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Catawba Indian Tribe
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The Catawba Nation once stretched from much of South Carolina through the Piedmont of North Carolina to the Virginia line. It lay on a well traveled trading route.[1] There were six villages along the Catawba River when the English began colonizing. The land was rich and fertile making excellent farmland. Catawbas cleared their land using the slash and burn method as other Native Americans did. Slashing and burning created clearings that grew tender grasses that attracted deer[2]. This made the land very attractive to the English. However, the area remained a frontier for the first half of the 18th century. Only traders and a few settlers ventured so far. The Catawba Nation remained somewhat isolated.
Their location on the frontier created a natural buffer zone against hostiles for the English colonies.[3] It would be beneficial for both the English colonies and the Catawba Nation to maintain friendly relations. The Catawba tribe recognized early the futility of fighting the colonists. Instead, they adapted to the white mans ways to conform and performed many valuable services for the Colonists. Ultimately, they survived as a tribe therefore keeping much of their culture, tradition and a portion of their ancestral homeland.
Contact with English traders and colonists spread disease among the Catawba Indians and other Native American tribes in the Carolinas. Epidemics of European diseases decimated populations of Native American tribes in the Carolinas. Diseases killed off most of the elderly. In Native American culture, the elderly passed on the stories, history, herbal remedies, songs and skills by oral tradition. When elders died so did much of the culture. Traditional medicine men lost most of their influence as their healing methods proved ineffective on the new diseases. People lost faith in the old ways.[4] Yet, the medicine men still had their place for they ensured the dead received proper burial.[5] The heavy death toll left tribes open to attack from enemies. Tribes could no longer provide enough food for everyone because there were not enough able bodied people to hunt or tend to the crops.
The Catawba Nation once stretched from much of South Carolina through the Piedmont of North Carolina to the Virginia line. It lay on a well traveled trading route.[1] There were six villages along the Catawba River when the English began colonizing. The land was rich and fertile making excellent farmland. Catawbas cleared their land using the slash and burn method as other Native Americans did. Slashing and burning created clearings that grew tender grasses that attracted deer[2]. This made the land very attractive to the English. However, the area remained a frontier for the first half of the 18th century. Only traders and a few settlers ventured so far. The Catawba Nation remained somewhat isolated.
Their location on the frontier created a natural buffer zone against hostiles for the English colonies.[3] It would be beneficial for both the English colonies and the Catawba Nation to maintain friendly relations. The Catawba tribe recognized early the futility of fighting the colonists. Instead, they adapted to the white mans ways to conform and performed many valuable services for the Colonists. Ultimately, they survived as a tribe therefore keeping much of their culture, tradition and a portion of their ancestral homeland.
Contact with English traders and colonists spread disease among the Catawba Indians and other Native American tribes in the Carolinas. Epidemics of European diseases decimated populations of Native American tribes in the Carolinas. Diseases killed off most of the elderly. In Native American culture, the elderly passed on the stories, history, herbal remedies, songs and skills by oral tradition. When elders died so did much of the culture. Traditional medicine men lost most of their influence as their healing methods proved ineffective on the new diseases. People lost faith in the old ways.[4] Yet, the medicine men still had their place for they ensured the dead received proper burial.[5] The heavy death toll left tribes open to attack from enemies. Tribes could no longer provide enough food for everyone because there were not enough able bodied people to hunt or tend to the crops.
A solution to this growing problem was to merge with nearby tribes.[6] The Catawba Nation was the largest Siouan tribe in the Carolinas. Therefore, lesser Siouan tribes from the Piedmont of North Carolina and the upcountry of South Carolina merged with the Catawba Nation for survival.[7] The Eno from around Hillsborough NC moved south to merge with the Catawbas in the early 1700’s. Other tribes merged with the Catawba included the Cheraw, the Keyauwee, the Shahori, the Sissipaha also known as the Haw, the Woccon and the Waxhaw.[8] As tribes integrated so did customs and language. Some customs were adopted while others were lost. [9]
Trade brought change to both the Catawba tribe and the English. To Native Americans, trade was not only economical but a sign of friendship. English traders learned to speak Catawba and learned the Native American customs. When a new trader arrived, the chief offered him a woman to marry. It was an insult to refuse.[10] Many traders married so as not to offend but then found the woman useful as an interpreter and for negotiating trade.[11]
Trade brought change to both the Catawba tribe and the English. To Native Americans, trade was not only economical but a sign of friendship. English traders learned to speak Catawba and learned the Native American customs. When a new trader arrived, the chief offered him a woman to marry. It was an insult to refuse.[10] Many traders married so as not to offend but then found the woman useful as an interpreter and for negotiating trade.[11]
The Catawbas offered deerskins, pottery, woven mats and other crafts for trade. In exchange, English traders offered guns, ammo, iron or brass pots, metal knives, woven blankets, clothing and other goods. These goods were superior in quality to the Native American craftwork. For example, the metal pots lasted longer than Native American clay pots. Woven blankets and clothing were more comfortable than skins or furs. Guns were better, more lethal weapons than bows and arrows. Metal hoes replace sticks for tending fields. In addition to being better quality, these goods made life easier for Native Americans. Thus, European goods replaced much of the Native American crafts. Although the making of crafts did not completely stop, the quality and production of the crafts produced diminished. For example, pottery once an ornate art became simpler as did the baskets and woven mats.[12]
When the deer became scarce due to over hunting, the Catawbas were hard pressed to find a replacement for trade.[13] Resourceful Catawba women began peddling, door to door, their pottery, moccasins, woven mats and baskets to nearby white settlers. The Catawba clay pottery rendered a special flavor to the okra dishes that the colonists relished so therefore became very popular. Soon, colonists as far away as Charleston wanted the Catawba clay pots to use for cooking.[14]
Like other Native Americans, the Catawbas grew dependent on European goods. During the early 1700’s, English traders began to realize the dependency Native Americans had acquired. These traders began cheating the Native Americans. As a result several wars erupted. The first and second war was with the Tuscarora. Catawba warriors together with other warriors from other tribes joined the English colonists to drive the Tuscarora out of the Carolinas. The Tuscarora were a fierce tribe that had many enemies. Catawba warriors captured Tuscarora Indians and quickly took them to Charleston to sell as slaves for profit. This made the English angry because they wanted to sell the captured Tuscarora Indians for profit and there weren’t any left. In order to still profit from the war, the English tricked the Catawbas and other Native American allies into a meeting, then sold them into slavery. After which, the Catawbas never fully trusted the English again.[15]
Soon after the Tuscarora war ended, the Yemassee War began. This time the Catawbas fought with other tribes against the English. The war started because of the unfair treatment Native Americans received from the white settlers. Many settlers cheated Native Americans in trade and land deals. Most often the settlers plied the Native Americans with liquor before negotiating transactions to make them more agreeable. Other mistreatment left unpunished involved murder, rape, stealing and slaving. After dealing with dishonest English traders, Native Americans had large debts. These dishonest Englishmen often settled the huge debts by forcing Native Americans into slavery or taking their land. Native Americans complained to authorities. When their pleas for justice were not satisfied, Native Americans rallied to drive the English out. The war spread from Florida, to Alabama and through North Carolina. [16] It was during this war that the Catawba realized the futility of fighting the English for they soon ran out of ammunition. They made peace with the English colonists and then turned on the other Native American tribes still fighting. It was the last war the Catawba Indians fought against the English colonists.[17]
Contact with the English resulted in changes to lifestyle and culture for the Catawba Nation. They adapted some of the English ways. Some Catawbas owned slaves. Many started wearing English clothing. They took English names yet used their Catawba names among one another. Their huts became square instead of round to resemble English houses.[18] However, the tribe never fully deserted their ways. They still kept their hair styles, dances, hunting and planting ways. For example, Chief Hagler knew English but preferred to speak Catawba. He always used an interpreter even in negotiations.[19]
The Catawbas performed many valuable services for the English. Therefore, the English colonists thought it important to remain friends with the Catawbas. The most important service the tribe offered the English was the natural buffer zone the nation formed against their enemies. Catawba warriors had a fierce reputation. Catawbas were excellent trackers and knew the territory. Therefore, Catawba warriors hunted down escaped slaves and runaway horses. Since they knew the territory, Catawba Indians served as guides through the wilderness. These services were exchanged for English goods.[20] The colonists recognized the need for the Catawbas’ services and preferred to keep the Catawbas content. They did not want war anymore than the Catawbas.[21] From the 1740’s till his death in 1763, Chief Hagler, frequently petitioned the South Carolina governor for many gifts and received them. The South Carolina government wished to ensure the Catawbas continued friendship therefore they often sided with the Catawbas in disputes against white settlers.[22] Each group benefited from the other.
The Catawbas like other Eastern Native American tribes practiced the mourning war raids to appease the dead and help grieving families cope. Catawba warriors raided other tribes to take scalps or captives to either adopt or torture to death. [23]After the English built their plantations, captives were sold as slaves for a good profit. Catawba warriors collected bounties on hostile Native American scalps that use to go to grieving families to avenge the dead.[24] Although English contact did not force the Catawba to abandon the mourning war tradition, it did change the purpose of these raids. In addition, the English often incited wars between Native American tribes to obtain more captives for slaves.[25]
Up to the mid 1700’s, the Catawba Nation enjoyed a relative isolated life.[26] They maintained friendly relations with the Colonials. In the 1750’s, white settlers began venturing into Catawba territory. Conflicts arose. Lessons of the past, taught the Catawbas that it was fruitless to start a war with the white settlers. Instead of war, the Catawbas met with colonists to try and solve the conflicts. Chief Hagler of the Catawba tribe believed that much of these conflicts between the colonists and Catawbas were caused by intoxication. Hagler asked the colonists to refrain from giving any Catawba liquor in a reply to the complaints in 1754. [27]
In the treaty of Pine Tree Hill of 1760, Chief Hagler skillfully negotiated and was able to retain two million acres of Catawba land. In exchange for Catawba land, South Carolina promised to stop white settlers from encroaching on Catawba land and forcibly remove squatters. In addition, the tribe retained hunting rights to much of South Carolina. However, South Carolina did not honor the treaty. In violation of the treaty, whites attacked Catawba hunting parties that roamed beyond the reservation and squatters remained. Even though North Carolina did not participate in negotiations, its governor thought the two million acre reservation to be too generous. North Carolina had already issued land grants to settlers on the Catawba reservation. They’d issued these land grants before the border between North and South Carolina was surveyed. [28] After many years, the resulting controversy was finally settled by King George III who in 1772 decreed the border between the two colonies run the boundaries of the Catawba reservation.[29]Three years after the signing of the treaty of Pine Tree Hill, the Treaty of Augusta was signed. Prior to negotiations, Chief Hagler was murdered and the record of the treaty of Pine Tree Hill lost. These two events made negotiations less fruitful for the Catawbas. In the Treaty of Augusta, the Catawbas surrendered more land. The reservation was reduced to 144,000 acres.[30]
Soon after the treaty of Augusta was signed, the Catawbas petitioned the King George III for a land title to their reservation. The petitioned was granted in 1763. It gave the tribe a land base protected by Anglo-American law. This would ensure that tribal land remained in Catawba hands forever. Title to the land gave the Catawbas legal rights to remove trespassers. The Catawbas soon realized that it would be impossible to fully enforce their legal rights to their land. White settlers were still squatting on Catawba land. To counter future conflicts with the settlers, the Catawbas decided to lease the land. Thomas Spratt was the first settler to lease land from the Catawbas. Soon, he became friends with the Catawbas and worked as their Indian agent. Spratt witnessed land leases to ensure that the Catawbas were not cheated by whites. He recruited white settlers to lease Catawba land. After a smallpox epidemic, Spratt adopted several orphaned Catawba children. Many white settlers who leased land from the Catawbas subleased the land to other settlers. Everyone profited from this arrangement.[31]
War helped cement friendly relations between the Catawbas and white settlers. During theAmerican Revolution, the Catawbas joined Thomas Sumter’s colonial army. The Catawbas served as scouts and trackers. They provided food for the continental militia. Prior to the American Revolution, the Catawbas referred to their chief as king. To show their sympathies lay with the Americans, the Catawbas removed their king and elected a general of their tribe. Fear of reprisals from the British, forced the Catawba to move their women and children to Virginia for safety as did the Americans. The Catawbas risked the same fate as the Americans bonding them to one another.[32] Many young men from Mecklenburg county North Carolina served along side the Catawbas in Sumter’s State troops. These men made lifelong friends with the Catawbas. The Catawbas knew the men were poor and would not receive much after the war for their service. Therefore, the Catawbas encouraged the men to settle on their land.[33] Furthermore, the Catawbas would not lease land to those known to have fought on the side of the British. These acts showed loyalty to both the new government and fellow patriots.
After 1785, the state of South Carolina sanctioned the Catawbas land lease. Governor Moultrie used the pretense that the state would be helping the Catawbas and white settlers. The land was affordable to white settlers. Taxes were considerably lower here than elsewhere. The money collected from the leases would go to educate the Catawbas. However, problems arose when the state took over. The state assigned commissioners kept poor records. For example, the first record book was lost. Because of the poor record keeping, many tenants refused to pay the Catawbas rent.[34] There was never any clear evidence to act upon. Problems continued into the 1820’s when leases were worded clearer so there would not be anymore misunderstanding.[35]By the 1830’s, the state of South Carolina wanted to buy the land from the Catawbas. The governor of South Carolina admitted that the Catawbas were cheated out of their annual rents because most settlers instead of cash paid the Catawbas in goods that did not equal the value of their rents. [36] “In 1838, the legislature passed an act to support the Catawba, which punished leaseholders who failed to pay their rents by requiring them to post a bond with the state treasury and pay a penalty of seven percent interest.”[37] This act was met with large resistance from settlers. Soon after, the State of South Carolina purchased the Catawba land. The treaty of Nation Ford was signed in which the state of South Carolina agreed to purchase land in Haywood County North Carolina for the Catawba Nation. They also agreed to pay annual salaries to the tribe for the next century. However, the North Carolina government refused to sell land to South Carolina for this purpose. For two years, tribe members had no where to go. A few went to live with the Cherokee in North Carolina. Some went west. Eventually, tribe members started coming back to their ancestral homeland. Many white settlers took pity on these remnants and let them stay on their land till the problem was resolved. In 1842, the state finally purchased 630 acres in the same area that once belonged to the Catawbas.[38] Even though the Catawbas were cheated, they faired better than most Native Americans. They were allowed to stay in the Carolinas while other tribes were force to move west.[39] When the Catawbas returned to their homeland, they began teaching their children the old ways so their culture would not die. The elders taught the children the history of the Catawba nation, stories, skills, herbal medicine and more. These children did not learn English. They spoke only Catawba. Even though the tribe had lost most of their homeland, they were able to retain most of their culture.
Contact with the English brought new challenges to the Catawba tribe. Diseases brought by the Europeans decimated their populations. By merging with other tribes, the Catawbas were able to survive intact. The Catawbas realized early that it was fruitless to fight the English. Instead the Catawbas provided invaluable services for the English that gave the English an incentive to remain on friendly terms. When American Revolution broke out, the Catawbas fought along side the Americans thus gaining their loyalty. By providing invaluable services and remaining friendly with the English, the Catawba nation was able to keep most of their culture and remain on a portion of their homeland.
When the deer became scarce due to over hunting, the Catawbas were hard pressed to find a replacement for trade.[13] Resourceful Catawba women began peddling, door to door, their pottery, moccasins, woven mats and baskets to nearby white settlers. The Catawba clay pottery rendered a special flavor to the okra dishes that the colonists relished so therefore became very popular. Soon, colonists as far away as Charleston wanted the Catawba clay pots to use for cooking.[14]
Like other Native Americans, the Catawbas grew dependent on European goods. During the early 1700’s, English traders began to realize the dependency Native Americans had acquired. These traders began cheating the Native Americans. As a result several wars erupted. The first and second war was with the Tuscarora. Catawba warriors together with other warriors from other tribes joined the English colonists to drive the Tuscarora out of the Carolinas. The Tuscarora were a fierce tribe that had many enemies. Catawba warriors captured Tuscarora Indians and quickly took them to Charleston to sell as slaves for profit. This made the English angry because they wanted to sell the captured Tuscarora Indians for profit and there weren’t any left. In order to still profit from the war, the English tricked the Catawbas and other Native American allies into a meeting, then sold them into slavery. After which, the Catawbas never fully trusted the English again.[15]
Soon after the Tuscarora war ended, the Yemassee War began. This time the Catawbas fought with other tribes against the English. The war started because of the unfair treatment Native Americans received from the white settlers. Many settlers cheated Native Americans in trade and land deals. Most often the settlers plied the Native Americans with liquor before negotiating transactions to make them more agreeable. Other mistreatment left unpunished involved murder, rape, stealing and slaving. After dealing with dishonest English traders, Native Americans had large debts. These dishonest Englishmen often settled the huge debts by forcing Native Americans into slavery or taking their land. Native Americans complained to authorities. When their pleas for justice were not satisfied, Native Americans rallied to drive the English out. The war spread from Florida, to Alabama and through North Carolina. [16] It was during this war that the Catawba realized the futility of fighting the English for they soon ran out of ammunition. They made peace with the English colonists and then turned on the other Native American tribes still fighting. It was the last war the Catawba Indians fought against the English colonists.[17]
Contact with the English resulted in changes to lifestyle and culture for the Catawba Nation. They adapted some of the English ways. Some Catawbas owned slaves. Many started wearing English clothing. They took English names yet used their Catawba names among one another. Their huts became square instead of round to resemble English houses.[18] However, the tribe never fully deserted their ways. They still kept their hair styles, dances, hunting and planting ways. For example, Chief Hagler knew English but preferred to speak Catawba. He always used an interpreter even in negotiations.[19]
The Catawbas performed many valuable services for the English. Therefore, the English colonists thought it important to remain friends with the Catawbas. The most important service the tribe offered the English was the natural buffer zone the nation formed against their enemies. Catawba warriors had a fierce reputation. Catawbas were excellent trackers and knew the territory. Therefore, Catawba warriors hunted down escaped slaves and runaway horses. Since they knew the territory, Catawba Indians served as guides through the wilderness. These services were exchanged for English goods.[20] The colonists recognized the need for the Catawbas’ services and preferred to keep the Catawbas content. They did not want war anymore than the Catawbas.[21] From the 1740’s till his death in 1763, Chief Hagler, frequently petitioned the South Carolina governor for many gifts and received them. The South Carolina government wished to ensure the Catawbas continued friendship therefore they often sided with the Catawbas in disputes against white settlers.[22] Each group benefited from the other.
