First Salute (4 page)

If the British expected him to put guards on the port to suppress the smuggling trade, any such hope was disappointed. He proved to be even more of a partisan of the American cause than his predecessor. The port is “opened without reserve to all American vessels,” protested Captain Colpoys, an English sea captain commanding the
Seaford
anchored off St. Kitts, the neighboring British island, while the American agent in St. Eustatius, Van Bibber of Maryland, wrote home, “I am on the best terms with H.E. the Governour.… Our Flag flys current every day in the road.… The Governour is daily expressing the greatest desire
and intention to protect a trade with us here.” The Dutch West India Company, which employed the Governor, could hardly have been ignorant of these sentiments, and, being eager to augment its revenues from the American trade, doubtless had appointed him because of them.

His domain—little St. Eustatius, or Statia, as it was familiarly called in the region—has a number of distinctive qualities, not the least of which is that the authorities seem not quite sure where it is. In histories and atlases and in 18th century usage it is always named one of the Leeward Islands, whereas a modern brochure published by the local official tourist bureau places it among the Windward Islands. To the average reader, likely to be a landlubber like the author, this odd contradiction may be a matter of indifference, but in the days of sail it lay at the heart of the matter. “Leeward,” meaning the direction toward which the wind blows, hence generally toward the shore, and “windward,” meaning the direction from which the wind comes to fill the sails, represent the absolute polarity and determinant of maritime activity, as distinct from each other as inside from outside. For a place that was once the wealthiest port of the Caribbean and played a crucial role in American history, this uncertainty about nomenclature seems a bit casual, not to say careless. Regardless of such confusions as may have slipped into print, St. Eustatius may confidently be stated, along with the Virgin Islands, to belong to the Leeward group of the Lesser Antilles.

The West Indies as a whole make up a curved chain connecting North and South America, from a point off Florida down to Venezuela, which lies on the north coast of South America, the coast known in the days of piracy as the Spanish Main. Here pirates lay in wait in ports of the mainland to raid Spanish treasure ships heading home loaded with the silver of Peru and the goods and riches of the Spanish Colonies of the New World.

Separating the Atlantic from the Caribbean, the chain of the West Indies protrudes on its outer curve into the Atlantic and on its inner curve encloses the Caribbean as in a bowl. Tree-covered humps of land, each wearing around its base a white-fringed skirt of waves breaking on the shore, the islands of the West Indies lie comfortably in an unthreatening sea under a wide coverlet of quiet sky. Changing from slate blue when under cloud cover to turquoise in the sun, the sea twinkled with little white-caps while it bore flotillas of sail coming to unload produce or pick up cargoes at the island ports, or perhaps to disembark troops of a hostile invasion with intention to seize and occupy an island
for attachment to the invader’s own nation. This happened regularly, causing changes of sovereignty with hardly more excitement than when a man changes his clothes. Because of their wealth in the flow of international trade, lifeblood of the 18th century, and from the new crop of sugar sweetening the tongue of Europe and from the slave trade bringing labor to do the hot and heavy work on the sugar plantations, the islands were prizes for any nation greedy for the hard currency believed at that time to be the stuff of power. Apart from actual seizure, invaders could devastate the plantations, reduce product, cut revenue to the sovereign nation and thereby reduce its war-making capacity. St. Eustatius, the most lucrative island, boasted
twenty-two changes of sovereignty in little more than a century and a half.

Within the Caribbean bowl, the islands lie in three groups, with the Bahamas at the top, followed at the center by a group of the largest islands, comprising Cuba, Jamaica, Puerto Rico and the divided island of Haiti-Santo Domingo. At the eastern edge is the thin vertical chain of the Leeward Islands where Statia was located, with British-owned St. Kitts as its nearest neighbor, eight miles distant. Further into the ocean, the Windward Islands, including Martinique, Barbados and Grenada, and Trinidad and Tobago, hold the windward position. Home base in Europe was far away, an average distance, depending on the port of destination, of about 4,000 miles, and an average sailing time from the West Indies to Europe with the push of the prevailing westerly wind (blowing from west to east) of five or six weeks. The coast of North America lay much closer, some 1,400 miles across the Caribbean and South Atlantic. The typical voyage from the Indies to America took an average of three weeks. Enough geography.

