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By Root 1100 0

a short digression is needed concerning Sir Robert Holmes, whom we encountered in Chapter 10, testing sea-going pendulum clocks for the Royal Society. For the catalyst for the seizure of New Netherland was an assault on Dutch settlements on the east coast of Africa by Holmes, under orders from the warmongering factions surrounding the recently returned English King, Charles II. This group had its eye on what it perceived to be extremely lucrative trading opportunities along the coast of Guinea, where, however, the Dutch were firmly installed already in fortified positions at Goree and elsewhere. The profitable commodity – eyed particularly covetously by James, Duke of York, who had acquired a considerable taste for speculative investment in overseas trade – politely known as ‘black gold’ was, of course, African slaves, to be transported at enormous profit to the new European plantations in the West Indies.

Holmes was first dispatched in 1661 with a small, heavily armed contingent of ships, to ‘assist’ in the Royal African Company’s trading ventures along the Guinea coast. He sailed from Portsmouth in January, reaching the Gambia in early March. On 18 March he forced the surrender of the Dutch fort of St Andreas, and after an unsuccessful attempt to find a legendary store of gold, he returned to England. The expedition brought a storm of diplomatic protest from the Dutch. Samuel Pepys regarded Holmes as fundamentally untrustworthy: ‘He seems to be very well acquainted with the King’s mind and with all the several factions at court. But good God, what an age is this, that a man cannot live without playing the knave and dissimulation.’

In May 1663, Holmes embarked on another voyage to Guinea, whose real purpose was to disrupt Dutch trade in the region and to seize Dutch possessions along the Guinea coast. On 21 January 1664 he attacked Goree, sinking two ships and taking two others, and the island surrendered on the following day. He went on to take the Dutch fort of Anta and a number of other Dutch positions before sailing for England in late June. We get some flavour of Holmes’s naval style from a letter he sent to one of the Duke of York’s officials on the way home. Undisciplined behaviour of a kind which seemed to follow him around had led to a nasty incident. In spite of assurances to the contrary, after seizing the Dutch trading posts at Aga and Anamaboa by force, Holmes’s men had begun to plunder their assets. The Dutch retaliated by blowing up the post, resulting in casualties to the tune of ’80 or 90 whites and blacks’. Which, Holmes reports nonchalantly, ‘the blacks rewarded by cutting off all their heads’:

Since my Letters from Cape Coast wee have taken in Aga & Anamaboa the former by storm, and after promiseing Quarter to the Flemins & taken possession our men being somewhat greedy of Plunder, the Flemins treacherously blew up the Powder & withall 80 or 90 whites and blacks, which the blacks rewarded by cutting off all their heads […] I know not how my Actions vpon the Coast of Guyny are resented at Court, nor how my Condicion stands […] My service to all friends I am sir, yours. R.H.9

It was on this return voyage that Holmes produced the story that has earned a permanent place in the history of science, about the amazing accuracy of Huygens’s pendulum clocks, and how they had saved the returning ships from disaster by enabling him to predict how long it would take, in precisely which direction, to make landfall on the Cape Verde islands. The clocks had been kept assiduously wound and to time, he claimed, throughout his marauding adventures.10

Anti-Dutch feeling was already running high among the hawks in Charles II’s government by 1662–63. But it was Holmes’s buccaneering and unscrupulous naval action off Guinea that brought matters between England and the United Provinces conclusively to a head, and triggered the declaration of war by the Dutch in February 1665 (Holmes was also to provoke the confrontation which led to the third Dutch war in 1672).

So much for Holmes’s disreputable behaviour on behalf