The Catawbas like other Eastern Native American tribes practiced the mourning war raids to appease the dead and help grieving families cope. Catawba warriors raided other tribes to take scalps or captives to either adopt or torture to death. [23]After the English built their plantations, captives were sold as slaves for a good profit. Catawba warriors collected bounties on hostile Native American scalps that use to go to grieving families to avenge the dead.[24] Although English contact did not force the Catawba to abandon the mourning war tradition, it did change the purpose of these raids. In addition, the English often incited wars between Native American tribes to obtain more captives for slaves.[25]
Up to the mid 1700’s, the Catawba Nation enjoyed a relative isolated life.[26] They maintained friendly relations with the Colonials. In the 1750’s, white settlers began venturing into Catawba territory. Conflicts arose. Lessons of the past, taught the Catawbas that it was fruitless to start a war with the white settlers. Instead of war, the Catawbas met with colonists to try and solve the conflicts. Chief Hagler of the Catawba tribe believed that much of these conflicts between the colonists and Catawbas were caused by intoxication. Hagler asked the colonists to refrain from giving any Catawba liquor in a reply to the complaints in 1754. [27]
In the treaty of Pine Tree Hill of 1760, Chief Hagler skillfully negotiated and was able to retain two million acres of Catawba land. In exchange for Catawba land, South Carolina promised to stop white settlers from encroaching on Catawba land and forcibly remove squatters. In addition, the tribe retained hunting rights to much of South Carolina. However, South Carolina did not honor the treaty. In violation of the treaty, whites attacked Catawba hunting parties that roamed beyond the reservation and squatters remained. Even though North Carolina did not participate in negotiations, its governor thought the two million acre reservation to be too generous. North Carolina had already issued land grants to settlers on the Catawba reservation. They’d issued these land grants before the border between North and South Carolina was surveyed. [28] After many years, the resulting controversy was finally settled by King George III who in 1772 decreed the border between the two colonies run the boundaries of the Catawba reservation.[29]Three years after the signing of the treaty of Pine Tree Hill, the Treaty of Augusta was signed. Prior to negotiations, Chief Hagler was murdered and the record of the treaty of Pine Tree Hill lost. These two events made negotiations less fruitful for the Catawbas. In the Treaty of Augusta, the Catawbas surrendered more land. The reservation was reduced to 144,000 acres.[30]
Soon after the treaty of Augusta was signed, the Catawbas petitioned the King George III for a land title to their reservation. The petitioned was granted in 1763. It gave the tribe a land base protected by Anglo-American law. This would ensure that tribal land remained in Catawba hands forever. Title to the land gave the Catawbas legal rights to remove trespassers. The Catawbas soon realized that it would be impossible to fully enforce their legal rights to their land. White settlers were still squatting on Catawba land. To counter future conflicts with the settlers, the Catawbas decided to lease the land. Thomas Spratt was the first settler to lease land from the Catawbas. Soon, he became friends with the Catawbas and worked as their Indian agent. Spratt witnessed land leases to ensure that the Catawbas were not cheated by whites. He recruited white settlers to lease Catawba land. After a smallpox epidemic, Spratt adopted several orphaned Catawba children. Many white settlers who leased land from the Catawbas subleased the land to other settlers. Everyone profited from this arrangement.[31]
War helped cement friendly relations between the Catawbas and white settlers. During theAmerican Revolution, the Catawbas joined Thomas Sumter’s colonial army. The Catawbas served as scouts and trackers. They provided food for the continental militia. Prior to the American Revolution, the Catawbas referred to their chief as king. To show their sympathies lay with the Americans, the Catawbas removed their king and elected a general of their tribe. Fear of reprisals from the British, forced the Catawba to move their women and children to Virginia for safety as did the Americans. The Catawbas risked the same fate as the Americans bonding them to one another.[32] Many young men from Mecklenburg county North Carolina served along side the Catawbas in Sumter’s State troops. These men made lifelong friends with the Catawbas. The Catawbas knew the men were poor and would not receive much after the war for their service. Therefore, the Catawbas encouraged the men to settle on their land.[33] Furthermore, the Catawbas would not lease land to those known to have fought on the side of the British. These acts showed loyalty to both the new government and fellow patriots.
After 1785, the state of South Carolina sanctioned the Catawbas land lease. Governor Moultrie used the pretense that the state would be helping the Catawbas and white settlers. The land was affordable to white settlers. Taxes were considerably lower here than elsewhere. The money collected from the leases would go to educate the Catawbas. However, problems arose when the state took over. The state assigned commissioners kept poor records. For example, the first record book was lost. Because of the poor record keeping, many tenants refused to pay the Catawbas rent.[34] There was never any clear evidence to act upon. Problems continued into the 1820’s when leases were worded clearer so there would not be anymore misunderstanding.[35]By the 1830’s, the state of South Carolina wanted to buy the land from the Catawbas. The governor of South Carolina admitted that the Catawbas were cheated out of their annual rents because most settlers instead of cash paid the Catawbas in goods that did not equal the value of their rents. [36] “In 1838, the legislature passed an act to support the Catawba, which punished leaseholders who failed to pay their rents by requiring them to post a bond with the state treasury and pay a penalty of seven percent interest.”[37] This act was met with large resistance from settlers. Soon after, the State of South Carolina purchased the Catawba land. The treaty of Nation Ford was signed in which the state of South Carolina agreed to purchase land in Haywood County North Carolina for the Catawba Nation. They also agreed to pay annual salaries to the tribe for the next century. However, the North Carolina government refused to sell land to South Carolina for this purpose. For two years, tribe members had no where to go. A few went to live with the Cherokee in North Carolina. Some went west. Eventually, tribe members started coming back to their ancestral homeland. Many white settlers took pity on these remnants and let them stay on their land till the problem was resolved. In 1842, the state finally purchased 630 acres in the same area that once belonged to the Catawbas.[38] Even though the Catawbas were cheated, they faired better than most Native Americans. They were allowed to stay in the Carolinas while other tribes were force to move west.[39] When the Catawbas returned to their homeland, they began teaching their children the old ways so their culture would not die. The elders taught the children the history of the Catawba nation, stories, skills, herbal medicine and more. These children did not learn English. They spoke only Catawba. Even though the tribe had lost most of their homeland, they were able to retain most of their culture.
Contact with the English brought new challenges to the Catawba tribe. Diseases brought by the Europeans decimated their populations. By merging with other tribes, the Catawbas were able to survive intact. The Catawbas realized early that it was fruitless to fight the English. Instead the Catawbas provided invaluable services for the English that gave the English an incentive to remain on friendly terms. When American Revolution broke out, the Catawbas fought along side the Americans thus gaining their loyalty. By providing invaluable services and remaining friendly with the English, the Catawba nation was able to keep most of their culture and remain on a portion of their homeland.
Sunday, July 29, 2018
Friday, July 27, 2018
Tuesday, July 24, 2018
Tuesday, July 17, 2018
Thursday, July 5, 2018
Tuesday, June 26, 2018
Saturday, June 23, 2018
Friday, June 22, 2018
Wednesday, June 20, 2018
Sunday, June 17, 2018
Thursday, June 14, 2018
Religion in Boston: Calvinism, First Great Awakening, New Lights & Old Lights, Unitarianism
Intro P
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Calvinism
Five Points
1. "Total depravity", also called "total inability", asserts that as a consequence of the fall of man into sin, every person is enslaved to sin. People are not by nature inclined to love God, but rather to serve their own interests and to reject the rule of God. Thus, all people by their own faculties are morally unable to choose to trust God for their salvation and be saved (the term "total" in this context refers to sin affecting every part of a person, not that every person is as evil as they could be). This doctrine is derived from Augustine's explanation of Original Sin. While the phrases "totally depraved" and "utterly perverse" were used by Calvin, what was meant was the inability to save oneself from sin rather than being absent of goodness.
2. "Unconditional election" asserts that God has chosen from eternity those whom he will bring to himself not based on foreseen virtue, merit, or faith in those people; rather, his choice is unconditionally grounded in his mercy alone. God has chosen from eternity to extend mercy to those he has chosen and to withhold mercy from those not chosen. Those chosen receive salvation through Christ alone. Those not chosen receive the just wrath that is warranted for their sins against God.
3. "Limited atonement", also called "particular redemption" or "definite atonement", asserts that Jesus's substitutionary atonement was definite and certain in its purpose and in what it accomplished. This implies that only the sins of the elect were atoned for by Jesus's death. Calvinists do not believe, however, that the atonement is limited in its value or power, but rather that the atonement is limited in the sense that it is intended for some and not all. Some Calvinists have summarized this as "The atonement is sufficient for all and efficient for the elect."
4. "Irresistible grace", also called "efficacious grace", asserts that the saving grace of God is effectually applied to those whom he has determined to save (that is, the elect) and overcomes their resistance to obeying the call of the gospel, bringing them to a saving faith. This means that when God sovereignly purposes to save someone, that individual certainly will be saved. The doctrine holds that this purposeful influence of God's Holy Spirit cannot be resisted, but that the Holy Spirit, "graciously causes the elect sinner to cooperate, to believe, to repent, to come freely and willingly to Christ." This is not to deny the fact that the Spirit's outward call (through the proclamation of the Gospel) can be, and often is, rejected by sinners; rather, it's that inward call which cannot be rejected.
5. "Perseverance of the saints" (also known as "perseverance of God with the saints" and "preservation of the believing") (the word "saints" is used to refer to all who are set apart by God, and not of those who are exceptionally holy, canonized, or in heaven) asserts that since God is sovereign and his will cannot be frustrated by humans or anything else, those whom God has called into communion with himself will continue in faith until the end. Those who apparently fall away either never had true faith to begin with (1 John 2:19), or, if they are saved but not presently walking in the Spirit, they will be divinely chastened (Hebrews 12:5–11) and will repent (1 John 3:6–9)
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The most notable Calvinist preacher was Jonathan Edwards and his 1741 Sermon, Sinners In the Hands Of An Angry God.
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Mayhew rejected Edwards view declaring that “total depravity [is] both dishonourable to the character of God and a libel on human nature.” He likewise rejected the five points of Calvinism including the doctrine of irresistible grace and the doctrine of the Trinity as taught by the Athanasian and Nicene Creeds.
At the same time Mayhew also rejected the Great Awakening—the first of a series of huge revival movements that have periodically swept Americans up into a religious frenzy. Mayhew had seen the principle mover of the Awakening, the English preacher and revivalist George Whitefield, an Anglican preacher who became a founding figure in Methodism, at camp meetings in what is now Maine. He was repulsed by the mindless emotionalism he witnessed which he suspected would burn brightly but soon extinguish itself. He found Whitefield’s followers, ‘of the more illiterate sort,” and the preaching “confused, conceited and enthusiastic.” He was repelled by the “extravagance and fanaticism, and violent gestures and shrieks” of people in the throes of religious ecstasy.
Mayhew made his views publicly know. He proposed a third path based on religious rationalism and a view of a loving, but firm God as Father as revealed in a careful reading and analysis of The Bible.
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William Hogarth
Hogarth (1697 - 1764)
-- Most popular English artist and engraver of his generation.
-- By April 1720, Hogarth was an engraver in his own right, at first engraving coats of arms, shop bills, and designing plates for booksellers.
-- In 1727, he was hired by Joshua Morris, a tapestry worker, to prepare a design for the Element of Earth. Morris heard that he was "an engraver, and no painter", and consequently declined the work when completed. Hogarth accordingly sued him for the money in the Westminster Court, where the case was decided in his favour on 28 May 1728. In 1757 he was appointed Serjeant Painter to the King.
Satire:
Emblematical Print on the South Sea Scheme (c.1721, published 1724)
The Lottery (1724);
The Mystery of Masonry brought to Light by the Gormogons (1724);
A Just View of the British Stage (1724);
Masquerades and Operas (1724). The latter is a satire on contemporary follies, such as the masquerades of the Swiss impresario John James Heidegger, the popular Italian opera singers, John Rich's pantomimes at Lincoln's Inn Fields, and the exaggerated popularity of Lord Burlington's protégé, the architect and painter William Kent.
The Large Masquerade Ticket.1727
The Fountaine Family (c.1730),
The Assembly at Wanstead House,
The House of Commons examining Bambridge,
A Midnight Modern Conversation (1733),
In the 18th eighteenth century, some of the most notable satirical portrayals of the medical profession came in the form of artistic renderings. William Hogarth skewered the profession, mockingly portraying physicians in "The Company of Undertakers" in 1737. The painting, framed with a black sash signifying a recent death, shows twelve portly physicians deep in thought, studying a flask of urine. Presiding over the consultation are three figures who turn out to be "Crazy Sally" Mapp (center), a well-known bonesetter, and two notorious quacks of the day, Joshua "Spot" Ward (left) and "Chevalier" John Taylor (right). By lumping professional physicians with the quacks and the bonesetter, Hogarth challenges the presumptions and pretensions that set the professionals and the quacks apart. Physicians in the 18th century were distinguished by their walking canes and stylish wigs—an appearance clearly appropriated by the quacks in the portrait. It is also not clear that any sort of superior education or training sets the professionals apart from the quacks—indeed in the eighteenth century, quack therapeutics were often less harmful to patients than professional therapeutics. The observer is left to conclude that consultation with either group will result in a request for the undertaker's services.
Satire:
Emblematical Print on the South Sea Scheme (c.1721, published 1724)
The Lottery (1724);
The Mystery of Masonry brought to Light by the Gormogons (1724);
A Just View of the British Stage (1724);
Masquerades and Operas (1724). The latter is a satire on contemporary follies, such as the masquerades of the Swiss impresario John James Heidegger, the popular Italian opera singers, John Rich's pantomimes at Lincoln's Inn Fields, and the exaggerated popularity of Lord Burlington's protégé, the architect and painter William Kent.
The Large Masquerade Ticket.1727
The Fountaine Family (c.1730),
The Assembly at Wanstead House,
The House of Commons examining Bambridge,
A Midnight Modern Conversation (1733),
Southwark Fair (1733),
The Sleeping Congregation (1736),
Before and After (1736),
Scholars at a Lecture (1736),
The Sleeping Congregation (1736),
Before and After (1736),
Scholars at a Lecture (1736),
The Company of Undertakers (Consultation of Quacks) (1736):
As the contrived heraldic rhetoric of this print's caption makes clear, it is a satirical representation of a coat-of-arms for the medical profession. The theme of the escutcheon is not recovery but death. The print is bordered in black like a mourning card; it has ominous crossbones in the bottom corners; and its motto "Et Plurima Mortis Imago" (And many an image of death).
The upper portion of the shield (the field "ermine" above the "nebulous" dividing line) shows three doctors, each with some obvious physical disorder. The center figure ("One Compleat Doctor") with the grim, thick-featured face wearing a clown's suit and a felt hat over a nightcap is cross-eyed. This masculine figure, said to represent Sarah Mapp, a well-known bone-setter of the time, points inarticulately to the human bone she is carrying as a cane. To the right stands a smiling, almost feminine-faced physician. He is supposed to portray Joshua Ward ("Spot Ward"), a doctor with a blood-colored birthmark on one side of his face—thus the shading. To the left stands a well-dressed oculist (his cane identifies his specialty) who has himself only one open eye, which stares erratically upward; he seems to wink ingratiatingly with the other. This figure is believed to represent John Taylor, a charlatan oculist.
Below these figures twelve more quacks huddle together. Nine smell the heads of their canes, which in the eighteenth century, contained disinfectant. Two stare into a urinal to determine the color of the contents. A third dips his finger into the urine itself to taste it. All wear sour, disaffected expressions.
The Distrest Poet (1736),
The Four Times of the Day (1738),
Strolling Actresses Dressing in a Barn (1738)
Moralizing Art:
The Harlot's Progress 1731 - The perils of whoredom
A Rake's Progress 1735 - Inherited wealth lost
Marriage a-la-mode 1745
1 - The Marriage Settlement shows an arranged marriage between the son of bankrupt Earl Squanderfield and the daughter of a wealthy but miserly city merchant. Construction on the earl's new mansion, visible through the window, has stopped, and a usurer negotiates payment for further construction at the center table. The gouty earl proudly points to a picture of his family tree, rising from William the Conqueror. The son views himself in the mirror, showing where his interests in the matter lie. The distraught merchant's daughter is consoled by the lawyer Silvertongue while polishing her wedding ring. Even the faces on the walls appear to have misgivings. Two dogs chained to each other in the corner mirror the situation of the young couple.
2 - The Tête à Tête Shortly after the marriage, there are signs that the marriage has already begun to break down. The husband and wife appear uninterested in one another, amidst evidence of their separate overindulgences the night before. A small dog finds a lady's cap in the husband's coat pocket, indicating his adulterous ventures. A broken sword at his feet shows that he has been in a fight. The open posture of the wife also indicates unfaithfulness. As Hogarth once noted: "A lock of hair falling thus cross the temples ... has an effect too alluring to be strictly decent, as is very well known to the loose and lowest class of women."[3]The disarray of the house and the servant holding a stack of unpaid bills shows that the affairs of the household are a mess.
3 - The Inspection called The visit to the quack doctor by Hogart, shows the viscount (the earl's son) visiting a quack with a young prostitute. According to one interpretation, the viscount, unhappy with the mercury pills meant to cure his syphilis, demands a refund while the young prostitute next to him dabs an open sore on her mouth, an early sign of syphilis.
4 - The Toilette The old earl has died, so the son is now the new earl and his wife is the countess. The countess sits with her back to her guests, oblivious to them, as a servant attends to her toilette (grooming). The lawyer Silvertongue from the first painting is reclining next to the countess, suggesting the existence of an affair. This point is underlined by the child in front of the pair, pointing to the horns on the statue of Actaeon, a symbol of cuckoldry. Paintings in the background include the biblical story of Lot and his daughters, Jupiter and Io, and the rape of Ganymede. The Actaeon and several other figurines are seen marked for auction. Such paintings show the African, presumed to be untamed fetish-worshipper and hunter, now fashioned into an icon of courtly style.
