First Salute (14 page)

British hostility had been steadily rising ever since de Graaff’s salute of the rebel flag. The indignation that swelled in British hearts over the affair endowed the incident with more significance than it had. “I find,” wrote Captain Colpoys of the
Seaford
to his superior, Admiral Young, “that the salutes of their [the American] armed vessels are returned at St. Croix as well as at Statia.” This additional insult had occurred in Colpoys’ imagination, as no such salute at St. Croix had taken place. Sir Joseph Yorke had no need to call on his imagination to keep informed on the continued Dutch smuggling of contraband. He had the most highly organized secret service in Europe, and it was supplying a stream of evidence on the shipments that were evading the Dutch embargo, their amounts and the routes they took. Shippers were sending their cargoes via Portugal, where they would be sold and the goods transferred to American agents. The brig
Smack
, prevented from leaving Amsterdam for fear of being seized by British vessels waiting outside, was sold by an American agent in Amsterdam and presumed to have left port under new ownership, a new name, a fresh coat of paint and neutral papers. Another smuggler, the brig
Betsy
owned in Boston, was reported to have carried 200 barrels of gunpowder of 112 pounds each, 1,000 muskets and 500 pairs of pistols with other stores.

Britain’s humiliating inability to suppress the rebellion, which she held against the Dutch for their steady supply of arms to the Colonies, evoked from Yorke the most self-revealing British remark of the war. Some military success was essential, he wrote in May, 1778, to Lord Suffolk, a minister in Lord North’s government, “
to restore the appearance which Britain had such a right to assume,” assuring that her neighbors would again speak the “language of respect and friendship.”
Crucial for empire though it might be, Yorke voiced something deeper, the craving not merely for respect but to be acknowledged top dog as the British nation felt itself to be. Philosophers may talk all they like about why men go to war; there are many reasons, but they need seek no further than Joseph Yorke for one answer. What he said about the desire for respect exactly describes the Kaiser’s Germany in 1914. Believing themselves the most industrious and civilized of contemporary peoples, chosen by Providence to occupy the supreme place in history, the Germans wanted desperately to be acknowledged as paramount by lesser nations. It galled the Kaiser that visitors always went to Paris as the goal of civilized culture and not to his capital. In that sense, war, as Joseph Yorke’s words suggest, can often arise from injured ego as much as from more serious cause.

The crosscurrents of Dutch politics in the conflict between rearming the army or navy determined the positions taken toward the American Revolution. The Stadtholder, followed by his party, was of course opposed to the American rebels not merely because he was by heritage in the British camp but because his domestic opponents who sympathized with the American cause expressed revolutionary republican views threatening his status as a hereditary sovereign. This group called themselves by the French word
patriotes
, and their strength grew in proportion as the Prince’s place in public respect sank. The Duke of Brunswick as a British partisan, and believed by the public to have kept the Prince ignorant of the true state of affairs, was a prime object of the
Patriotes
’ dislike.

The most important influence with regard to the Americans was the mercantile interest dominated by Amsterdam, whose leaders were convinced that the great unknown continent of America, once independent and freed from the grip of British mercantalism, offered a flowing fountain of trade for the export of Haarlem cloth and Schiedam gin and the import of rice, indigo, sugar, cotton, coffee and rum, and the financing of loans to American merchants that in their hands would break British supremacy of the Atlantic. As reported by a French envoy at The Hague, the opportunities were expected to “
multiply like sand” and the Dutch would not want any other nation to get ahead of them in their relationship to a new nation of such “vast possibilities.”