De Graaff’s salute of the rebels, and his countrymen’s defiance of the embargo risking retaliation by a greater power, raises the question of motive. In all this affair the primary Dutch interest was a profitable commerce rather than liberty. De Graaff was not intending a mere routine ritual, as he later pretended when under investigation, but a deliberate one. In the subsequent furor, the Commander of Fort Orange, Abraham Ravené, testified that he had been reluctant to respond to the
Andrew Doria
but the Governor at his elbow ordered it. The applause of the island’s inhabitants tells why. It confirmed to them that their new governor was not going to enforce the prohibition of trade in contraband or cut off the wealth that trade engendered.

Statia rejoiced. After the salute, as the Maryland agent reported,
Captain Robinson of the
Andrew Doria
was “
most graciously received by his Honour and all ranks of people … all American vessels here now wear the Congress coulours. Tories sneak and shrink before the Americans here.” Because de Graaff’s interests lay with the Company and the merchant class, the first salute was clearly intended to assure the unruly Eustatians of the benevolent eye they needed to pursue their profits. For added emphasis, de Graaff gave a party after the salute in honor of Captain Robinson, inviting all American agents and merchants to the entertainment, as Van Bibber happily reported to his principals in Maryland. Confirming the motive behind the salute, Van Bibber also wrote, “The Dutch understand quite well that enforcement of the laws, that is, the embargo, would mean the ruin of their trade.”

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.

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—if not, as some boasted, in the world. Holland’s declared neutrality in the struggle between Britain and the American Colonies had assisted its enrichment.

Geography favored Statia with a splendid roadstead that could shelter 200 ships at a time and an invaluable position at the center of a multinational cluster of territories—English (Jamaica, St. Kitts, Antigua and Barbados), French (Ste. Lucie, Martinique and Guadeloupe), Spanish (Cuba, Puerto Rico and Hispaniola, the last divided between Haiti and Santo Domingo), and Danish (Virgin Islands). Taking advantage of Statia’s neutrality, these nations, as well as British merchants of the area
who were actually sharing in the trade with the enemy, made Statia’s shores the principal depot for transshipment of goods to and from America.

Called the Golden Rock for the flood of commerce that flowed through its free port, stuffing its warehouses with goods for trade and the coffers of its merchants with the proceeds, it “was different from all others,” said Edmund Burke in a speech of 1781 when Eustatius in sudden fame leapt into public notice. “It had no produce. no fortifications for its defense, nor martial spirit nor military regulations.… Its utility was its defense. The universality of its use, the neutrality of its nature was its security and its safeguard. Its proprietors had, in the spirit of commerce, made it an emporium for all the world … Its wealth was prodigious, arising from its industry and the nature of its commerce.”

Two factors besides geography accounted for the prodigy of the Golden Rock: Holland’s enterprising neutrality amid the ceaseless and circular wars of her larger neighbors, and Statia’s role as a free port without customs duties.

The pressure of the merchant class represented by the formidable Dutch West India Company, which held a monopoly over trade with America, induced the States General to declare neutrality in the war of the British Crown against its Colonies. Neutrality, as the Dutch knew from experience in the preceding Seven Years’ War of Britain against France, was good business, although in the American war it went against the natural bent of the States General, which favored the British as fellow-rulers. Popular opinion, however, in a rare combination with business interests, added its pressure for neutrality. Out of inherited pride in their own revolution to overthrow the sovereignty of Spain, the mass of the Dutch people openly sympathizied with the American rebellion.

Neutrality on the high seas, always the most contentious element in international relations, balances on a tightrope of mutual contradictions. According to the much-disputed doctrine of “free ships, free goods,” a neutral had the theoretical right to pursue a normal trade with either belligerent so long as its supplies did not cause a military disadvantage to the other side. At the same time, the theory allowed a belligerent to prevent the subjects of a neutral state from sending military supplies in aid of the enemy. Between these two assertions—the right of a neutral to trade and the right of the belligerent to interfere to stop the trade—there could be no reconciliation.

Determined to take advantage of this condition, Dutch merchants and mariners, alert to every opening for commerce, braved the physical and financial risks of seaborne commerce to make it pay richly. Wealth filled their warehouses. The American Colonies sent rich cargoes of their products—tobacco, indigo, timber, horses—to exchange for naval and military supplies and for molasses, sugar, slaves and furnishings from Europe. Their agents in Amsterdam arranged the purchases and the delivery to St. Eustatius for transshipment to the American coast. Vessels loaded with 1,000 to 4,000 pounds of gunpowder per ship, and in one case a total of 49,000 pounds, made their way to Philadelphia and Charleston (the nearest port). To the rebels with empty muskets, St. Eustatius made the difference.