5 - The Bagnio The new earl has caught his wife in a bagnio with her lover, the lawyer, and is fatally wounded. As she begs forgiveness from the stricken man, the murderer in his nightshirt makes a hasty exit through the window. A picture of a woman with a squirrel on her hand hanging behind the countess contains lewd undertones. Masks on the floor indicate that the couple have been at a masquerade.
6 - The Lady's Death The countess poisons herself in her grief and poverty-stricken widowhood, after her lover is hanged at Tyburn for murdering her husband. An old woman carrying her baby allows the child to give her a kiss, but the mark on the child's cheek and the caliper on her leg suggest that disease has been passed onto the next generation. The countess's father, whose miserly lifestyle is evident in the bare house, removes the wedding ring from her finger.
Industry & Idleness 1747 -
Parallel lives leading from the same start to opposite ends. Paulson suggests two: the plays "Eastward Hoe" (Revived after Hogarth's publication of these) and "The London Merchant", the latter containing the especially applicable quote that "business [is] the youth's best preservative from ill, as idleness [is] the worst of snares". He also suggests that Hogarth already had the idea when he painted "Hudibras and the Lawyer" with its 2 (industrious and idle) clerks.
Anti-French Art:
The Gate of Calais (1748)
The painting takes a viewpoint under an archway in the main outer wall of Calais. The scene within centres around a sirloin of beef destined for the English tavern, the Lion d'Argent, carried by a chef who stands out in his bright white apron and cap. The French soldiers, dressed in rags and forced to eat their watery soupe maigre, gather round licking their lips. Two soldiers in sabots can be seen carrying a cauldron of the grey unappetising soup. The Franciscan friar who greedily rubs his finger in the fat of the beef joint, is thought to be based on Hogarth's friend John Pine.[2] In the foreground, a Highlander, an exile from the Jacobite rising of 1745,[1] sits slumped against the wall, his strength sapped by the poor French fare – a raw onion and a crust of bread. Hogarth is seen sketching to the left in the background, but the tip of the halberd and hand of the soldier who will arrest him are just appearing round the corner behind him.
There are strong references to the celebration of Eucharist in the picture. Through the gates, under the sign of a dove (that of an inn) a Roman Catholic mass is being celebrated. In the foreground, but still aligned with those in the background under the cross of the gate, the principal characters worship the beef. The man carrying it bows under the weight appearing to offer it up to the friar on partially bended knee. Above the scene in front of the gate, the dove of peace is replaced by a carrion bird, the crow. In the foreground fishwives superstitiously worship the face of a ray, and the Jacobite also clasps his hand together in prayer.
The upper portion of the shield (the field "ermine" above the "nebulous" dividing line) shows three doctors, each with some obvious physical disorder. The center figure ("One Compleat Doctor") with the grim, thick-featured face wearing a clown's suit and a felt hat over a nightcap is cross-eyed. This masculine figure, said to represent Sarah Mapp, a well-known bone-setter of the time, points inarticulately to the human bone she is carrying as a cane. To the right stands a smiling, almost feminine-faced physician. He is supposed to portray Joshua Ward ("Spot Ward"), a doctor with a blood-colored birthmark on one side of his face—thus the shading. To the left stands a well-dressed oculist (his cane identifies his specialty) who has himself only one open eye, which stares erratically upward; he seems to wink ingratiatingly with the other. This figure is believed to represent John Taylor, a charlatan oculist.
Below these figures twelve more quacks huddle together. Nine smell the heads of their canes, which in the eighteenth century, contained disinfectant. Two stare into a urinal to determine the color of the contents. A third dips his finger into the urine itself to taste it. All wear sour, disaffected expressions.
The Distrest Poet (1736),
The Four Times of the Day (1738),
Strolling Actresses Dressing in a Barn (1738)
Moralizing Art:
The Harlot's Progress 1731 - The perils of whoredom
A Rake's Progress 1735 - Inherited wealth lost
Marriage a-la-mode 1745
1 - The Marriage Settlement shows an arranged marriage between the son of bankrupt Earl Squanderfield and the daughter of a wealthy but miserly city merchant. Construction on the earl's new mansion, visible through the window, has stopped, and a usurer negotiates payment for further construction at the center table. The gouty earl proudly points to a picture of his family tree, rising from William the Conqueror. The son views himself in the mirror, showing where his interests in the matter lie. The distraught merchant's daughter is consoled by the lawyer Silvertongue while polishing her wedding ring. Even the faces on the walls appear to have misgivings. Two dogs chained to each other in the corner mirror the situation of the young couple.
2 - The Tête à Tête Shortly after the marriage, there are signs that the marriage has already begun to break down. The husband and wife appear uninterested in one another, amidst evidence of their separate overindulgences the night before. A small dog finds a lady's cap in the husband's coat pocket, indicating his adulterous ventures. A broken sword at his feet shows that he has been in a fight. The open posture of the wife also indicates unfaithfulness. As Hogarth once noted: "A lock of hair falling thus cross the temples ... has an effect too alluring to be strictly decent, as is very well known to the loose and lowest class of women."[3]The disarray of the house and the servant holding a stack of unpaid bills shows that the affairs of the household are a mess.
3 - The Inspection called The visit to the quack doctor by Hogart, shows the viscount (the earl's son) visiting a quack with a young prostitute. According to one interpretation, the viscount, unhappy with the mercury pills meant to cure his syphilis, demands a refund while the young prostitute next to him dabs an open sore on her mouth, an early sign of syphilis.
4 - The Toilette The old earl has died, so the son is now the new earl and his wife is the countess. The countess sits with her back to her guests, oblivious to them, as a servant attends to her toilette (grooming). The lawyer Silvertongue from the first painting is reclining next to the countess, suggesting the existence of an affair. This point is underlined by the child in front of the pair, pointing to the horns on the statue of Actaeon, a symbol of cuckoldry. Paintings in the background include the biblical story of Lot and his daughters, Jupiter and Io, and the rape of Ganymede. The Actaeon and several other figurines are seen marked for auction. Such paintings show the African, presumed to be untamed fetish-worshipper and hunter, now fashioned into an icon of courtly style.
5 - The Bagnio The new earl has caught his wife in a bagnio with her lover, the lawyer, and is fatally wounded. As she begs forgiveness from the stricken man, the murderer in his nightshirt makes a hasty exit through the window. A picture of a woman with a squirrel on her hand hanging behind the countess contains lewd undertones. Masks on the floor indicate that the couple have been at a masquerade.
6 - The Lady's Death The countess poisons herself in her grief and poverty-stricken widowhood, after her lover is hanged at Tyburn for murdering her husband. An old woman carrying her baby allows the child to give her a kiss, but the mark on the child's cheek and the caliper on her leg suggest that disease has been passed onto the next generation. The countess's father, whose miserly lifestyle is evident in the bare house, removes the wedding ring from her finger.
Industry & Idleness 1747 -
Parallel lives leading from the same start to opposite ends. Paulson suggests two: the plays "Eastward Hoe" (Revived after Hogarth's publication of these) and "The London Merchant", the latter containing the especially applicable quote that "business [is] the youth's best preservative from ill, as idleness [is] the worst of snares". He also suggests that Hogarth already had the idea when he painted "Hudibras and the Lawyer" with its 2 (industrious and idle) clerks.
The Gate of Calais (1748)
The painting takes a viewpoint under an archway in the main outer wall of Calais. The scene within centres around a sirloin of beef destined for the English tavern, the Lion d'Argent, carried by a chef who stands out in his bright white apron and cap. The French soldiers, dressed in rags and forced to eat their watery soupe maigre, gather round licking their lips. Two soldiers in sabots can be seen carrying a cauldron of the grey unappetising soup. The Franciscan friar who greedily rubs his finger in the fat of the beef joint, is thought to be based on Hogarth's friend John Pine.[2] In the foreground, a Highlander, an exile from the Jacobite rising of 1745,[1] sits slumped against the wall, his strength sapped by the poor French fare – a raw onion and a crust of bread. Hogarth is seen sketching to the left in the background, but the tip of the halberd and hand of the soldier who will arrest him are just appearing round the corner behind him.
There are strong references to the celebration of Eucharist in the picture. Through the gates, under the sign of a dove (that of an inn) a Roman Catholic mass is being celebrated. In the foreground, but still aligned with those in the background under the cross of the gate, the principal characters worship the beef. The man carrying it bows under the weight appearing to offer it up to the friar on partially bended knee. Above the scene in front of the gate, the dove of peace is replaced by a carrion bird, the crow. In the foreground fishwives superstitiously worship the face of a ray, and the Jacobite also clasps his hand together in prayer.
Hogarth's antipathy to the French had been apparent in his art since Noon in his Four Times of the Day series, painted in 1736. The March to Finchley, which he painted in 1749/50, provides a companion theme to The Gate of Calais: it depicts a fictional gathering of robust English guardsman who are to march north to defend London against the invasion of Bonnie Prince Charlie's Jacobites in 1745. Further anti-French sentiment is apparent in his two Invasion engravings, published in 1756, and in Beer Street, where Rev. James Townley's accompanying verses stress the superiority of the English. The Gate of Calais' secondary title, O, the Roast Beef of Old England, is a reference to the popular patriotic ballad 'The Roast Beef of Old England' from Henry Fielding's The Grub-Street Opera (1731), which told of how the food "ennobled our brains and enriched our blood" and laughed at "all-vapouring France"".
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1751 - Gin Lane and Beer St.
Gin, cursed Fiend, with Fury fraught,
The British government tried a number of times to stop the flow of gin. The Gin Act 1736 taxed retail sales at a rate of 20 shillings a gallon on spirits and required licensees to take out a £50 annual licence to sell gin, a fee equivalent to about £7,000 today. The aim was to effectively prohibit the trade by making it economically unfeasible. Only two licences were ever taken out. The trade became illegal, consumption dipped but then continued to rise and the law was effectively repealed in 1743 following mass law-breaking and violence (particularly towards informers who were paid £5 to reveal the whereabouts of illegal gin shops). The illegally distilled gin which was produced following the 1736 Act was less reliable and more likely to result in poisoning.
By 1743, England was drinking 2.2 gallons (10 litres) of gin per person per year. As consumption levels increased, an organised campaign for more effective legislation began to emerge, led by the Bishop of Sodor and Man, Thomas Wilson, who, in 1736, had complained that gin produced a "drunken ungovernable set of people". Prominent anti-gin campaigners included Henry Fielding (whose 1751 "Enquiry into the Late Increase in Robbers" blamed gin consumption for both increased crime and increased ill health among children), Josiah Tucker, Daniel Defoe(who had originally campaigned for the liberalisation of distilling, but later complained that drunken mothers were threatening to produce a "fine spindle-shanked generation" of children), and – briefly – William Hogarth. Hogarth's engraving Gin Lane is a well known image of the gin craze, and is often paired with "Beer Street", creating a contrast between the miserable lives of gin drinkers and the healthy and enjoyable lives of beer drinkers.
The Gin Craze began to diminish after the Gin Act 1751. This Act lowered the annual licence fees, but encouraged "respectable" gin selling by requiring licensees to trade from premises rented for at least £10 a year. Historians suggest that gin consumption was reduced not as a result of legislation but because of the rising cost of grain. Landowners could afford to abandon the production of gin, and this fact, coupled with population growth and a series of poor harvests, resulted in lower wages and increased food prices. The Gin Craze had mostly ended by 1757. . . .
Beer, happy Produce of our Isle
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1751 - Gin Lane and Beer St.
Gin, cursed Fiend, with Fury fraught,
Makes human Race a Prey.
It enters by a deadly Draught
It enters by a deadly Draught
And steals our Life away.
Virtue and Truth, driv'n to Despair
Its Rage compells to fly,
But cherishes with hellish Care
Damned Cup! that on the Vitals preys
Its Rage compells to fly,
But cherishes with hellish Care
Theft, Murder, Perjury.
That liquid Fire contains,
Which Madness to the heart conveys,
Which Madness to the heart conveys,
And rolls it thro' the Veins.
Gin was popularised in England following the accession of William of Orange in 1688. Gin provided an alternative to French brandy at a time of both political and religious conflict between Britain and France. Between 1689 and 1697, the Government passed a range of legislation aimed at restricting brandy imports and encouraging gin production. Most importantly, the monopoly of the London Guild of Distillers was broken in 1690, thereby opening up the market in gin distillation. The production and consumption of English gin, which was then popular amongst politicians and even Queen Anne, was encouraged by the government. This encouragement was shown in the reduced taxes on the distillation of spirits. Additionally, no licenses were needed to make spirits, so distillers of spirits could have smaller, more simple workshops than brewers, who needed to serve food and provide shelter for patrons.
Economic protectionism was a major factor in beginning the Gin Craze; as the price of food dropped and income grew, consumers suddenly had the opportunity to spend excess funds on spirits. By 1721, however, Middlesex magistrates were already decrying gin as "the principal cause of all the vice & debauchery committed among the inferior sort of people". . . .
Comments on the picture: Set in the parish of St Giles—a notorious slum district that Hogarth depicted in several works around this time—Gin Lane depicts the squalor and despair of a community raised on gin.
1. Desperation, death and decay pervade the scene. The only businesses that flourish serve the gin industry:
a) gin sellers; a distiller (the aptly named Kilman);
b) the pawnbroker where the avaricious Mr. Gripe greedily takes the vital possessions (the carpenter offers his saw and the housewife her cooking utensils) of the alcoholic residents of the street in return for a few pennies to feed their habit; and
c) the undertaker, for whom Hogarth implies at least a handful of new customers from this scene alone.
2. Most shockingly, the focus of the picture is a woman in the foreground, who, addled by gin and driven to prostitution by her habit—as evidenced by the syphilitic sores on her legs—lets her baby slip unheeded from her arms and plunge to its death in the stairwell of the gin cellar below. Half-naked, she has no concern for anything other than a pinch of snuff.
Other images of despair and madness fill the scene:
Other images of despair and madness fill the scene:
1. a lunatic cavorts in the street beating himself over the head with a pair of bellows while holding a baby impaled on a spike—the dead child's frantic mother rushes from the house screaming in horror;
2. a barber has taken his own life in the dilapidated attic of his barber-shop, ruined because nobody can afford a haircut or shave;
3. on the steps, below the woman who has let her baby fall, a skeletal pamphlet-seller rests, perhaps dead of starvation, as the unsold moralising pamphlet on the evils of gin-drinking, The Downfall of Mrs Gin, slips from his basket.
4. An ex-soldier, he has pawned most of his clothes to buy the gin in his basket, next to the pamphlet that denounces it.
5. Next to him sits a black dog, a symbol of despair and depression.
6. Outside the distiller a fight has broken out, and a crazed cripple raises his crutch to strike his blind compatriot.
Images of children on the path to destruction also litter the scene: aside from the dead baby on the spike and the child falling to its death, a baby is quieted by its mother with a cup of gin, and in the background of the scene an orphaned infant bawls naked on the floor as the body of its mother is loaded into a coffin on orders of the beadle.[13] Two young girls who are wards of the parish of St Giles—indicated by the badge on the arm of one of the girls—each take a glass. Hogarth also chose the slum of St Giles as setting for the first scene of The Four Stages of Cruelty, which he issued almost simultaneously with Beer Street and Gin Lane. Tom Nero, the central character of the Cruelty series wears an identical arm badge. In front of the pawnbroker's door a starving boy and a dog fight over a bone, while next to them a girl has fallen asleep; approaching her is a snail, emblematic of the sin of sloth
Images of children on the path to destruction also litter the scene: aside from the dead baby on the spike and the child falling to its death, a baby is quieted by its mother with a cup of gin, and in the background of the scene an orphaned infant bawls naked on the floor as the body of its mother is loaded into a coffin on orders of the beadle.[13] Two young girls who are wards of the parish of St Giles—indicated by the badge on the arm of one of the girls—each take a glass. Hogarth also chose the slum of St Giles as setting for the first scene of The Four Stages of Cruelty, which he issued almost simultaneously with Beer Street and Gin Lane. Tom Nero, the central character of the Cruelty series wears an identical arm badge. In front of the pawnbroker's door a starving boy and a dog fight over a bone, while next to them a girl has fallen asleep; approaching her is a snail, emblematic of the sin of sloth
Background (Wiki) The Gin Craze
Gin - Pot distilling a fermented grain mash (malt wine) from barley or other grains, then redistilling it with botanicals -- #1 Juniper, but also lemon and bitter orange peel, as well as a combination of other spices, which may include any of anise, angelica root and seed, orris root, licorice root, cinnamon, almond, cubeb, savory, lime peel, grapefruit peel, dragon eye (longan), saffron, baobab, frankincense, coriander, grains of paradise, nutmeg, cassia bark or others -- to extract the aromatic compounds. The fermentation of grain mash produces a neutral alcohol (similar to vodka). Due to the use of pot stills, the alcohol content of the distillate is relatively low; around 68% ABV for a single distilled gin or 76% ABV for a double gin. This type of gin is often aged in tanks or wooden casks.
Economic protectionism was a major factor in beginning the Gin Craze; as the price of food dropped and income grew, consumers suddenly had the opportunity to spend excess funds on spirits. By 1721, however, Middlesex magistrates were already decrying gin as "the principal cause of all the vice & debauchery committed among the inferior sort of people". . . .
By 1743, England was drinking 2.2 gallons (10 litres) of gin per person per year. As consumption levels increased, an organised campaign for more effective legislation began to emerge, led by the Bishop of Sodor and Man, Thomas Wilson, who, in 1736, had complained that gin produced a "drunken ungovernable set of people". Prominent anti-gin campaigners included Henry Fielding (whose 1751 "Enquiry into the Late Increase in Robbers" blamed gin consumption for both increased crime and increased ill health among children), Josiah Tucker, Daniel Defoe(who had originally campaigned for the liberalisation of distilling, but later complained that drunken mothers were threatening to produce a "fine spindle-shanked generation" of children), and – briefly – William Hogarth. Hogarth's engraving Gin Lane is a well known image of the gin craze, and is often paired with "Beer Street", creating a contrast between the miserable lives of gin drinkers and the healthy and enjoyable lives of beer drinkers.