Yet, even in Amsterdam, Adams found few men of influence who took the Colonies’ battle seriously, as anything but “
a desultory rage of a few enthusiasts without order, discipline, law or government.” Scarcely
anyone had direct knowledge of America and its growing population and trade. In their golden dreams, what did the Dutch really know of America? Its immensity left a feeling of awe which bred some very odd notions fostered by pseudo-scientists and scholarly pretenders to universal knowledge, such as the omniscient Abbé Raynal in his
Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the Two Indies
. As a late creation, America was pronounced to be still incomplete and unfit for human life, much less civilization. Its natural physical conditions, which the famed naturalist Buffon, in one of the wilder leaps of European fiction, managed somehow to describe as a “
niggardly sky and unprolific land,” prevented healthy development of flora and fauna and even of the human race, who were believed weak in virility. Buffon, of course, never crossed the Atlantic to see America in person. According to similarly qualified scientists, fully grown adults from other climates who settled there “lost their powers,” and Buffon was able to satisfy himself in another of his peculiar findings that the native Indians “have small organs of generation” and “little sexual capacity.” Climate in the New World, according to a best-selling French treatise translated into Dutch in 1775, made men listless and indolent; they might become happy but never stalwart. America, affirmed this scholar, “was formed for happiness, but not for empire.” If this was intended to be reassuring, it hints at an underlying fear in Europeans of some huge primitive force in the New World that could rise to overwhelm them.

Fantasies about America produced two strongly contradictory conclusions that in the end came to the same point of injecting some caution into the golden dreams. According to one school, America was too big, too divided, ever to become a single country, its communications too distended for the country ever to be united. Were it to gain independence, it would fall apart in civil war, nor could its long coastline be defended against a foe unless it acquired decisive sea power. The other school maintained that America’s immensity and large resources destined her for great power that must inevitably clash with the Dutch and threaten their trade, especially in the Colonies. Expectation of lucrative commerce, pessimists warned, must be held within this framework. Both arguments, that America was too weak and contrariwise too strong, were taken up by British propagandists in the effort to dampen enthusiasm within the Amsterdam group for closer ties with the American Colonies.

Combat at sea in 1779 over the tangled issue of neutral rights brought
matters to increased tension. The reason neutrality was a subject so rife in nuisance value was because in a climate of incessant wars the belligerents were in everlasting need of supplies, for which they were dependent on neutral shipping. Neutrality law, supposedly established upon the simple principle of “free ships, free goods,” had been formulated by the great Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius in 1625; essentially it provided that anything carried in neutral bottoms except actual munitions of war was “free” to be delivered to a belligerent, while anything in a belligerent ship was
ipso facto
a prize of war. Subsidiary questions of what materials were “free” and what were contraband, what were a belligerent’s rights of search and seizure and a shipper’s right of convoy to protect against such action, had become so overregulated by treaties and protocols as to constitute a maze from which Theseus himself could not have found his way out. The purity of Grotius’ principle had been modified with disorderly effect to exempt naval “stores,” meaning materials, mainly timber, for ship construction, from the category of contraband. Limiting Britain’s freedom of action, the naval stores’ exemption and the principle of “free ships, free goods” were hated by the British, yet had been accepted in their Treaty of Westminster with the Dutch in 1674 in order to end the expensive and endless Dutch wars.

Naval stores brought the French vigorously into the picture. While individuals in France were fired by the ideals of liberty in the revolt of the Colonies, French official policy was not concerned with liberty but with aiding the rebels as a means of avenging herself on Britain for the loss of Canada and other defeats in the Seven Years’ War. To this end France needed to build up her decayed fleet, for which she counted on Baltic timber delivered in neutral Dutch bottoms. Therefore adequate Dutch convoy, which was meager because of lack of ships, was an urgent French interest. To reduce and strictly limit convoy was of equal interest to the British.

