First Salute Read Online Free PDF

Europe, as they were most of the time, they brought their goods to buy and sell in St. Eustatius and to purchase edibles from foreign sources, for no one of the West Indies, concentrating on sugar and slaves, was self-sufficient in food. In the next twenty-five years, Eustatius enjoyed its golden era. Population, which had numbered only a few thousand before the American war, rose to 8,000 by 1780, owing to the explosion of trade and storage service. Residences crowded up against each other along the shore of the Lower Town and were doubled by a row of stone warehouses occupying every space. Mercantileadventurers from all over flocked to St. Eustatius to store their goods, which otherwise might be lost on their own islands through the constant seizures of territory by naval predators in search of booty and land. Warehouses of the Lower Town overflowed with goods awaiting transshipment. The traders often took the precaution to become Dutch citizens while using the island as their depot. British blockade of the American coast and French entry into the war rendered American and French ports subject to attack, further encouraging the use of St. Eustatius for storage.
    The Lower Town ended at Gallows Bay, where there was a sloping beach suitable for the bizarre business of cleaning ships’ bottoms. Barnacles and marine growths had to be scraped off and the bottom repainted every few months in an excessively awkward process called “careening.” It required hauling the vessel up on the beach and turning it over from one side to the other while masts, ballasts, guns and other equipment were removed or lashed in place. The fighting machine itself was out of action for the duration of its humiliation. Provided it had not bogged down in mud or been damaged by a squall while it lay helpless, it might then be relaunched. Rarely did human ingenuity fall so short of requirements as in this preposterous, almost farcical procedure. The only alternative, for navies which could afford it, was to sheathe their warships’ bottoms in copper.
    Through the 1770s and ’80s, Dutch merchants continued to defy their government’s embargo on contraband, and the Americans to ignore as before the Navigation Acts, to which as British Colonies they were subject. So tempting was the opportunity to get rich quickly, complained Sir Joseph Yorke, that munitions were loaded in Dutch harbors as publicly as if no embargo had been declared. He tried to insist to the States General that they must enforce their orders, but he could get nothing done. Writing to a colleague, he came to the sore point that galled the British the most: “… the Americans would have had to abandon their revolution if they had not been aided by Dutch greed.” He did not see greed in the British merchants who were selling supplies to the enemy, for greed, like better qualities, often lies in the eye of the beholder.

III

Beggars of the Sea—The Dutch Ascendancy
    AT THE TIME
of de Graaff’s salute, his fellow-countrymen had already registered and passed the peak of dynamic accomplishment in almost every realm of endeavor—in hydraulic engineering to make their own land habitable, in the longest successful revolt for political independence sustained against the greatest imperial power of the age, in flourishing commerce, business and banking, in maritime enterprise covering the oceans, in the supreme art of the Golden Age of Rembrandt, in everything but government, where they contented themselves with a paralytic system that would not have been tolerated by a primitive island of the Pacific. For all these qualities—positive and negative—the Dutch were the most interesting people in Europe, although few contemporaries would have said so. Except perhaps an American, specifically John Adams, our first envoy to the Netherlands, who wrote to his wife in 1780, shortly after his arrival in Holland, “The country where I am is the greatest curiosity in the world.… I have been here