The Gin Craze began to diminish after the Gin Act 1751. This Act lowered the annual licence fees, but encouraged "respectable" gin selling by requiring licensees to trade from premises rented for at least £10 a year. Historians suggest that gin consumption was reduced not as a result of legislation but because of the rising cost of grain. Landowners could afford to abandon the production of gin, and this fact, coupled with population growth and a series of poor harvests, resulted in lower wages and increased food prices. The Gin Craze had mostly ended by 1757. . . .
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Beer Street
Beer, happy Produce of our Isle
Can sinewy Strength impart,
And wearied with Fatigue and Toil
And wearied with Fatigue and Toil
Can cheer each manly Heart.
Labour and Art upheld by Thee
Labour and Art upheld by Thee
Successfully advance,
We quaff Thy balmy Juice with Glee
We quaff Thy balmy Juice with Glee
And Water leave to France.
Genius of Health, thy grateful Taste
Genius of Health, thy grateful Taste
Rivals the Cup of Jove,
And warms each English generous Breast
And warms each English generous Breast
With Liberty and Love!
In comparison to the sickly hopeless denizens of Gin Lane, the happy people of Beer Street sparkle with robust health and bonhomie. "Here all is joyous and thriving. Industry and jollity go hand in hand". The only business that is in trouble is the pawnbroker: Mr Pinch lives in the one poorly maintained, crumbling building in the picture. In contrast to his Gin Lane counterpart, the prosperous Gripe, who displays expensive-looking cups in his upper window (a sign of his flourishing business), Pinch displays only a wooden contraption, perhaps a mousetrap, in his upper window, while he is forced to take his beer through a window in the door, which suggests his business is so unprofitable as to put the man in fear of being seized for debt. The sign-painter is also shown in rags, but his role in the image is unclear.
The rest of the scene is populated with doughty and good-humoured English workers. It is George II's birthday (30 October) (indicated by the flag flying on the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields in the background) and the inhabitants of the scene are no doubt toasting his health. Under the sign of the Barley Mow, a blacksmith or cooper sits with a foaming tankard in one hand and a leg of beef in the other. Together with a butcher—his steel hangs at his side—they laugh with the pavior (sometimes identified as a drayman) as he courts a housemaid (the key she holds is a symbol of domesticity). Ronald Paulson suggests a parallel between the trinity of signs of ill-omen in Gin Lane, the pawnbroker, distiller, and undertaker, and the trinity of English "worthies" here, the blacksmith, pavior, and butcher. Close by a pair of fish-sellers rest with a pint and a porter sets down his load to refresh himself. In the background, two men carrying a sedan chair pause for drink, while the passenger remains wedged inside, her large hoop skirt pinning her in place.[b] On the roof, the builders, who are working on the publican's house above the "Sun" tavern share a toast with the master of a tailor's workshop. In this image it is a barrel of beer that hangs from a rope above the street, in contrast to the body of the barber in Gin Lane.[16]
The inhabitants of both Beer Street and Gin Lane are drinking rather than working, but in Beer Street the workers are resting after their labours—all those depicted are in their place of work, or have their wares or the tools of their trade about them—while in Gin Lane the people drink instead of working.[17] Exceptions to this rule come, most obviously, in the form of those who profit from the vice in Gin Lane, but in Beer Street Hogarth takes the opportunity to make another satirical statement. Aside from the enigmatic sign-painter, the only others engaged in work in the scene are the tailors in an attic. The wages of journeyman tailors were the subject of an ongoing dispute, which was finally settled by arbitration at the 1751 July Quarter sessions (in the journeymen's favour). Some believe that the tailors serve another purpose, in that Hogarth shows them continuing to toil while all the other inhabitants of the street, including their master, pause to refresh themselves.[17] Much as the tailors are ignored by their master and left to continue working, the occupants of Beer Street are oblivious to the suffering on Gin Lane.
Hogarth also takes the opportunity to comment on artistic pretensions. Tied up together in a basket and destined for use as scrap at the trunk-maker are George Turnbull's On Ancient Painting, Hill on Royal Societies, Modern Tragedies, Polticks vol. 9999 and William Lauder's Essay on Milton's Use and Imitation of the Moderns in Paradise Lost, all examples, real and imagined, of the type of literature that Hogarth thought fabricated connections between art and politics and sought out aesthetic connections that did not exist. Lauder's work was a hoax that painted Milton as a plagiarist.[18]
The picture is a counterpoint to the more powerful Gin Lane—Hogarth intended Beer Street to be viewed first to make Gin Lane more shocking—but it is also a celebration of Englishness and depicts of the benefits of being nourished by the native beer. No foreign influences pollute what is a fiercely nationalistic image. An early impression showed a scrawny Frenchman being ejected from the scene by the burly blacksmith who in later prints holds aloft a leg of mutton or ham (Paulson suggests the Frenchman was removed to prevent confusion with the ragged sign-painter).[19] There is a celebration of English industriousness in the midst of the jollity: the two fish-sellers sing the New Ballad on the Herring Fishery (by Hogarth's friend, the poet John Lockman), while their overflowing baskets bear witness to the success of the revived industry; the King's speech displayed on the table makes reference to the "Advancement of Our Commerce and the cultivating Art of Peace"; and although the workers have paused for a break, it is clear they are not idle. The builders have not left their workplace to drink; the master tailor toasts them from his window but does not leave the attic; the men gathered around the table in the foreground have not laid their tools aside. Townley's patriotic verses further refer to the contrast between England and France:
Paulson sees the images as working on different levels for different classes. The middle classes would have seen the pictures as a straight comparison of good and evil, while the working classes would have seen the connection between the prosperity of Beer Street and the poverty of Gin Lane. He focuses on the well-fed woman wedged into the sedan chair at the rear of Beer Street as a cause of the ruin of the gin-addled woman who is the principal focus of Gin Lane. The free-market economy espoused in the King's address and practised in Beer Street leaves the exponents prosperous and corpulent but at the same time makes the poor poorer. What fucking horseshit!!! For Paulson the two prints depict the results of a move away from a paternalistic state towards an unregulated market economy. Further, more direct, contrasts are made with the woman in the sedan chair and those in Gin Lane: the woman fed gin as she is wheeled home in a barrow and the dead woman being lifted into her coffin are both mirror images of the hoop-skirted woman reduced to madness and death
In comparison to the sickly hopeless denizens of Gin Lane, the happy people of Beer Street sparkle with robust health and bonhomie. "Here all is joyous and thriving. Industry and jollity go hand in hand". The only business that is in trouble is the pawnbroker: Mr Pinch lives in the one poorly maintained, crumbling building in the picture. In contrast to his Gin Lane counterpart, the prosperous Gripe, who displays expensive-looking cups in his upper window (a sign of his flourishing business), Pinch displays only a wooden contraption, perhaps a mousetrap, in his upper window, while he is forced to take his beer through a window in the door, which suggests his business is so unprofitable as to put the man in fear of being seized for debt. The sign-painter is also shown in rags, but his role in the image is unclear.
The rest of the scene is populated with doughty and good-humoured English workers. It is George II's birthday (30 October) (indicated by the flag flying on the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields in the background) and the inhabitants of the scene are no doubt toasting his health. Under the sign of the Barley Mow, a blacksmith or cooper sits with a foaming tankard in one hand and a leg of beef in the other. Together with a butcher—his steel hangs at his side—they laugh with the pavior (sometimes identified as a drayman) as he courts a housemaid (the key she holds is a symbol of domesticity). Ronald Paulson suggests a parallel between the trinity of signs of ill-omen in Gin Lane, the pawnbroker, distiller, and undertaker, and the trinity of English "worthies" here, the blacksmith, pavior, and butcher. Close by a pair of fish-sellers rest with a pint and a porter sets down his load to refresh himself. In the background, two men carrying a sedan chair pause for drink, while the passenger remains wedged inside, her large hoop skirt pinning her in place.[b] On the roof, the builders, who are working on the publican's house above the "Sun" tavern share a toast with the master of a tailor's workshop. In this image it is a barrel of beer that hangs from a rope above the street, in contrast to the body of the barber in Gin Lane.[16]
The inhabitants of both Beer Street and Gin Lane are drinking rather than working, but in Beer Street the workers are resting after their labours—all those depicted are in their place of work, or have their wares or the tools of their trade about them—while in Gin Lane the people drink instead of working.[17] Exceptions to this rule come, most obviously, in the form of those who profit from the vice in Gin Lane, but in Beer Street Hogarth takes the opportunity to make another satirical statement. Aside from the enigmatic sign-painter, the only others engaged in work in the scene are the tailors in an attic. The wages of journeyman tailors were the subject of an ongoing dispute, which was finally settled by arbitration at the 1751 July Quarter sessions (in the journeymen's favour). Some believe that the tailors serve another purpose, in that Hogarth shows them continuing to toil while all the other inhabitants of the street, including their master, pause to refresh themselves.[17] Much as the tailors are ignored by their master and left to continue working, the occupants of Beer Street are oblivious to the suffering on Gin Lane.
Hogarth also takes the opportunity to comment on artistic pretensions. Tied up together in a basket and destined for use as scrap at the trunk-maker are George Turnbull's On Ancient Painting, Hill on Royal Societies, Modern Tragedies, Polticks vol. 9999 and William Lauder's Essay on Milton's Use and Imitation of the Moderns in Paradise Lost, all examples, real and imagined, of the type of literature that Hogarth thought fabricated connections between art and politics and sought out aesthetic connections that did not exist. Lauder's work was a hoax that painted Milton as a plagiarist.[18]
The picture is a counterpoint to the more powerful Gin Lane—Hogarth intended Beer Street to be viewed first to make Gin Lane more shocking—but it is also a celebration of Englishness and depicts of the benefits of being nourished by the native beer. No foreign influences pollute what is a fiercely nationalistic image. An early impression showed a scrawny Frenchman being ejected from the scene by the burly blacksmith who in later prints holds aloft a leg of mutton or ham (Paulson suggests the Frenchman was removed to prevent confusion with the ragged sign-painter).[19] There is a celebration of English industriousness in the midst of the jollity: the two fish-sellers sing the New Ballad on the Herring Fishery (by Hogarth's friend, the poet John Lockman), while their overflowing baskets bear witness to the success of the revived industry; the King's speech displayed on the table makes reference to the "Advancement of Our Commerce and the cultivating Art of Peace"; and although the workers have paused for a break, it is clear they are not idle. The builders have not left their workplace to drink; the master tailor toasts them from his window but does not leave the attic; the men gathered around the table in the foreground have not laid their tools aside. Townley's patriotic verses further refer to the contrast between England and France:
Paulson sees the images as working on different levels for different classes. The middle classes would have seen the pictures as a straight comparison of good and evil, while the working classes would have seen the connection between the prosperity of Beer Street and the poverty of Gin Lane. He focuses on the well-fed woman wedged into the sedan chair at the rear of Beer Street as a cause of the ruin of the gin-addled woman who is the principal focus of Gin Lane. The free-market economy espoused in the King's address and practised in Beer Street leaves the exponents prosperous and corpulent but at the same time makes the poor poorer. What fucking horseshit!!! For Paulson the two prints depict the results of a move away from a paternalistic state towards an unregulated market economy. Further, more direct, contrasts are made with the woman in the sedan chair and those in Gin Lane: the woman fed gin as she is wheeled home in a barrow and the dead woman being lifted into her coffin are both mirror images of the hoop-skirted woman reduced to madness and death
Friday, May 11, 2018
Religion, The First Great Awakening, and Abolition
The First Great Awakening (wiki)
The First Abolitionist Movement in America - Anthony Benezet; Ben Franklin Correspondence with Benezet.
Abolitionist Movement (wiki),
Franklin on abolition, Society For Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and the Relief of Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage. Franklin was convinced that not only the slave trade, but slavery itself should be eliminated. He eventually freed his own two slaves.
Franklin recognized that freed slaves could not fend for themselves without help, so he advanced the idea that slaves needed to be educated in order to become contributing members of a free society. In his position of president of the abolitionist society, Franklin wrote and published an "Address to the Public," in which he addressed the education of former slaves. The plan was to "instruct, to advise, to qualify those who have been restored to freedom, for the exercise and enjoyment of civil liberty; to promote in them habits of industry, to furnish them with employment suited to their age, sex, talents, and other circumstances. . . which we conceive will essentially promote the public good, and the happiness of these hitherto much neglected fellow-creatures."
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. . . I have visited the Negro School here in Company with the Revd. Mr. Sturgeon and some others; and had the Children thoroughly examin’d. They appear’d all to have made considerable Progress in Reading for the Time they had respectively been in the School, and most of them answer’d readily and well the Questions of the Catechism; they behav’d very orderly, showd a proper Respect and ready Obedience to the Mistress, and seem’d very attentive to, and a good deal affected by, a serious Exhortation with which Mr. Sturgeon concluded our Visit. I was on the whole much pleas’d, and from what I then saw, have conceiv’d a higher Opinion of the natural Capacities of the black Race, than I had ever before entertained. Their Apprehension seems as quick, their Memory as strong, and their Docility in every Respect equal to that of white Children. You will wonder perhaps that I should ever doubt it, and I will not undertake to justify all my Prejudices, nor to account for them. . . .
Ben Franklin, Letter to John Waring, Dec. 17, 1763
_________
Franklin, Address to the Public on Abolition, 1789
Jonathan Wesley - Thoughts Upon Slavery; Wesley & The Abolitionist Movement
George Washington - An Imperfect God (Kindle)
Simon Schama - Rough Crossings (Kindle)
The World of Thomas Jeremiah (Google Books)
The First Great Awakening (sometimes Great Awakening) or the Evangelical Revival was a series of Christian revivals that swept Britain and its Thirteen Colonies between the 1730s and 1740s. The revival movement had a permanent impact on Protestantism as adherents strove to renew individual piety and religious devotion. The Great Awakening marked the emergence of Anglo-American evangelicalism as a transdenominational movement within the Protestant churches. In the United States, the term Great Awakening is most often used, while in the United Kingdom, it is referred to as the Evangelical Revival.
Building on the foundations of older traditions—Puritanism, pietism and Presbyterianism—major leaders of the revival such as George Whitefield, John Wesley and Jonathan Edwards articulated a theology on revival and salvation that transcended denominational boundaries and helped create a common evangelical identity. Revivalists added to the doctrinal imperatives of Reformation Protestantism an emphasis on providential outpourings of the Holy Spirit. Extemporaneous preaching gave listeners a sense of deep personal conviction of their need of salvation by Jesus Christ and fostered introspection and commitment to a new standard of personal morality. Revival theology stressed that religious conversion was not only intellectual assent to correct Christian doctrine but had to be a "new birth" experienced in the heart. Revivalists also taught that receiving assurance of salvation was a normal expectation in the Christian life.
While the Evangelical Revival united evangelicals across various denominations around shared beliefs, it also led to division in existing churches between those who supported the revivals and those who did not. Opponents accused the revivals of fostering disorder and fanaticism within the churches by enabling uneducated, itinerant preachers and encouraging religious enthusiasm. In England, evangelical Anglicans would grow into an important constituency within the Church of England, and Methodism would develop out of the ministries of Whitefield and Wesley. In the American colonies, the Awakening caused the Congregational and Presbyterian churches to split, while it strengthened both the Methodist and Baptistdenominations. It had little impact on most Lutherans, Quakers, and non-Protestants.[1]Evangelical preachers "sought to include every person in conversion, regardless of gender, race, and status."[2] Throughout the colonies, especially in the South, the revival movement increased the number of African slaves and free blacks who were exposed to and subsequently converted to Christianity.[3] It also inspired the creation of new missionary societies, such as the Baptist Missionary Society in 1792.
Building on the foundations of older traditions—Puritanism, pietism and Presbyterianism—major leaders of the revival such as George Whitefield, John Wesley and Jonathan Edwards articulated a theology on revival and salvation that transcended denominational boundaries and helped create a common evangelical identity. Revivalists added to the doctrinal imperatives of Reformation Protestantism an emphasis on providential outpourings of the Holy Spirit. Extemporaneous preaching gave listeners a sense of deep personal conviction of their need of salvation by Jesus Christ and fostered introspection and commitment to a new standard of personal morality. Revival theology stressed that religious conversion was not only intellectual assent to correct Christian doctrine but had to be a "new birth" experienced in the heart. Revivalists also taught that receiving assurance of salvation was a normal expectation in the Christian life.
While the Evangelical Revival united evangelicals across various denominations around shared beliefs, it also led to division in existing churches between those who supported the revivals and those who did not. Opponents accused the revivals of fostering disorder and fanaticism within the churches by enabling uneducated, itinerant preachers and encouraging religious enthusiasm. In England, evangelical Anglicans would grow into an important constituency within the Church of England, and Methodism would develop out of the ministries of Whitefield and Wesley. In the American colonies, the Awakening caused the Congregational and Presbyterian churches to split, while it strengthened both the Methodist and Baptistdenominations. It had little impact on most Lutherans, Quakers, and non-Protestants.[1]Evangelical preachers "sought to include every person in conversion, regardless of gender, race, and status."[2] Throughout the colonies, especially in the South, the revival movement increased the number of African slaves and free blacks who were exposed to and subsequently converted to Christianity.[3] It also inspired the creation of new missionary societies, such as the Baptist Missionary Society in 1792.
Sunday, May 6, 2018
S.t Eustatius - 18th Century Smuggling Hub in the Caribbean
See J. of the Am. Rev.,
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“That Abominable Nest of Pirates”: St. Eustatius and the NorthAmericans, 1680–1780
. . . From its founding in the 1620s, the Dutch West India Company (WIC) had claimed a commercial exclusivity over shipping to its overseas settlements similar to that of the other European powers. In the 1630s, however, it did something revolutionary: it opened most of its territories, with the notable exception of West Africa and the trans-Atlantic slave trade, to all Dutch vessels, both company and private, and permitted direct trade from its colonies to their Spanish, French, and English neighbors.