Debate in the provincial states over the need and the cost of more ships was strenuous, plunging the provinces into more than their normal antagonism to each other, with Holland and Friesland, as the most dependent on foreign commerce and ship-building, ranged against Utrecht, Overyssel and Gelderland, which wanted reinforcement of land forces. Focus of the debate was the fiercely disputed issue of “
unlimited convoy,” meaning escort for all merchantmen that sailed from the Netherlands with any or all goods not specifically listed as contraband. As
this raised the issue of naval stores and would have protected delivery of timber to the French, the British could not allow it, while the French insisted on it. For Britian the issue was wider than just ship-building material for France. Convoy implied resistance to search, disputing England’s claim to sovereignty of the seas between her coast and the continent of Europe, as laid down, to the unbounded satisfaction of the nation, by the erudite historian of law John Selden in
Mare Clausum
, his answer to Grotius. In asserting Britain’s exclusive rights over the seas surrounding her islands, Selden affirmed the supremacy that Yorke believed Britain had “the right to assume.” Unlimited convoy would become another test of ego as a
casus belli
. Believing that England would fight rather than give up her right of search, there were many in Holland who advised against making the test.

Crossing provincial lines, the debate drew parties and groups into a turmoil of conflicts. The Stadtholder, counting on England as his supporter against the revolutionary ideas of the
Patriotes
, knew his mind well enough in the matter to be sturdily opposed. Artisans of the middle class and proletarians, seeing unlimited convoy as a means of increasing trade and reviving manufacture, were as strongly advocates. Had the Dutch been united, they could have taken a firm stand one way or the other, but there was no person or body having the force or authority to impose a decision.

The French Ambassador, the Duc de la Vauguyon, a suave and soft-spoken diplomat schooled in the tactful manners of the French court, where his father had been tutor to Louis XVI, was soothingly recommending to the Dutch to follow a policy of ease and quiet without expense, saying that they had nothing to fear from France but that, for their own sake, their national dignity required a strong navy. Yorke, growing more harsh and overbearing the more he despaired of stopping the Dutch contraband trade, resorted to dire warnings, raising the prospect of England abrogating the Treaty of Westminster, leaving all Dutch trade open to seizure.

The States General failed to see in this a sign that Britain was approaching active reprisal, perhaps because Sir Joseph, the Thunderer, was too prolific in threats, and more because they could not believe that Britain, now engaged against both France and Spain as well as in America, would be so reckless as to take on another war. Events proved otherwise. In June, 1779, Spain had just entered the war on the side of the Colonies against Britain. As the most rockbound of monarchies, she
had no interest in the success of the American rebellion, rather the contrary, and made no treaty of alliance with the Americans but only with France, in furtherance of their existing alliance known as the Bourbon Family Compact. Renewal of the compact was intended to bring the partners to that long-awaited day of which so many of her enemies have dreamed, the invasion of Britain. In joining the war, Spain planned the occasion for 1779, one hundred and ninety-one years since the drowned hopes of Philip’s Armada. Her more modest war aim was the recovery of Gibraltar and Minorca, lost to Britain in 1704 in the War of the Spanish Succession. With Britain now pressed by both major continental powers at once, Spain believed her moment had come.

Dutch vessels carrying supplies to France were every week being stopped at sea by the British, deepening the anxiety of Dutch naval officers about their inferiority in a possible war. Advocates of the navy had urged the addition of more ships as convoys to protect the trade, but the reluctance of the inland provinces to vote for the cost and the ensuing prolonged debate had brought no additional naval guardians. At the same time, Admiral Bylandt, a commander of convoys, reported on the lack of island defenses in the West Indies, mentioning especially St. Eustatius, which he warned must have added arms and installations to enable her to resist attack and protect her flourishing commerce. No adequate response was made to his demand. Eight ships, not 24, were put under Bylandt’s command for convoy duty when the building program produced its results.

Ease and quiet for the Dutch were not to be had in the new decade. As a means of bringing pressure for additional convoy, France was threatening to cancel import privileges granted to individual cities and provinces, doing injury to the Dutch pocketbook. On second thought, recognizing that a gift is always more persuasive than a threat, France instead granted exemption from import duties to Amsterdam and Haarlem and reaped a reward in the form of Holland’s vote in March, 1779, in favor of unlimited convoy. But the controversy was kept alive when the States General, anxious about the British reaction, failed to confirm the provincial vote.