Going Dutch_ How England Plundered Holland's Glory - Lisa Jardine [127]
The problem with the story I have just recounted is that Sir Robert Holmes (as he later became) was not known as a person who could be relied upon. He is, in fact, infamous as the hot-tempered, violent and uncontrollable commander of the English fleet whose impetuous exploits were responsible for starting both the second and the third Anglo–Dutch wars. He had served under Prince Rupert and James, Duke of York, and eventually rose to the rank of Admiral. In 1664, on the very voyage on which he was supposed to be testing the Bruce–Huygens clocks, he sacked the Dutch trading stations along the coast of Guinea one by one, seizing goods and property and laying waste the settlements.78 On his return he was twice imprisoned in the Tower of London (on 9 January and 14 February 1665), either for having gone beyond orders or for failing to bring back adequate amounts of booty, it is not quite clear which. His actions led directly to the Dutch declaring war on 22 February 1665, by announcing that they would retaliate against any British shipping in the Guinea region, at which point Holmes was released and pardoned, in order to command his Majesty’s forces. In August 1666 he attacked and destroyed by fire 150 East Indiamen in the Vlie estuary and sacked the town of Westerschelling on adjacent Terschelling island.
Samuel Pepys (at that time in overall charge of supplies at the Navy Board) was afraid of Holmes: ‘an idle, proud, conceited, though stout fellow’. On several occasions he expressed reluctance at having to deal with him on matters of naval discipline. After the second Dutch war Holmes was rewarded for his exploits with the Governorship of the Isle of Wight; he eventually became extremely rich and somewhat more respectable.79
It was Huygens himself who was the first to raise concern about Holmes’s report (as a Dutchman, he might be expected to have a particularly low opinion of Holmes’s integrity). On 6 February 1665, in his first response to Moray, after expressing his delight at the dramatic outcome of the trials he added a small caveat:
I have to confess that I had not expected such a spectacular result from these clocks. To give me ultimate satisfaction, I beg you to tell me what you and your colleagues at the Royal Society think of this Relation [of Holmes’s], and if the said Captain seems a sincere man whom one can absolutely trust. For it must be said that I am amazed that the clocks were sufficiently accurate to allow him by their means to find such a tiny island [as Fuego].80
On 6 March, Huygens was still pressing Moray for ‘something of the detail of what you have learned from Mr Holmes, principally in order to know how the clocks behaved in a storm, and if in that climate rust did not eventually cause them to stop’.81
The matter of Holmes’s trustworthiness was raised at the 8 March meeting of the Royal Society, at which Huygens’s concerns were raised, and his letter of 6 March read:
There being also mention made again of Major Holmes’s relation of the late performances of the pendulum watches in his voyage to Guinea, it was affirmed by several of the members, that there was an error in that relation, as to the island named therein; and that it was not the island of Fuego, which the Major’s ships had touched in order to water there, but another thirty leagues distant from it.82
Samuel Pepys (recently elected a Fellow) was ‘desired to visit the Major, and to inquire farther concerning this particular for the satisfaction of the society’. This meant visiting Holmes in the Tower, where he was imprisoned for his conduct towards the Dutch settlements at Guinea during his voyage.83 On 14 March Pepys attended ‘a farewell dinner which [Sir John Robinson, Lieutenant of the Tower] gives Major Holmes at his going out of the Tower’, ‘Here a great deal of good victuals and company.’84
On 15 March both Pepys and Moray reported on their dealings with Holmes. Pepys had spoken