By the 1650s, Dutch entrepreneurs had become the dominant force in the Caribbean. In 1688 the WIC directors went a step further and allowed foreign ships to trade with St. Eustatius. Ships that had not departed from a Dutch port (usually foreign ships) were obliged to pay a 2 percent recognition fee to the company, on both incoming and outgoing goods. Over time the obligations for foreign ships changed but were never retracted.
The Dutch ideology of a borderless free-market Atlantic economy was a threat to the developing mercantilism of the other empires. It conflicted irreconcilably with Iberian, French, and English protectionism, for Dutch commerce depended on breaching their closed commercial systems. Dutch vessels undercut mercantilism when they traded in the ostensibly closed ports of English, French, and Spanish colonies. Merchants and mariners from foreign colonies did as well when they visited Dutch ‘‘free ports’’ such as St. Eustatius. Visiting a free port open to all to trade was a violation of their empires’ laws.
The thirteen North American colonies were a special case. For these overseas settlements the imperial economic scheme was in theory rather straightforward. The export of commodities, preferably staple goods like tobacco, would generate credit in the metropolis to finance the import of provisions and dry goods.
The Navigation Acts had regulated this process since their initial passage in 1651. They were designed to generate revenue for England’s treasury, encourage the growth of England’s merchant marine, and exclude foreigners—particularly the Dutch—from the valuable colonial trades. The plan had just one tiny flaw. The colonies, especially New England and the middle colonies, suffered considerable deficits in the commodity trade with Great Britain. Pennsylvania, New York, and New England made some effort to reduce the deficit by exporting commodities to southern Europe, the Wine Islands (Madeira, the Azores, and the Canary Islands), Africa, and the West Indies. Much of the deficit was made up through the provisions of shipping and other commercial services and through the sale of ships. Over time, colonial merchants expanded their activities, beginning as commission agents and later becoming both independent exporters and the owners and operators of their own ships. Thoughthis development occurred first in colonies that lacked a staple export, eventually indigenous merchants and shipowners were active everywhere.
LITTLE AMSTERDAM: ST. EUSTATIUS’ DEVELOPMENT AS A FREE PORT
The physical geography of the island explains much about the appeal of trade as its economic mainstay. The human geography of the colony re- flected the development of its trade, including the major shift from selling slaves to selling sugar. All these trades involved North Americans to one degree or another, knitting together St. Eustatius and British North America in a symbiotic relationship of mercantile and social networks that culminated in the American Revolution. Edmund Burke described the island as follows in 1781:
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The British took the incident seriously. Britain protested bitterly against the continuous trade between the United Colonies and St. Eustatius. In 1778, Lord Stormont claimed in Parliament that, "if Sint Eustatius had sunk into the sea three years before, the United Kingdom would already have dealt with George Washington". Nearly half of all American Revolutionary military supplies were obtained through St. Eustatius. Nearly all American communications to Europe first passed through the island. The trade between St. Eustatius and the United States was the main reason for the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War,1780-1784. For example, the British Admiral George Brydges Rodney, having occupied the island for Great Britain in 1781, urged the commander of the landing troops, Major-General Sir John Vaughan, to seize "Mr. Smith at the house of Jones - they (the Jews of St. Eustatius, Caribbean Antilles)[10] cannot be too soon taken care of - they are notorious in the cause of America and France." The war was disastrous for the Dutch economy.
Britain declared war on the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands on December 20, 1780. Even before officially declaring war, Britain had outfitted a massive battle fleet to take and destroy the weapons depot and vital commercial center that St. Eustatius had become. British Admiral George Brydges Rodney was appointed the commander of the battle fleet. February 3, 1781, the massive fleet of 15 ships of the line and numerous smaller ships transporting over 3,000 soldiers appeared before St. Eustatius prepared to invade. Governor De Graaff did not know about the declaration of war. Rodney offered De Graaff a bloodless surrender to his superior force. Rodney had over 1,000 cannon to De Graaff's one dozen cannon and a garrison of sixty men. De Graaff surrendered the island, but first he fired two rounds as a show of resistance in honor of Dutch Admiral Lodewijk van Bylandt, who commanded a ship of the Dutch Navy which was in the harbor.[5] Ten months later, the island was conquered by the French, allies of the Dutch in the war. The Dutch regained control over the looted and plundered island in 1784.
At its peak, St. Eustatius may have had a largely transient population of about 10,000 people. Most were engaged in commercial and maritime interests. A census list of 1790 gives a total population (free and enslaved people combined) of 8,124. Commerce revived after the British left. Many of the merchants (including the Jews) returned to the island. However, French and British occupations from 1795 disrupted trade and also the North-Americans, now globally recognised as an independent nation, had meanwhile developed their own trading network and did not need St. Eustatius anymore. The island was eclipsed by other Dutch ports, such as those on the islands of Curaçao and Sint Maarten. During the last years of the 18th century Statia developed trade in bay rum. The economy declined in the early 19th century. From about 1795, the population declined and in 1948 the population stood at a mere 921.
Jewish population[edit]
The first record of Jews on St. Eustatius dates to 1660. The Jews were mainly merchants with significant international trading and maritime commercial ties. Jews were captains, owners or co-owners with Christian partners, of significant numbers of ships originating out of St. Eustatius. A few were island plantation owners. Jews were estimated[by whom?] to have comprised at least 10% of the permanent population of St. Eustatius.[11]
Ten days after the island surrendered to the British on 3 February 1781, Rodney ordered that the entire Jewish male adult population assemble for him. They were rounded up and thirty one heads of families were summarily deported to St. Kitts without word or mercy to their dependents. The choice of exiling the Jews to St. Kitts was significant. The nearby British Island of Nevis had a large Jewish population and an established community capable of aiding the refugees. St. Kitts did not have any Jewish community or population. The other seventy-one were locked up in the weighing house in Lower Town where they were held for three days.
Expulsion of Americans followed on 23 February, of merchants from Amsterdam on 24 February and of other Dutch citizens and Frenchmen on 5 March. The crews of the Dutch ships Rodney took were sent to St. Kitts for imprisonment - after first stripping them of all their belongings. Because of their maltreatment, many perished. The Jews were well received on St. Kitts - where many knew them as their respected business partners. They were supported in their protest against their deportation and it proved successful. They were allowed to return to St. Eustatius after a few weeks to observe all their property being sold at small fractions of the original value after having been confiscated by Rodney.
The resentment the British felt for the population of this island that helped the Americans to defeat them translated in a harsh treatment of the inhabitants. There were numerous complaints about "individuals of both sexes being halted in the streets and being body searched in a most scandalous way."[12] The eighty-year-old member of the island council and captain of the civic guard, Pieter Runnels did not survive the rough treatment he received aboard Rodney's ship. He, a member of one of the island's oldest established families, became the only civilian casualty of the British occupation. British soldiers prevented the family and others paying their last respects at his funeral from using the water from the family's own cistern.
The tomb of former governor Jan de Windt was broken open by British soldiers, all the silver decorations stolen off the caskets, and the bodies of the governor and his wife exposed - without any of Rodney's officers interfering.
Rodney singled out the Jews: the harshness was reserved for them alone. He did not do the same to French, Dutch, Spanish or even the American merchants on the island. He permitted the French to leave with all their possessions. Rodney was concerned that his unprecedented behavior would be repeated upon British islands by French forces when events were different. However, Governor De Graaff was also deported.
As he did with all other warehouses, Rodney confiscated the Jewish warehouses, looted Jewish personal possessions, even cutting the lining of their clothes to find money hidden in there. When Rodney realized that the Jews might be hiding additional treasure, he dug up the Jewish cemetery.
Later, in February 1782, Edmund Burke, the leading opposition member of the Whig Party, upon learning of Rodney's actions in St. Eustatius, rose to condemn Rodney's anti-Semitic, avaricious vindictiveness in Parliament:
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The Jews of St. Eustatius: Rescuers of the American Revolution
t. Eustatius, Caribbean Arsenal of the American Revolution
St Eustatius [In Dutch: Sint Eustatius, and now named simply Statia] is one of the Netherlands Antilles islands, along with St Maarten, Saba, Curaçao, and Bonaire.
The island earned a unique place in the annals of the history of the United States and in the hearts of Americans. The first shots in recognition of the United States as a sovereign power were fired in a congratulatory exchange between the island's Fort Orange and the American Brigantine Andria Doria.
"White puffs of gun smoke over a turquoise sea followed by the boom of cannon rose from the unassuming port on the diminutive Dutch island of St. Eustatius in the West Indies on November 16th 1776. The guns of Fort Orange on St. Eustatius were returning the ritual salute on entering a foreign port of an American vessel, the Andrea 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 to officially 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."1
"Captain Isaiah Robinson fired a salute of 13 guns... A few minutes later the salute was returned by 9 (or 11) guns by order of the Dutch governor of the island. At the time, a 13 gun salute would have represented the 13 newly-formed United States; the customary salute rendered to a republic at that time was 9 guns. This has been called the "first salute" to the American flag."2
In 1939 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt presented a plaque to St. Eustatius. Mounted on the ruins of Fort Orange, it 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 Graff, Governor of St. Eustatius in reply to a national gun salute fired by the U.S. Brig-of-war Andria Doria.. Here the sovereignty of the United States was first formally acknowledged... to a national vessel by a foreign official."3
Acknowledgment of United States sovereignty was significant, but it was the smallest part of the service the island's inhabitants rendered the United States. One of only four vessels in the Revolutionary navy, the small but swift brigantine Andrea Doria was dispatched on October 23rd, 1776 on a diplomatic mission to deliver a copy of the Declaration of Independence to the governor of St.
Eustatius and to return with a cargo of armaments. The ship proceeded to load munitions for delivery to the American rebels. "The Andrea Doria, loaded with armaments, successfully ran the British blockade and docked in her home port of Gloucester City, New Jersey, across the river from Philadelphia."4 That shipment and the hundreds of shipments that followed it from St. Eustatius were major factors in the outcome of the American Revolution. The salutary exchange between the vessel and the port authorities was apt, for "during the American War of Independence, St. Eustatius served as a major arsenal for the revolution."
In 1757 St Eustatius became the first of a series of free ports set up by the Dutch in the Caribbean. The island is placed strategically at the confluence of the Caribbean and the Atlantic. The island measured only four by eight kilometers (less than eight square miles), but during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries this speck in the sea became famous in every European and American household for the goods that were exported to and imported from the 200 warehouses clustered on the shore of Oranjestad [Port Orange], its main city. Its "Long Beach" become so crowded that its bulging buildings had been built with Netherlands expertise on dyke-like jetties out into its Bay.
A Scottish traveler, Janet Schaw, arrived in St. Eustatius just before the outbreak of the revolution. She went on a shopping spree, noting with delight that she could obtain French gloves and English "thread-stockings" more cheaply in the island than she could at home. Rich embroideries, painted silks, flowered muslims, and a vast assortment of clothes and goods, "for in every store you can find every thing."6
St Eustatius, it seems, was the high seas precursor of the modern shopping mall! It was the eighteenth century equivalent of Hong Kong.
Until the American Revolution, merchants from the Netherlands, Denmark, France, Britain, Spain, the American colonies and the other Americas could all be found trading in that international free-trade emporium. The volume of international trade that funneled through that port can be judged by the fact that in 1779 well over 3000 ships from Europe, Africa and the Americas weighed anchor in Oranjestad's bay to load and unload merchandise. As many as twenty ships might arrive on a single day and two hundred ships might be in port at any one time! In that year, for example, sugar production on the island totaled 500,000 pounds, but official port records show that shipments of sugar from the island totaled 25,000,000 pounds!
Among those vessels were those of Aaron Lopez, of Newport, Rhode Island. Lopez maintained Samson Mears as an agent on St Eustatius. As the British occupied Newport, Lopez fled the city and continued his commercial activities from Leicester, Connecticut. Lopez' Sephardic fellow-countrymen on St Eustatius proved invaluable for obtaining war materials for the American rebels from Spain, Portugal, France, Holland, and even from England!
So lucrative was the commerce that the island was nick-named "The Golden Rock." Every European power lusted for possession of the bustling trading post. It changed hands no less than 22 times over two centuries as the French, British, and Dutch wrested possession of the tiny island from each other. In 1816 the "Emporium of the Western World" became permanently Dutch.
Settlement of the Sephardim
The island's name has since been shortened to Statia. Despite its rich and meaningful history, Statia is today the least known of the Windward islets. It has one of the most distinctive profiles of the Caribbean islands. The hilly north end rises to almost a thousand feet from the central plain, and drops precipitously down to the sea. The southern area is dominated by a massive silhouette of the Quill, the crater of an extinct volcano. The lush green rain forest vegetation within the crater contrasts with the gray ancient lava flow on its exterior, wending its way down to a golden-sanded beach. The westward, Caribbean side is now thick with tall palms, breadfruit trees and banana groves. The arid southern side hosts a variety of xerophytic plants (plants needing little water). The rest of the island is covered with tough and thorny bushes and trees.
The Caribs called the island Alo, which means "cashew tree." Christopher Columbus sighted the island in 1493, and named it after St. Anastasia.
The French and English both claimed sovereignty over the island in 1625, and the Dutch staked a claim in 1632. The island remained basically unsettled until the mid-seventeenth century, when the Dutch, based on Curaçao, consolidated their Caribbean empire by establish-ing a viable presence on it. Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese Jews were among the first settlers of St. Eustatius. Many of the Jewish settlers came in 1655, and physical evidence of their arrival can still be found in the sands of its beaches. In the seventeenth century Jewish glassmakers in Amsterdam were producing a particular kind of blue beads,7 most valuable for trading abroad. Travel brochures now note that "A big deal on the beaches is searching for Statia's fabled blue-glass beads... found only on Statia."
Other Jews soon followed. They became ship owners, planters of sugar cane, and producers of rum and molasses. They arrived from Recife (Brazil), Suriname, Barbados, Holland, and France. Jewish emigration to St. Eustatius burgeoned in the period 1757-1813, when the Dutch authorities, in order to bolster its holdings abroad, issued grants in Dutch guilders to Portuguese Sephardim for leaving Amsterdam to Dutch possessions abroad against the guarantee that they were not to return in less than 20 years. The grants varied according to the size of the family, averaging about 150 guilders..8 Most grant recipients went to the Caribbean, and many ended up in St. Eustatius. Holland was wise in dispatching these Sephardim to open new avenues for trade, for they were no ordinary emigres, but hard-working, knowledgeable entrepreneurs who had helped make Spain and Portugal great powers. They came bolstered with commercial expertise and world-wide contacts, and they made Statia into the western world's emporium
The Sephardim were joined on Statia by enterprising Ashkenazim from the American continent. Over a hundred Jewish families came to constitute the core of the mercantile establishment on the island
The Statia community "included a community of Jewish traders and merchants, a bubbling kettle of Sephardic Jews - Spanish and Portuguese refugees from the murderous Inquisition - and Ashkenazim, those Jews of German and East European descent... For trade or social purposes both groups could offer a range of European languages but among themselves the Sephardim spoke Ladino, the admixture of old Castilian and Hebrew, while the Ashkenazim made use of Yiddish."
"...It is estimated that this community consisted of 101 [adult, male] men and their families. With the material and moral assistance of their brethren of Caraçao and Amsterdam, the Jews of Eustatius built a synagogue to which they gave the title Honen Dalim... The One who is merciful to the poor. The still impressive shell of that building is here... [as well as] their own goat-cropped burial place, with the great mound of the Quill for background; and, for those who pushed the bier along that sad road, a glimpse of the sea which brought them to this last haven."9
The synagogue and its archives and the records of other Judaic institutions and families were destroyed during the British occupation of Statia in 1781, as will be seen below. The British ransacked and razed the island during their occupation, leaving little but ashes. It can be assumed however, that the culture of the Statia Jews was similar to that of the Jews on the leeward islands. We can therefore construct a picture of that community from the surviving records of neighboring islands.
Traders and settlers from all of Europe and America came to profit from Statia's bustling business, but the Jews, Sephardim and Ashkenazim, remained the largest and most effectual group of the island.
The Jews, like the other white residents of the Antilles islands, employed slaves. From the outset, however, the relationship of the Jews with the black slaves appear to have been qualitatively different, as the records of the Dutch Leeward Council and Assembly demonstrates. A difference between the Jewish and Christian relations with the slave population is evidenced in an act of August 31, 1694, passed by the Assembly. The act was specifically directed at the Jews and states that it is:
"'An Act against Jews ingrossing Commodities imported in the Leeward islands, and trading with the slaves belonging to the inhabitants of the same.' The important role the Jews played in the introduction of sugar planting and sugar trading in Nevis prompted the repeal of the same act on 10 December 1701, when the Leeward Islands Council met in Nevis, the reason given as the "many grievances sustained by reason from the said act.'"
The Jews continued to deal with slaves at the markets on a person-to-person level. This led the island's Christian minister, Reverend Robinson, to disdainfully set his constituency apart from the Jews and from Christians who deigned to follow the example of the Jews. "...A description, by Nevis historian Karen Fog Olwig, of the market where slaves sold their products, explains that... "It is no longer acceptable for the white population to trade at the markets, perhaps because they were held primarily by slaves, and on Sundays, and Robertson noted that only Jews and lesser sort of Christians traded with slaves.'"10
The Problem of Supply for the Rebels
Military histories devote their attention to battles, personalities and political maneuvers. Little attention is paid to logistics, yet the ability to conduct war and to achieve military success hinges on keeping an army supplied with food, clothes, tents, and especially munitions and ordnance.
Obtaining, and then maintaining a flow of military equipment and supplies was crucial to the conduct of the American Revolution. Time and time again, the victorious conclusion of a battle or of a phase of the Revolutionary War hung precariously upon the availability of munitions and ordnance. From the very outset of American resistance to British rule, this speck of an island played a pivotal role in providing the means by which a ragged assembly of American patriots ultimately won victory over a well-established and well-equipped army. The success of the Revolution can be attributed in large measure to the activity of the traders of the tiny island of St. Eustatius.
