armed for offensive war” and that even “the colours and forts of the States General have been so far debased as to return the salute of these pirates and rebels and giving all manner of assistance of arms and ammunition and whatever else may enable them to annoy and disturb the trade of His Britannic Majesty’s loyal and faithful subjects, and even the Governor of St. Eustatius daily suffers privateers to be manned and armed and fitted in their port.” It needs only this letter to convey the throb of British indignation at the insolence of rebels who “annoy and disturb” the sacred trade of the British Empire, and, worse, that a friendly nation—a member of the club, as it were—should not only condone but assist them. Now it was the Dutch more than the Colonies who were raising British blood pressure. Because the Colonies were not a recognized state, they had in the British view no belligerent rights and thus their sea captains no valid commissions, which explains why the British were so free with the term “pirates.”
De Graaff’s salute to the Continental flag was by no means a mere complimentary bow to the anticipated victor in the war, for the Governor fired his guns almost a full year—eleven months, to be exact—before Burgoyne’s surrender at Saratoga (October, 1777) supplied evidence that the raggle-taggle colonial forces might actually prevail. It was this victory at Saratoga that persuaded France in 1778 to enter into the open alliance with the Americans that was to change the balance of the war.
Statia and her Governor, prospering in the bold disobedience of their enterprise, were not intimidated by the rising wrath of Britain—too little, perhaps, for their own good, as coming events were about to demonstrate.
*Following the practice of the 18th century, Holland, as the chief of the United Provinces of the Netherlands, is the name used here for the whole of the country.
II
The Golden Rock
THE teapot of this tempest, St. Eustatius, a rocky meager spot less than seven square miles in area, hardly more than a volcanic outcropping above the waves, was an unlikely place for a rendezvous with history. Nevertheless, by virtue of an unexampled devotion to trade on the part of a virtually landless nation, and location at the hub of the West Indies, where it was a natural meeting place for trade coming from North and South America and for ships coming to the West Indies from Europe and Africa, the little island had made itself the richest port of the Caribbean and the richest territory per acre in the region