First Salute (2 page)

Todd Ellison of Greenbelt, Maryland, for finding the Van Bibber correspondence in the Maryland Archives, and for his careful analysis of Clark’s
Naval Documents
.

Dorothy Hughes, London, for research assistance at the Public Record Office.

Joan Kerr, Richard Snow and Arthur Nielsen of
American Heritage
for picture research.

Geraldine Ostrove and Charles Sens, Music Division of Library of Congress, for material on “The World Turned Upside Down.”

The staff of the Historical Museum of St. Eustatius.

The staff of the Greenwich Library, in Connecticut, for answering many queries with unfailing courtesy and for efficient service in inter-library loans.

The Historical Society of Pennsylvania for records of the flag of the Continental Congress made by Margaret Manny.

New London, Connecticut, Historical Society and The National Maritime Museum, London, for naval records.

The MacDowell Colony, which has understood and arranged the perfect conditions for a place for uninterrupted and consecutive work away from the distractions of home.

The Dana Palmer House, at Harvard University, for a working residence next door to a great library.

Mary Maguire and Nancy Clements of Alfred A. Knopf and Barbara DeWolfe for indispensable aid in the publishing process.

A NUMBER
of difficulties and discrepancies exist in the narrative: the first is the peculiar peregrination of Windward and Leeward islands in the Caribbean whose location and designation find no agreement among various atlases and current sources on the West Indies. The cartographic division of the National Geographic Society explains one reason for the confusion, namely that there is a “slight overlap” of the islands at the mid-point of the West Indian chain. According to the National Geographic, Dominica and the chain extending north of Martinique belong to the Leeward group and those south of Dominica down to and including Barbados and Tobago belong to the Windward group. I leave this problem to the controversy that will inevitably ensue, knowing that the definitive is elusive.

A SECOND
problem is the continual elasticity in the given number of ships in a squadron or fleet. As explained in the footnote on
this page
, the count suffers from uncertain visibility at sea and depends upon whether frigates and merchant ships are counted along with ships of
the line and whether a certain number may have left the squadron or been added to it after the count was made.

MONEY
, that is, the value of a foreign currency in the late 18th century, or its equivalent to a better-known currency or to our own in contemporary terms, is of course a perennial problem in all historical studies. I can do no better than quote what I wrote in the foreword to
A Distant Mirror
, a book on the 14th century, that because value and equivalency keep changing and are impossible to make definite at any one time, I advise the reader not to worry about the problem but simply to think of any given amount as so many pieces of money.

FINALLY
, the problem of non-agreement among authorities: e.g., on the identity of the Dutch Admiral who, in a famous incident of the Anglo-Dutch wars of the 17th century, sailed up the Thames with a broom tied to his mast. The English historian Wingfield-Stratford says it was Tromp, while Professor Simon Schama, historian of the Netherlands, says the admiral was de Ruyter.

Or, the case of King George II as godfather to Admiral Rodney, so stated by Rodney’s biographer, David Hannay, while a second biographer, David Spinney, says that claim “is a myth.”

Or, the utter confusion surrounding the battle or battles of Finisterre in 1747. The naval historian Charles Lee Lewis deals bluntly with one aspect of the problem by saying other accounts “are all incorrect.” (That’s the spirit!) The confusion among historians arose in this case because there were several battles of Finisterre closely following each other, and there are two Finisterres, one in France and one, the true land’s end of Europe, in Spain.

WHITE
puffs of gun smoke over a turquoise sea followed by the boom of cannon rose from an unassuming fort on the diminutive Dutch island of St. Eustatius in the West Indies on November 16, 1776. The guns of Fort Orange on St. Eustatius were returning the ritual salute on entering a foreign port of an American vessel, the
Andrew Doria
, as she came up the roadstead, flying at her mast the red-and-white-striped flag of the Continental Congress. In its responding salute the small voice of St. Eustatius was the first officially to greet the largest event of the century—the entry into the society of nations of a new Atlantic state destined to change the direction of history.

The effect of the American Revolution on the nature of government in the society of Europe was felt and recognized from the moment it became a fact. After the American rebellion began, “an extraordinary alteration took place in the minds of a great part of the people of Holland,” homeland of St. Eustatius, recalled Sir James Harris, Earl of Malmesbury, who was British Ambassador at The Hague in the years immediately following the triumph of the American Revolution. “
Doubts arose,” he wrote in his memoirs, “about the authority of the
Stadtholder” (Sovereign of the Netherlands and Prince of Orange) … “indeed all authority came under attack when the English colonists in America succeeded in their rebellion.” What the Ambassador was witnessing—in idea, if not yet in fact—was the transfer of power from its arbitrary exercise by nobles and monarchs to power stationed in a constitution and in representation of the people. The period of the transfer, coinciding with his own career, from 1767 to 1797, was, he believed, “the
most eventful epoch of European history.” The salute to the
Andrew Doria
, ordered on his own initiative by the Governor of St. Eustatius, Johannes de Graaff, was the first recognition following the rebel colonies’ Declaration of Independence, of the American flag and American nationhood by an official of a foreign state. Dutch priority was not the most important aspect of the event, but as other claimants have disputed the case, let it be said that the guns of Fort Orange were confirmed as first by the President of the United States, in a plaque presented to St. Eustatius in 1939 over the engraved signature of the incumbent Franklin D. Roosevelt. The plaque reads, “In Commemoration of the salute of the flag of the United States fired in this fort November 16, 1776, by order of Johannes de Graaff, Governor of St. Eustatius, in reply to a national gun salute fired by the U.S. Brig-of-War
Andrew Doria
.…
Here the sovereignty of the United States of America was first formally acknowledged to a national vessel by a foreign official.” Thereby de Graaff found a place, though it may be the least known of any, in the permanent annals of the United States.

The
Andrew Doria
, vehicle and protagonist of this drama, was not just any ship but already the possessor of a historic distinction. She was one of the first four ships, all converted merchantmen, to be commissioned into the Continental Navy created by act of the Continental Congress on October 13, 1775, and she was shortly to take part in its first active combat. She was a brigantine, a small two-masted vessel, refitted for belligerent action in the newly created American Navy. She had sailed from the New Jersey coast town of Gloucester near Philadelphia on October 23, under orders of the Continental Congress to proceed to St. Eustatius to take on military supplies and deliver a copy of the Declaration of Independence to Governor de Graaff. With only her limited sail area to catch the westerlies, her crossing in a little over three weeks to arrive by November 16 was a notable feat. Sailing times from North America to Europe and back varied widely depending on the type of ship, with the heavier warships taking longer than frigates
and merchantmen, and depending on the wind, which might sometimes shift erratically from the prevailing westerlies blowing eastward to the reverse. At the time of the Revolution, the eastward passage to Europe, called “downhill,” ordinarily took about three weeks to a month as opposed to the westward “uphill” voyage to America against the wind and the Gulf Stream, which took about three months.