At the outset of the revolt against British rule, there were few facilities for the production of arms and munitions in the colonies. "Long before the Second Continental Congress assumed responsibility for the support of the Continental Army, colonial governments had looked to foreign markets for the procurement of essential military supplies. When the First Continental Congress met in September 1774, few colonists anticipated open warfare. Yet patriots, acting in provincial congresses and conventions, initiated preparatory measures. Militia drilled more conscientiously, and communities of safety collected guns and ammunition at safe deposit points. The Mass-achusetts Provincial Congress in October of that year went so far as to appropriate funds to purchase powder, shot, and shells, flints, field pieces, mortars, muskets, and bayonets."
"The British government had good reason to suspect that colonists were carrying on illicit trade in gunpowder and other military stores with Holland through the island of St. Eustatius in the West Indies. Determined to prevent the accumulation of such stocks, it enacted a law prohibiting the importation of saltpeter, gunpowder, or arms into the colonies and made the law applicable also to coastwise trade."11
"Shortly after the Second Continental Congress met, it realized that to support the Continental Army it would have to import ordnance and ordnance stores. On 18 September 1775 it authorized the Secret Committee to import 500 tons of gunpowder... Congress also empowered the Secret Committee to procure forty brass 6-pounder field pieces, 20,000 musket-locks, and 10,000 stand of good arms... [It waived non-exportation agreements and] authorized the Secret Committee to export to the non-British West Indies, on behalf of the Continental Congress, as much produce... as was necessary to pay for the arms, ammunition, sulphur, and saltpeter imported. Before the end of the year the Secret Committee reported the necessity of procuring 20,000 stand of arms, 300 tons of lead, 1 million flints, 1,500 boxes of tin and assorted hardware, and 500 sheets of assorted copper for the support of the Continental Army. These orders were but the first of many to the Secret Committee."12
The colonial interests of France, Spain, and the Netherlands led them to support the American rebels. At first, the United States currency, the Continental, having no substantial backing, decreased rapidly in value, leading to the still current phrase, "Not worth a continental." This financial difficulty was resolved largely by the remarkable Haym Solomon, who raised large amounts of desperately needed cash to bolster the currency by negotiating bills of exchange with France and the Netherlands.
Solomon had already served the revolution in a significant way. He was a Polish Jew who spoke several languages, including German. He served as George Washington's spy among the British forces by becoming a translator for the British in passing orders to their Hessian troops. Zealous as a saboteur (He was caught helping French and American prisoners to escape and persuading Hessians to defect), he was apprehended and imprisoned by the British. He escaped, "leaving behind his wife and a one month old baby and belongings worth about five thousand pounds."13 Solomon returned to finance and rebuilt a fortune while putting his talents and the proceeds of his successful ventures at the disposal of members of the Continental Congress and of the Revolution.
The Continental Congress appointed Solomon Broker to the Office of Finance of the United States, and the French consulate appointed him Treasurer of the French Army in the United States.13 Solomon staked his entire fortune in support of the military effort, as did another Jewish financier, Isaac Moses, founder of the Bank of New York.
The first recorded moneys received from abroad were two million livres from Spain in hard currency and war material. Thus the United States currency, the Continental, was secured by Spanish silver dollars."14 Other financial assistance followed from Spain, ultimately reaching a value of some $6,000,000.
France was particularly helpful before it became engaged in war with Britain. Albeit the French and Dutch, at first, maintained a facade of neutrality, they nonetheless were "showing the same favors at Martinique to the rebelling American colonies as the Dutch were at St Eustatius."15
On March 15th 1776, "Joseph Reed, Washington's military secretary, wrote the general from Philadelphia: 'The French vessels begin to find their way to our ports...but their cargoes are chiefly West Indian goods - a little, very little powder merely as a cover.' Yet within three weeks a total of 121,200 pounds of powder had arrived at the colonies. On April 20ththe Virginia Gazette reported the arrival of 1,200 casks of gunpowder...The Dutch island of St. Eustatia and the French Island of Martinique were the principle entrepots of the ammunition traffic...On May 7th an American wrote from St. Eustatia that a Danish ship had arrived there with fifty tons of powder and two others were expected shortly."
"Besides these, near 20 sail are expected from Amsterdam... St. Eustatius was so important as a source of arms and munitions that [without its help] the war could not have been won."16
"Especially during the American Revolution merchants demanded better protection on the high seas. They used the Dutch island of St. Eustatius to supply the rebels with all the supplies they could pay for, stretching the concept of neutrality to the limit. It was an awkward situation because, until war [between the Netherlands and Britain] was declared in 1780, the Dutch Republic and Britain were officially allies."17
The contacts that the Caribbean Sephardim maintained with their cousins throughout the Diaspora (including in England) stood them in good stead. Trade proved so lucrative that "large numbers of British merchants were enticed into providing supplies for their country's enemies."18
The French and the Spanish, in order to keep up the appearance of neutrality, formed "a 'dummy' world trading company -- Roderique Hortelez et Cie. Based in Paris, but operated out of St. Eustatius... the Bourbon Kings of Spain and France each provided one million livres to start the company in May of 1776, six weeks before the Declaration of Independence."19 This bogus business became the means by which the French and Spanish Courts "would assist the Americans by sending, in the fall of 1776, arms and ammunition worth 200,000 pounds sterling from Holland to St. Eustatius, Martinique or Cape Francois."18A
By the beginning of March, 1777 ten "Hortalez" ships were already engaged in bringing military supplies to the revolutionaries. Until these supplies arrived in 1777, The revolutionaries were at a disadvantage for "the rebelling Americans had been forced to rely on their own efforts to support the war."
France entered into an alliance with the United States after the victory of the Americans at Saratoga in the fall of 1777. France could no longer pretend neutrality, and French vessels and the French Caribbean islands became subject to British harassment and attack. The Dutch-owned free port of St Eustatius became all the more important as virtually the sole center for the transhipment of military supplies to the Americans.
General Washington was constantly pressing the Congress for more supplies. "I am so restrained in all my military movements," he wrote General Trumbull, "that it is impossible to undertake anything effectual." The capture of British supply ships by privateers and of weapons in the field did not assure a steady nor sufficient supply of arms. The brave attempt to locally manufacture gunpowder and ordnance proved inadequate for producing the necessary level of military goods for sustaining the war, let alone for winning it. So desperate was the need for conserving ammunition that Washington ordered that no musket was to be loaded, "until we are close to the enemy and there is a moral certainty of engaging them."20
"The Kings troops, Washington explained, never had less than 60 rounds per man in their possession. To supply a proposed 20,000-man army with the same amount of ammunition per soldier would require 400 barrels of powder. Given the small amount of powder on hand and faced with the dire prospect that an accident would leave the army destitute. Washington allowed each man no more than 12 or 15 rounds. His difficulties were increased by the arrival of militia with little or no powder."21
Liaison of the Continental Congress with St. Eustatius
Samuel Curzon, in partnership with Isaac Gouverneur Jr. , acted as the Caribbean local agent for the Continental Congress in St. Eustatius. When France formally entered into war with Britain in 1778, Martinique could no longer even pretend to be a neutral port. Until the Dutch likewise became a belligerent in 1780, St. Eustatius became almost exclusively the transhipment port for war materials destined for the United States.
The island was a favorite of the founding fathers of the American Revolution. During the perilous times for sea traffic, Benjamin Franklin employed St. Eustatius as a maildrop to assure delivery abroad.
The Fate of the Jews of Statia
The British harbored a seething resentment against the Dutch since the brash salute was made to the fledgling American flag from St. Eustatius. The British had informed the Dutch "that it must formally disavow the salute to the rebels, punish the culprit and recall and dismiss the Governor of St. Eustatius.. 'His Majesty will not delay one instant to take such measures as he think due to the interest and dignity of his crown.'"22 It was an empty threat, and Britain realized by 1781 that the war against the revolutionaries could only be won if the lifeline from St. Eustatius to the continent would be severed.
The festering hostility the British had against Holland finally turned into war, and the pretense of the neutral status of the Dutch possessions was no longer a deterrent to British attack upon Dutch possessions. On January 27, 1781 British Admiral Sir George Rodney was informed that Britain was now at war with the United Provinces (Holland) and recommended as "first objects of attack St. Eustatius and St. Martin."23
Britain's forces in the United States were then suffering severe setbacks, yet so vital was severance of the flow of military material from St. Eustatius considered that two of Britain's most redoubtable military figures were consigned to the campaign against St Eustatius with a formidable fleet and force. Admiral Sir George Brydges Rodney and Major-General Sir John Vaughan were dispatched to raid and occupy the island. Rodney's name "ranked with the names of the Royal navy's most illustrious figures, Nelson, Blake and Hawke and it is honoured in St. Paul's Cathedral..."24
Major-General Vaughan had served in England, Scotland, and in Germany in the Seven Years' War. The General earned a somewhat dubious reputation in the war against the American revolutionaries by burning Kingston.
"The admiral's own force represented six hundred... guns, the ninety-ton Sandwich being accompanied by five seventy-fours -Terrible, Torbay, Shrewsbury, Resolution and Belliqueux. With these vessels were the Princessa, of seventy guns, the Prince William (64) and the Convert (32) plus fireships and Bomb vessels expedited by Laforey. Shortly, Rodney would add Sir Samuel's six ships -Barfleur (90), the four 74's Alfred, Alcide, Invincible and Monarch and the Sybil (28)... The most modest estimate suggests a minimum of ten thousand seamen crewing the British ships but in all probability their numbers were considerably greater. Each vessel of any consequence also carried a detachment of Marines with Vaughan's reinforced army now in the order of three thousand souls."25
The lone Dutch frigate defending Statia could not even consider taking on the fifteen great British warships. Nor could a token garrison of sixty soldiers consider resisting the massive British force that debarked onto Statia.
The British fleet arrived on a Saturday morning as the Jews were at Sabbath prayer in their synagogue. The virtually defenseless island succumbed quickly to the British forces. Rodney confiscated all the merchandise stuffing the warehouses, valued at three to four million pounds sterling. Vaughan wrote that "150 Sail of Ships and Vessels of all Sorts" in the harbor were likewise seized along with their cargos. Included was the Dutch Frigate of War of 38 guns and a number of American vessels.
"The British commanders engaged in the indiscriminate plunder of St. Eustatius. They continued to fly the Dutch Flag over St. Eustatius to trick unsuspecting enemy ships of which 'the largest proportion belonged to America.'"26
The North American agents were sent to England as prisoners. The English and Danish merchants were stripped of all their property and extradited. The French agents were treated more circumspectly, for a powerful French fleet was deployed in the Caribbean. The French were shipped off to Martinique and Guadaloupe. Rodney instructed that they be permitted to carry with them '...their families and their household furniture."
"The indiscriminate plunder of the British commanders at St. Eustatius had violated the spirit and customs of the laws of war which were 'generally understood' to allow a conquered people 'the enjoyment of their property' as subjects of the victorious state. This was at least the convention toward fellow Europeans... This was the practice of the French toward the occupied British islands during the American Revolution. The British commanders had set a precedent which critics feared the French might imitate if any more of the British islands 'should hereafter have the misfortune of falling into the Enemy's power.'"27
The Jews, however, were isolated, brutally beaten, and robbed of everything they had. "Rodney singled out the Jews... and ordered them stripped for cash or precious stones or whatever might be secreted in their clothing. Acting out a common antipathy with unnecessary zeal, he ordered the Jews expelled on one days notice, without notice to their families or access to their homes."28 8,000 pounds sterling was extracted from their persons. "The men of the community were rounded up, their wives and families being denied news of them or access to them, and assembled in Statia's weigh-house pending deportation. ... the prisoners were brutally handled and so thoroughly searched for concealed money that their clothing was ripped apart in the process."29
Thirty Jewish men were deported to the island of St Kitts. "The rest were locked in a weighing house for three days when they were released just in time to witness the auction of their properties."30
"Rodney's behavior... suggests anti-semitism... Earlier in his career as a naval commander in Jamaica, Rodney had lashed out against the Jews who conducted a 'Pernicious and Contraband Trade' at Kingston where he insisted that 'particularly the Jews' traded illegally with the Spanish. He confiscated two of their ships which were condemned for sale in the vice-admiralty court. The 'Sons of Israel, who are possessed of most of the ready money in [Jamaica]'met with a lawyer and considered making an appeal. None of the correspondence of the other naval commanders in the Caribbean made such special mention of the Jews."31
Rodney's hatred for the Jews found expression in his letters. He urges Vaughan on 13 February - a day of reckoning for the Jews, "they cannot too soon be taken care of - they are notorious in the cause of America and France." Again he promised to "take Care of this Nest of Villains to condign [fitting] Punishment: they deserve scourging and they shall be scourged." Once again, as for the island: "...take Care this Nest of Thieves shall be leveled with the Earth, as an Example to Perfidious States."32
Rodney's indiscriminate looting subjected him to a mass of lawsuits in Britain. The Jews (even the few that were British citizens), however, had no such recourse. So heinous was Rodney's treatment of the Jews that he came under fire in Britains Parliament by the most prestigious voice of the Opposition, Edmund Burke. After denouncing his plundering of Statia's citizens of various nationalities, Burke focused on the egregious manner in which Jews were separated and brutalized. "Speaking of the order exiling them on one day's notice without their property and without their wives and children he described their vulnerability through statelessness...'If Britons are injured,' said Burke, 'Britons have armies and laws to fly to for protection and justice. But the Jews have no such power and no such friend to depend on.'"33
Rodney's insatiable appetite for loot is amply evident from his letters. In a letter of February 6 to Vaughan, for example, he wrote: "One of my officers will wait upon you, upon a very good affair - a Rascal of a Jew has his a chest with 5000 Joes [Johannes - i.e., Portuguese gold coins] in a cane patch - a negro will shew the place, upon a promise of Freedom and reward."
Historically speaking, however, Rodney's greed proved to be the determining factor in the last significant battle of the American Revolution: Washington's campaign against the British forces under General Cornwallis.
The capture of St. Eustatius would undoubtedly affect the long-range ability of the Americans to sustain resistance. The fact was, however, that the passage of material to the Americans from St. Eustatius had already provided the Americans with the essentials for victory.
The Revolutionary's victories at King's Mountain (Oct. 7, 1780) and Cowpens (Jan. 17, 1781) sapped Cornwallis' reserves. Cornwallis regrouped, marched his 7,800 man army to the coast. He entrenched them at the Chesapeake Bay port of Yorktown, Virginia. Cornwallis expected that the British domination of the sea would provide a lifeline to military reinforcements and supplies and the means by which he could recoup his military strength.
The astute General Washington sensed an opportunity. If Chesapeake Bay could be bottled up, and British ships prevented from succoring Cornwallis, and if enough time could be gained to march in enough forces from around the colonies, an assault upon the still powerful forces under Cornwallis could be launched that could clinch the success of the Revolution.
The American navy, such as it was, was inadequate for the Job. The French, however, concerned with protecting her interest in the Antilles, had "issued orders to Admiral François de Grasse to take a strong fleet of supply to the Leeward islands, and from there... to cooperate with the generals of the Revolution in whatever military action they planned."34
Rodney's first great mistake was his failure to intercept the French fleet under Admiral de Grasse on its way to the Chesapeake Bay. Rodney was expected to intercept the French fleet, but he was so involved with looting Statia's treasures that he assigned this task to Admiral Hood, who later stated "'...What Sir George Rodney's motive for it could be I cannot conceive, unless it was to cover him at St. Eustatius.'"35
On September 5, 1781, Washington rode into Chester, a town on the Bay "when a courier from de Grasse's fleet came riding up to tell him that the Admiral had arrived in the Bay with no less than 28 ships and 3000 troops, and that they were already being disembarked and placed in contact with Lafayette." The Cornwallis trap was laid! "After announcing the stunning news to his troops, Washington turned his horse northward to inform Rochambeau, who was coming down by barge. As Rochambeau's boat neared the dock at Chester, he and his staff saw the astonishing sight of a tall man acting as if he had taken leave of his senses. He was jumping up and down and waving his arms in sweeping circles, with a hat in one hand and a white handkerchief in the other. On nearing the shore they could see that the eccentric figure was undoubtedly George Washington, ordinarily so grave and well-contained. No one had ever seen the General so unres-trained and joyful, and almost childlike in his happiness."36
In the ensuing engagement, the British Chesapeake fleet, outnumbered and out-gunned, was crippled and dispersed. De Grasse made the Chesapeake Bay his domain. In addition, naval reinforcements under the command of de Barras "slipped in from Newport, with his siege guns and his beef and his eight fresh ships."37
The blockade and a massive bombardment by land and sea of the entrapped British forces brought that campaign to an end. "While the bands played in New York, Cornwallis watched the horizon in vain for masts to appear. A dispatch from Yorktown told how he was 'in daily expec-tation of the appearance of the British fleet to relieve him."38
No sails appeared. On October 19, Cornwallis' petition for surrender was granted. His defeat determined the eventual victory of the rebels.
While Cornwallis was entrenching his army of 7,800 men at Yorktown, Rodney, his officers and men were amassing vast stores of loot from Statia's warehouses and population, and lading it aboard a convoy of 34 vessels to England and in enriching themselves in the process.
Had the British fleet under Rodney provided the critical support to the beleaguered British army at Yorktown, the war might have taken an entirely different course.
Instead, Rodney assigned a sizable part of his naval force to protecting the convoy. Rodney's occupation of Statia began on February 3rd, 1781. Already, in a report of March 5, 1781, General Vaughan advised Rodney against attempting to keep the island. Rodney did not follow Vaughan's advice. Professing to be ailing, but evidently swayed more by consolidating the riches gained than with geopolitics, he departed for England, leaving a garrison of 670 men behind on decimated Statia, and assigned a naval contingent to protect them.
The Encyclopedia Britannica notes in "American Revolution" under "The War at Sea" that "[Rodney] became so involved in the disposal of the enormous booty that he dallied at the island for six months."
"Rodney was so pre-occupied with stopping and plundering the Statian merchants that he failed to cut off the French fleet that was headed to the Chesapeake Bay. The arrival of the French fleet, together with the British army's failure to send promised reinforcements from New York, forced General Charles Cornwallis to become trapped between Washington's and Lafayette's forces and the sea at the decisive Battle of Yorktown."39
The British occupation of Statia was terminated on November 20th 1781 by a French invasion. They found the place in ashes, and virtually depopulated.
St. Eustatius played two roles in the victorious outcome of the American Revolution. It had first served as a main artery for the creation and sustenance of an American revolutionary military force. Admiral Sir George Rodney himself bitterly declared in a letter to Rear Admiral Sir Peter Parker that "had it not been for that nest of vipers... this infamous island, the American rebellion could not possibly have subsisted." In a letter to Lady Rodney he stated: "This rock had done England more harm than all the arms of her most potent enemies."40
Statia's ultimate contribution to the American Revolution was not made voluntarily. The dazzling wealth of goods in the warehouses of the island, in the ships in its harbor, and the personal possessions of its three hundred and fifty Jews diverted Rodney and the commanders under him from preventing the disaster that befell the British forces under General Cornwallis. The sacrifice made by the inhabitants of St. Eustatius, and above all, the sacrifice of the Jews among them, was a major factor in the outcome of that critical battle of the American Revolution.
The Jews of the island, Sephardim and Ashkenazim alike, had staunchly supported freedom, and were instrumental in bringing it to reality on a new continent. In a "Petition of the Philadelphia Synagogue to Council of Censors of Philadelphia," on December 23, 1782 (document 8), it was pointed out that: "The Jews of Charlestown, New York, New-Port, and other posts, occupied by British troops, have distinguishedly suffered for their attachment to Revolutionary principles; and their brethren in St. Eustatius, for the same cause."
. "Rodney set fire to St. Eustatius and burned it flat, destroying at the same time all the precious records of that golden epoch. A historical catastrophe! That is when the Sephardic Jews of St. Eustatius raised themselves from the great disaster and moved to St. Thomas."41
Jews did come back to Statia, but those who had escaped to St. Thomas built a new synagogue and began a new and illustrious history.
The ruins of the Honen Dalim synagogue on St. Eustatius now stand as a lonely monument to a glorious history.
Notes1: Barbara Tuchman, The First Salute, A View of the American Revolution, 1988, 5.
2: Department of the Navy, Origins of the Twenty-One Gun Salute, Washington Navy Yard. www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq40-1.htm
3: Hank Rice, Footnotes in History, "The First Salute." Sons of the American Revolution, June, 2000. www.flssar.org/dayjun00.htm.
4:Rice, Idem.
5: George Maria Welling, The Prize of Neutrality Rijksuniversiteir, 1998, 192.
6: .Andrew J. O'Shaughnessy, The Other Road to Yorktown, presented to The Library Company of Philadelphia May, 2000, quoting Evangeline and Charles Andrews, eds. Journal of a Lady of Quality, New Haven, 1921, 136-7.
7: Lois Rose Rose, Hebrew History Federation Fact Paper 20-I, Ornament and the Jews: Beads.
8: List of Portuguese-Sephardim who were paid to leave Amsterdam 1757-1813 by Vibeke Sealtiel Olsenn, Amsterdam 1999.
9: Ronald Hurst, The Golden Rock, Naval Institute Press, 1996, 6-7.
10: Mordechai Arbell, The Sephardim of the Island of Nevis, quoting Karen Fog Olwig, Global Culture, Island Identity - Continuity and Change in the Afro-Caribbean Community of Nevis, Chur, Switzerland, 1993, 48.
11: Erna Risch, Supplying Washington's Army, Special Studies Series, Center of Military History, United States Army, Washington D.C., 1981. Ch, 12, "Supply of Ordnance and Ordnance Stores" 334-5.
12: Risch, Ibid," 335-6.
13: "Builders of America," Wimberly Library Special Collections and www. Archives, LYSCA@Fau.edu.
14: Dr. Mildred Murry and Chuck Lampman, Spain's Role in the American Revolution From the Atlantic to the Pacific, www.Americanrevolution.org.
15: Risch, Ibid., 336
16: "Ammunition Supply In Revolutionary Virginia"; Part 2, Black Powder Journal, Vol 2, No. 3, June, July 1997.
17: Welling, Ibid., 191
18: Risch, Ibid, 337, quoting from Jameson, "St. Eustatius in the American Revolution," American Historical Review, 8:688. and: Fortescue, A History of the British Army, 3:260.
18A: Ibid. 337-8.
19: Murry and Lampman, Ibid.
20: Risch, Ibid., 345
21: Risch, Ibid., 341.
22: Tuchman, Ibid., 57.
23: Tuchman, Ibid., 94.
24: Hurst, Ibid, 7-8.
25: Hurst, Ibid. 109.
26: O'Shaughnessy, Ibid..
27: O'Shaughnessy, Ibid.
28: Tuchman, Ibid., 97.
29: Hurst, Ibid., 141.
30: O'Shaughnessy, Ibid.
31: O'Shaughnessy, Ibid.
32: Hurst, Ibid., 133 .
33: Tuchman, Ibid., 102.
34: Tuchman, Ibid., 215.
35: O'Shaughnessy, Ibid.
36: Tuchman, Ibid., 260.
37: Tuchman, Ibid., 262.
38: Tuchman, Ibid., 278.
39: U. S. Virgin Islands Update, August 8, 2000 www.usvi.net/usvi/press/html/000808.html.
40: Rabbi Bradd H. Boxman, A Short History of the Hebrew Congregation of St. Thomas, 5.
41: Rabbi Bradd H. Boxman, ibid., 8.
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“That Abominable Nest of Pirates”: St. Eustatius and the NorthAmericans, 1680–1780
By the 1650s, Dutch entrepreneurs had become the dominant force in the Caribbean. In 1688 the WIC directors went a step further and allowed foreign ships to trade with St. Eustatius. Ships that had not departed from a Dutch port (usually foreign ships) were obliged to pay a 2 percent recognition fee to the company, on both incoming and outgoing goods. Over time the obligations for foreign ships changed but were never retracted.
The Dutch ideology of a borderless free-market Atlantic economy was a threat to the developing mercantilism of the other empires. It conflicted irreconcilably with Iberian, French, and English protectionism, for Dutch commerce depended on breaching their closed commercial systems. Dutch vessels undercut mercantilism when they traded in the ostensibly closed ports of English, French, and Spanish colonies. Merchants and mariners from foreign colonies did as well when they visited Dutch ‘‘free ports’’ such as St. Eustatius. Visiting a free port open to all to trade was a violation of their empires’ laws.
The thirteen North American colonies were a special case. For these overseas settlements the imperial economic scheme was in theory rather straightforward. The export of commodities, preferably staple goods like tobacco, would generate credit in the metropolis to finance the import of provisions and dry goods.
The Navigation Acts had regulated this process since their initial passage in 1651. They were designed to generate revenue for England’s treasury, encourage the growth of England’s merchant marine, and exclude foreigners—particularly the Dutch—from the valuable colonial trades. The plan had just one tiny flaw. The colonies, especially New England and the middle colonies, suffered considerable deficits in the commodity trade with Great Britain. Pennsylvania, New York, and New England made some effort to reduce the deficit by exporting commodities to southern Europe, the Wine Islands (Madeira, the Azores, and the Canary Islands), Africa, and the West Indies. Much of the deficit was made up through the provisions of shipping and other commercial services and through the sale of ships. Over time, colonial merchants expanded their activities, beginning as commission agents and later becoming both independent exporters and the owners and operators of their own ships. Thoughthis development occurred first in colonies that lacked a staple export, eventually indigenous merchants and shipowners were active everywhere.
LITTLE AMSTERDAM: ST. EUSTATIUS’ DEVELOPMENT AS A FREE PORT
‘‘This island was different from all others. It seemed to have been shot up from the ocean by some convulsion; the chimney of a volcano, rocky and barren. It had no produce. . . . It seemed to be but a late production of nature, a sort of lusus naturae, hastily framed, neither shapen nor organised, and differing in qualities from all other. Its proprietors had, in the spirit of commerce, made it an emporium for all the world; a mart, a magazine for all the nations of the earth. . . . Its wealth was prodigious, arising from its industry, and the nature of its commerce.’’
[Debate on Mr. Burke’s Motion relating to the Seizure and Confiscation of Private Property in the Island of St. Eustatius, May 14, 1781, in Parliamentary History of England, from the Norman Conquest in 1066 to the Year 1803, ed. William Cobbett, 36 vols. (London: T. C. Hansard, 1806–20), 22:220–21.]
The island’s harbor made the colony’s fortune. Made up of two extinct
volcanoes, St. Eustatius is not as well suited for plantation agriculture as
some of the other Leeward Islands. Consequently, other Europeans had not
yet colonized it before the Dutch arrived in 1636. There are only about
1,400 acres of arable ground on the island, situated along the spine of land
connecting the two peaks. The Dutch began growing tobacco, then sugar,
employing an increasing number of enslaved Africans to do the work. It
was not long, however, before they realized that the rocky island’s most
precious asset was the deep, protected anchorage on its west side. Called
Oranje Baai (Orange Bay) by the Dutch, it made for an ideal port: free of
navigational hazards, directly approachable from the sea, and easily defended
from the high cliffs surrounding it. A sandy beach extending the
length of the shoreline provided a ready storage space for goods even without
the warehouses built later.
Freshwater was scarce. The island’s relatively low relief means that little
rain falls, keeping it relatively dry, and there are no swamps. The Dutch
built cisterns, but there were years in which the cisterns were empty and
water had to be shipped from neighboring islands. Arriving ships sometimes
had difficulty obtaining freshwater from the government’s reservoirs.
In that case, they had to purchase water from someone else on the island or
sail to another island. The lack of water prevented St. Eustatius from developing
into a full-fledged plantation economy. The size of the population,
including the slaves, remained small (see table 1). But the benefits far outweighed
the setbacks. Yellow fever, one of the main killers in the Caribbean,
was virtually unknown on the island, as was malaria. Everything indicates
that living conditions were comparatively good. Life expectancy on the island was similar to that in Europe.
Statians boasted of living on one of the
healthier Caribbean islands. The environmental conditions, combined with the Dutch free trade ideology,
resulted in a transition in St. Eustatius’ commercial and social composition
from plantation to emporium, or what Michael Jarvis in his study of Bermuda has called ‘‘the shift from field to sea.’’ Geographically, economically,
and socially the island was split in three: the countryside, Upper
Town, and Lower Town. The countryside with its plantations encompassed
the areas between the Quill and the volcanic hills to the north and was a
domain of slavery. On average, the slave population was around a dozen per
plantation. The number of plantations increased from thirty-five in the
1730s to seventy-five in the 1750s. Hundreds of slaves lived in the countryside
with only a few Europeans. The plantation slaves, however, represented
less than half of the slave population.
The Dutch-speaking European elite lived in Upper Town, in the shadow
of fort Oranje. According to Admiral Rodney in 1781: ‘‘The Upper Town
is upon a steep Cliff, at least seventy foot perpendicular. You ascend to it
by a zig zag road, very difficult, steep, & must have cost the Expense of
much Blood, had the enemy defended it. The Town is neat, well laid out,
healthy, airy and for the West Indies Beautiful. In it resided the Governour
and all the Principal People.’’
A few Dutch families dominated the island’s
economic and political life. Newcomers found it almost impossible to gain
admission into their circle. The Heyliger, Doncker, De Windt, Lindesay,
Markoe, and Cuvilje´ families formed a closely knit oligarchy. They owned
the plantations, divided the company jobs among themselves, were the captains
of the militia, and dominated the sugar trade. Their family members
settled in every corner of the Caribbean, not only on the Dutch islands of
Saba, St. Martin, Curac¸ao, and Aruba, but especially on the Danish West
Indian islands.
As the largest European group on St. Thomas, Dutch planters
dominated culture, politics, and the economy almost from the outset.
Creole Dutch became the colony’s lingua franca. The tentacles of the
Statia families extended to North America. For example, Nicolaas Heyliger
(who died in 1699) married Anna Bartlett from Marblehead and settled in Salem, Massachusetts. Abraham Markoe moved to Philadelphia around
1770.
Admiral Rodney in 1781 found few of the island’s elite to be involved
in illegal practices. Lower Town was the center of the island’s maritime and commercial
activities. A visitor observed in 1792: ‘‘I go from the mountain to the Bay
[Oranje Baai], where all the warehouses are about 600, I should think. This
makes a small city in itself. . . . The roadstead is always full of Spanish,
American, French, and English barks that come and go every day and with
whom we do business; the Bay is Little Amsterdam.’’ Between one hundred
and two hundred barks and schooners harbored in Oranje Baai during
the eighteenth century, most of them Bermuda-built. At least half of the
island’s population was directly involved as sailors in the shipping industry,
supplemented by dozens of porters, joiners, coopers, and blacksmiths. The
mariners and artisans were a heterogeneous group of whites, creoles, free
people of color, and slaves, coming from Statia, Europe, Africa, and the
West Indies. Hundreds of Barbadians were employed on Statian vessels, for
example.
Lower Town housed most of the private merchants, active in all
sorts of shady wheeling and dealing. Some 160 merchants can be identified for the 1750s (see Appendix I). Fewer than 10 percent of them belonged to
the elite families of Cuvilje´, Doncker, Heyliger, Lindesay, and De Windt.
The rest formed the island’s middle class, which had three origins. The
largest group, consisting of 101 males in 1781, had Dutch roots and names
such as Aertsen, Backer, Cannegieter, Van Put, and Van Veen.
A specific
Dutch subgroup were the Jews. In 1723 there were five Jewish families,
consisting of over twenty persons, predominantly Sephardim hailing from
Amsterdam. They enjoyed freedom of religion on the island. The second
largest group came from the French sugar islands, men such as Foulquier,
Godet, Pubaud, Beauyon, and Riorteau. A third group hailed from the
British Empire, including Britain, the British West Indies, and British
North America.
In 1758 there were several Bermudan merchant houses in
Lower Town. North Americans had merchant houses there as well. Thomas
Allen, a New Londoner in partnership with Francis Goelet of New York,
for instance, maintained correspondence with merchants in Salem, Newburyport,
Boston, Newport, New London, New York, Philadelphia, and
Savannah.
During the 1770s Samson Mears acted as agent for Aaron Lopez
from Newport. The Philadelphia merchant Thomas Riche used the firm of
Hurley and Gurley, later Gurley and Riche (Gurley’s new partner was John
Riche, Thomas’s brother). During the 1770s Henry Johnston and Fergus
Peterson acted as agents for Glaswegian merchant house Alexander Houston
and Company. In 1781 some thirty-four Scots lived on the island. And
there were Irish as well, with the merchant house of Haffey.
Over time, as trade with North America intensified, English-speaking merchants became
so dominant that English surpassed Dutch as the island’s prevailing
language. The British traveler Janet Schaw provided a depiction of Lower
Town on the eve of the American Revolution, in 1775:
I understand, however, that the whole riches of the island consists in its merchandize, and they are obliged to the neighboring islands for subsistence; while they in return furnish them with contraband commodities of all kinds. The town consists of one street a mile long, but very narrow and most disagreeable, as every one smokes tobacco, and the wiffs are constantly blown in your face. But never did I meet with such variety, there was a merchant vending his goods in Dutch, another in French, a third in Spanish, etc., etc. They all wear the habit of their country and the diversity is really amusing. The first that welcomed us ashore were a set of Jews. As I had never seen a Jew in his habit, except Mr. Diggs in the character of Shylock, I could not look on the wretches without shuddering.
A Pirates’ Nest
By 1680 St. Eustatius was a full-scale trading depot with extensive and
diverse support networks. Lying among the Leeward Islands, St. Eustatius
was also a perfect base for smugglers. The small island, stocked with Dutch
traders, enslaved Africans, European goods, and other necessaries, provided
neighboring English and French planters with relatively easy access to all
Dutch commerce had to offer, drawing the complaints of their governors.
Thomas Lynch, governor of Jamaica, reported in June 1671 that several
masters at Montserrat ‘‘told us most of ye produce of that Island [Montserrat]
& Antego is carryed away to Statia by ye Dutch, & assured us that the
last yearse they fetched thence in sloopes neere 40,000 Lb Tobacco.’’ The
tobacco sent to Dutch St. Eustatius was a significant part of the two islands’
production.
In May 1687 Captain George Loe, investigating the ‘‘defrauding of the royal revenue in the Leeward Islands,’’ described how smugglers
used St. Eustatius:
‘‘There are generally several great ships lying at
Statia [and] on their way from Holland they generally touch at all our islands
on pretext of watering [and] all the planters go aboard and . . . agree
for what is on board. . . . Having disposed of their cargoes the ships go back
to Statia, where they wait for the planters to send their sugar.’’ The Dutch
‘‘sell European goods thirty per cent, cheaper than we [the English] and
will pay dearer for American Goods.’’
Between January and August 1688,
eight ships with a full cargo of French and English sugar had left the island
for the Dutch Republic, while four hundred hogsheads of sugar still lay in
the WIC’s warehouse. By 1690 the reputation of St. Eustatius was such
that the former British West Indian planter Dalby Thomas claimed that a
‘‘great quantity of Commodities [was] sent out of the Leeward Caribee
Islands, and sold to the Dutch . . . under the name St. Eustace Sugar’’ in his
pamphlet urging greater imperial attention to the Caribbean, An Historical
Account of the Rise and Growth of the West-India Collonies.
St. Eustatius had a ‘‘Wild West’’ quality in the late seventeenth century.
Its nominal ruler was the Dutch West India Company, but its negligible
profits provided little incentive to invest much in its administration. As
subcontractors of the Spanish asiento, the company’s interest lay with
Curacao and its slave market. Violent eruptions of family feuds and rivalries
made the island difficult to govern. At the same time, it was regularly attacked
and plundered during the era’s long series of wars. The last such
attack was in January 1713, when Jacques Cassard (1679–1740) ransacked
the island. The lawlessness and looting seriously hampered the island’s development.
The Treaty of Utrecht (1713) soon brought peace, but it also
deprived the company of its role in the asiento trade [Spanish slave trade]. Only then did the
WIC slowly gain some control over the island. This is best illustrated with
the island’s development as a slave market.
Slave Market
The Dutch West India Company did not initially recognize the island’s
potential as an outpost of the slave trade. Preoccupied with the slave market
on Curacao, it largely neglected St. Eustatius. The few enslaved Africans
sent by the company to St. Eustatius were destined for the dozen or so
sugar plantations on the island. The slaves, however, were too few or of
inferior quality for the planters’ needs, many of them being so-called macron
slaves from Curacao: older slaves or those with some physical or mental
impairment that made them unacceptable for the asiento trade.
In 1687
some fifty slaves arrived on St. Eustatius. According to Lucas Schorer, commander
of St. Eustatius 1686–89, the island was actually in need of at least
150 slaves at that time, an observation shared by the planters. St. Eustatius’ neighbors noticed the island’s potential to become an international
depot for slaves before the Dutch did.
In the 1680s agents of the
Royal African Company complained that leading colonists on Nevis as well
as St. Christopher’s often talked about how much cheaper and easier it was
to buy slaves from the Dutch at St. Eustatius than from the Royal African
Company. The English company feared that the Dutch would ‘‘ ‘establish a
magazine for negroes’ ’’ on the island.
The Dutch, however, could not yet
supply the needs of the plantation owners on the surrounding islands.
When, a year later, several vessels coming from the French and English
islands with sugar arrived hoping to acquire some six hundred slaves, they
left empty-handed. Isaac Lammont, commander of St. Eustatius 1701–4,
immediately realized that the island would make an ideal slave-trading station.
In 1701 he requested that the WIC assign several slave transports for
this purpose. He claimed that he could sell three thousand to four thousand
slaves annually. As he put it, the ‘‘trade would render much profit to Your
Honors and also be the only means to end the interloper trade here, as the
foreign planters would rather buy from me than from interlopers.’’
Without a reliable supply of slaves, the islanders had turned to private
traders interloping in the WIC’s slave-trade monopoly. Ruud Paesie estimates
that an average of four Dutch interloper slave ships, each with a
human cargo of three hundred Africans on board, sailed annually between
1675 and 1730. Most of these illicit slavers called at St. Eustatius. Initially
they anchored in one of the remote bays of the island.
In 1687, for instance,
an interloper from Flushing anchored on the leeside of the island. In four
weeks’ time two hundred slaves were sold to French and English planters
and a return cargo taken on board.36 In 1717 four to five interlopers lay
at anchor at the same time in Tommelendijkbaai. News of newly arrived
interlopers spread like fire across the Caribbean. As a contemporary English
book described it:
Its road is the Place where Dutch interlopers from the Coast of Africa seldom fail to call at. In a few Days all our Leeward Islands are informed of this. In Places, such as our Islands are, it is not much to be wondered at if there are Persons who run some Hazard for the Hope of a considerable Gain; so that all the ready Money which they can advance at any rate, is carried by them on Board these Ships, where Negroes are sold to them frequently 20 per Cent. Cheaper than our own Ships do afford them. This ready money is a great Temptation to some planters who sell their sugars to them at less than the current Price; and under Pretence of sending it in Sloops to our own shipping it is sent on Board these Interlopers.
By 1715 the illicit slave trade had shifted onshore and become so bold that
when the new administrator (fiscaal) Johannes Meijer arrived at Oranje
Baai, his ship was shot at by the interlopers Jager and Vergulde Vrijheid. The
two ships’ masters went on land daily to sell their slaves publicly. The sugar
and cacao they traded for were weighed in the company’s weighing house
with one of the WIC employees, Jacob Stevens, assisting the interloper
These illegal activities were a needle in the eye of the WIC directors. But
they also revealed St. Eustatius’ potential as a slave market. With the asiento
now expired, the company began to direct the trans-Atlantic slave trade to
the island in the 1720s, and St. Eustatius briefly became the cornerstone of
the Dutch slave trade. The first company slave ship, Leusden, arrived from
Africa in 1721. Over that decade, twenty-three WIC ships disembarked
nearly 11,000 slaves at the island. Three of these ships disembarked only a
portion of their slaves on the island, taking the remainder to Curacao. The
last WIC slaver, Phenix, arrived in 1729.
To accommodate this trade, a twostory
slave house was built in the Waterfort (fort Amsterdam), near the
shoreline. It could house 400–450 slaves awaiting transshipment.40
Almost all slaves landed on St. Eustatius were sold to foreign buyers. In
the years 1721–23 over one thousand slaves were sold to the English from
Saint Christopher (Saint Kitts). Martinique and Guadeloupe were the nextmost-frequent
destinations.41 North Americans purchased some 5 percent
of the available slaves (see table 2). That would mean that during the 1720s,
on average around fifty enslaved Africans were shipped to British North
America annually, almost exclusively to New York and New England.
The case of the Gouden Put, master Benjamin Kreeft, can illustrate how
the St. Eustatius slave market operated. The ship had taken 390 enslaved
Africans on board from the Congo area. During the middle passage 18
Africans died. After arriving at St. Eustatius on June 28, 1725, another 7
slaves passed away.
In the end, a total of 365 Africans were put up for sale.
The slaves were sold in two ways. Between July 4 and August 13, 1725, 326
healthy slaves were sold for a fixed price directly to the buyers (verkocht uit
de hand). On August 14, the day after the last healthy slaves were sold, 38
macrons were auctioned. Finally, a last sick slave was auctioned on January 10, 1726.42 The net proceeds of this human cargo were 26,492 pesos. The
money was used to purchases a cargo of sugar, cotton, and fustic to be
shipped with the Phenix, master Jacob Vallee.
The WIC slave trade came to an end in 1730 for several reasons. First,
Jacobus Stevensen, commander of St. Eustatius 1721–22, had started to
sell the slaves to French planters on long-term credit. Johannes Lindesay,
commander of St. Eustatius 1722–28, in conjunction with his business associate
Joanz Doncker, extended this practice. The outstanding credit to
the planters increased from 34,727 guilders in 1722 to 377,909 guilders in
1728. P. J. Spiering and Theodore Godet were send to Guadeloupe and
Grande-Terre to collect the debts, but in vain; a sum of 276,099 guilders
was never collected. Second, Everard Raecx, commander of St. Eustatius
1728–33, saw no future for the slave trade, claiming the English were
flooding the market, and that slave prices had dropped significantly.
Third, during the 1730s the WIC withdrew from human trafficking and
officially opened up the trans-Atlantic slave trade to private companies.
King Sugar
Sugar had became an important product to the island in the seventeenth
century. After 1730, however, sugar was truly king. Between 1720 and 1780
sugar exports to the Netherlands grew sixfold (see graph 1). The culmination
came in 1779, when a staggering 22.7 millions pounds of sugar were
exported. St. Eustatius had surpassed the plantation colony of Suriname as
the main supplier for the Dutch sugar refiners.
Where was all this sugar coming from? Only a small portion of the sugar
was produced on the island itself, where production expanded from 450,000
pounds in 1740 to 590,000 pounds in 1781. Almost all the sugar sold
from the island was imported. To procure it, Statian merchants supplied the French, British, and Spanish planters with dry goods, provisions, building
materials, and African slaves, which were imported from the Dutch Republic,
Ireland, the Wine Islands, North America, and Africa. St. Eustatius was
like a spider in a web spanning most of the Atlantic world.
Only a small number of all incoming ships, some 5 percent, participated in
the import trade (see Appendix II). They came from different parts of the
Atlantic world, carrying different goods, all of them passing through St.
Eustatius.
The Dutch Republic usually sent a dozen or so ships a year to St. Eustatius.
They carried dry goods like hats, silk stockings, paper, glass objects,
axes, pots and pans, and fabric, especially Osnaburg linen, a cheap and
coarse fabric used to clothe slaves. Ireland supplied the Caribbean with salted
provisions, butter, and cheese. Much of this went to the French islands,
but some went also to the Dutch plantation colonies in Guyana. Occasionally,
a Dutch ship called at an Irish port. British ships, presumably coming
from North America, also sailed via Ireland to St. Eustatius. In periods
when France was at war with Britain, many Dutch and American ships
visited Ireland to get provisions for the French West Indies.
The Wine Islands acted as supplier of wine for the Atlantic world. North
Americans were more active in this trade than the Dutch. In years of peace,
a dozen or so British North American ships arrived in St. Eustatius from
Madeira. During the American Revolution in particular, Madeirans exported
significant quantities of wine to St. Eustatius and Curacao.
The remainder of the provisions, especially cheese, fish, flour, and bread,
came from North America—cheese and fish predominantly from New England,
flour and bread mostly from New York and Philadelphia. Livestock
was a typical North American commodity: sheep and poultry were consumed;
horses and mules were used to power sugar mills. The North
Americans also supplied building materials, such as planks, shingles, hoops,
staves, bricks, turpentine, and tar. North American candles were made of
spermaceti, a wax from the sperm whale. The candle-making industry was
centered in New England. Another specifically North American export
commodity was wooden furniture.
Between 1731 and 1775 on average one private slaver called annually at
St. Eustatius, delivering between two hundred and three hundred enslaved
Africans. Many of the private slavers were foreign. In 1753, for instance,
some English slavers visited St. Eustatius. Without paying the company’s
duties, they landed the enslaved Africans and purchased large quantities of
sugar, which resulted in a drop in the export of sugar to the Netherlands.
Because of a lack of sources, the function and character of the island’s intraCaribbean
trade is still obscure, despite some excellent publications. The
shipping lists, however, make three things clear: (1) the number of incoming
and departing ships; (2) the last port of call and the next destination of
the ships; (3) the origin of the staple goods. Table 4 gives an overview of
the first two aspects, and table 5 of the third.
Despite the fact that the
shipping lists do not mention the flag or nationality of the ships, two things
are certain. First, vessels from St. Eustatius and North America (including
Bermuda) took care of the intra-Caribbean shipping. Second, the former
left the island in ballast or with a cargo of provisions or sundries (or both). Of course, the re-export of staple goods reflects the volume of the intra-Caribbean
trade. The re-export was primarily directed to the Netherlands—
conducted by the WIC, private merchants, and the masters of the Dutch
ships on account for the shipowners—but a significant quantity of sugar,
molasses, and rum also ended up in British North America.
When the WIC dominated the slave trade in the 1720s, it was a major
exporter of staple goods. Table 3 illustrate how the proceeds from the
Gouden Put were shipped to the Netherlands. The merchants and planters
paid for the slaves mostly in sugar (see table 6). Occasionally the company
used a private ship. In 1723, for instance, Commander Johannes Lindesay
shipped on account and risk for the company in the frigate St. Christopher,
master William Harris, 614 hogshead of sugar and 10 bales of cotton to
Middelburg. For freight the company had to pay for the sugar four and a
half duiten per pound, and for the cotton nine duiten per pound.53 The
company’s re-export dwindled rapidly after 1730, only occasionally shipping
moderate amounts of sugar to the Netherlands
Statian entrepreneurs also acted as correspondents and agents for Dutch
shipping firms. The private Dutch ships arrived with sundries and returned
with hundreds of thousands pounds of sugar and other staple commodities.
One such ship was the Zeefortuijn, destined for Flushing (see table 7). Master
David Graij sold the cargo of the ship; in return he purchased for the
shipowners 181 hogshead of sugar, 5 bales of cotton, 1 barrel of indigo, and
72,780 pounds yellowwood. For his own account he bought two hogshead
of sugar. Furthermore, the Zeefortuijn shipped some two hundred hogsheads
of sugar for Statian merchants. The Marquis de Jenectere hailed from
Guadeloupe; his 87 hogshead of sugar were consigned to Pierre Dutilt. . . .
SUGAR, MOLASSES AND RUM
A second outlet for the staple re-export, especially for sugar, was North
America. For the year 1770 John MacCusker has estimated that 4.9 million
pounds of sugar, tens of thousands of gallons of molasses, and hundreds of thousands
of gallons of rum left St. Eustatius for the British mainland colonies. This
was maybe as much as one-third of the island’s sugar re-export.
So significant was the North American connection that the fate of St. Eustatius’ trade after
1730 can best be followed through the North American contacts.
Carriers of the Caribbean
By the eighteenth century British colonists had taken over the role of carriers
of the Caribbean’s trade from the Dutch; New Englanders especially
became ‘‘the Dutch of England’s empire.’’60 At least four developments, but
maybe several more, contributed to this transformation.
First, the Dutch
had receded from the West Indies carrying trade during the last quarter of
the seventeenth century, thanks in large part to the wars against France.
France’s guerre de course made the Atlantic crossing hazardous. On the high
seas a total war raged. During the Nine Years’ War (1688–96), for instance,
some eight thousand ships were seized by the belligerents. The War
of the Spanish Succession (1702–13) repeated the feat with some seven
thousand prizes. During the period 1680–1720, the number of Dutch
ships equipped for a trans-Atlantic destination plummeted to less than half
that in the decades before 1680 and in the years after 1720. In those same
years the economies of British North America and the islands had become
tightly intertwined as the West Indian sugar islands became indispensable
to the development of the mainland colonies.
The British West Indies
served as a major market for colonial exports, particularly provisions and
building materials. They also supplied a variety of goods that the continental
colonists imported, processed, consumed, and re-exported. Finally, they provided an important source of foreign exchange that helped balance colonial
accounts and pay for British manufactures.
The Chesapeake, New York,
and especially New England ports had all forged strong contacts with the
West Indies by the end of the seventeenth century. In the words of one
New Englander: ‘‘The general course of our [Boston] trade to the West
Indies has been this. Our vessels (except those bound for Suriname, and
some that go directly to Jamaica) call at Barbados to try the market from
thence they proceed to Antigua, Nevis and St. Kitts, and in case they meet
with a tolerable market at either of those islands, they always embrace it, if
not, they then proceed, some to Jamaica, others to St. Eustatia, and the
other foreign islands, where they dispose of their cargoes, which our own
islands don’t want.’’
Two examples illustrate the nature of the connections to St. Eustatius. In January 1734 the Boston sloop Africa, master Samuel
Rhodes, sailed to St. Eustatius, carrying a cargo of fish, candles, Madeira
wine, shoes, desks, pork, oil, staves, and bricks. On arrival, Rhodes disposed
of these goods and with the proceeds obtained 173 hogsheads of sugar,
13,000 gallons of rum, and sundries. He continued his voyage to West
Africa, where he obtained two hundred enslaved Africans. Dysentery broke
out among the slaves and many died. On the homeward voyage Rhodes
again stopped at St. Eustatius, where he was able to sell his remaining
slaves, only on condition of accepting part of his payment in cocoa instead
of cash.
In 1752 the Rhode Island sloop Charming Polly, master Richard
Penmure, was directed to go first to St. Vincent, then to Saint Domingue,
and then to St. Eustatius. Penmure was to sell his cargo as he could, for
cash if possible, and with only money in hand, he was to go to Hispaniola
and there buy indigo, sugar, and molasses for the voyage home.
New Englanders learned that the shipping business itself could generate
considerable credits, and merchants soon accepted both the risks and the
benefits of the ‘‘carrying trade.’’ They created a well-integrated commercial
economy based on a growing fleet. With 730 merchant and fishing vessels
in 1676, Massachusetts was the preeminent maritime power in colonial
America. It had a thriving fishery and an extensive network of coastal, intercolonial,
and trans-Atlantic trades. Other English New World settlements
would turn to the sea, too, as, for instance, Bermuda did. Between 1685 and
1715 this small island, situated between the Caribbean and North America,
converted from a plantation settlement to a maritime economy that included
St. Eustatius. For example, the Bermudan Seth Place, an emigrant to
the Dutch island, engaged a French-owned, Bermuda-built sloop manned
mainly by Bermudan mariners to ship seventy African slaves from St. Eustatius
to Martinique in exchange for cash and French sugar.
British North America’s carrying trade thrived also in part because it
was based on a new generation of small and medium-sized vessels like the
Baltimore clipper, the Bermuda sloop, and the Bahamian schooner. Sloops
were the single most common vessel in American and Caribbean waters.
These single-masted, fore-and-aft-rigged vessels ranged in size from 5 to
more than 140 tons. Four to eight men were generally sufficient to man a
sloop. Evolving as a hybrid between sloops and ketches, schooners shared
many of the sloop’s traits. These two-masted vessels divided their canvas
area between two smaller and more manageable fore-and-aft sails, enabling
them to sail with one fewer sailor than sloops of the same size. Both vessels
suited the character of the colonial economy and were in many ways better
than the larger European-built ships. They were cheap and easy to build,
given the abundance of timber, and their construction was relatively simple
and straightforward.
New Yorkers, together with New Englanders and later entrepreneurs
from the middle and southern colonies, expanded their contacts from the
British Caribbean to all the West Indies, South America, and Europe. St.
Eustatius would act as a pivot in this system. In 1736, for instance, 138
foreign ships left the island with a cargo of staple goods (see table 8). Despite
the fact that the nationality of the ship is not mentioned, judging by
the name of the ship or its master, all of them were British, presumably
North American (and Bermudan). The vast majority left St. Eustatius for
an American port, but a few dozen left the island for another destination.
Actually, many hundreds of ships called at St. Eustatius without landing
any goods or departed from the island without taking on any cargo. Most
of these ships were North American.
The Molasses Act of 1733
When the WIC’s slave trade came to an end in 1730, the economic prospects
for St. Eustatius were rather bleak. After all, the island’s own resources
were limited. Luckily, the Statians got help from an unexpected ally:
Whitehall. The illicit import of sugar, rum, and molasses from the French,
Dutch, Danish, and Spanish West Indies to the North American British
colonies was a thorn in the side of the British planters and West Indian merchants. In 1733 Parliament adopted the Molasses Act in response of
the declining trade of the sugar islands, imposing heavy duties on rum,
molasses, and sugar imported into the American colonies from the nonBritish
West Indies. The British West Indian lobby hoped to force North
Americans to buy only their own, more expensive sugar products. In North
America the act was routinely evaded. Bribery at a customary rate of a farthing
to a halfpenny a gallon, a fraction of the statutory sixpenny rate on
foreign molasses, was generally sufficient to clear customs at New York and
Massachusetts.
As a result, St. Eustatius, more than before, became a conduit
through which cheap French molasses and sugar continued to reach
North America. For New York most of the sugar and molasses was imported
from St. Eustatius. To oversee these illicit shipments, North American firms
dispatched scores of factors to take up residence in non-British Caribbean
islands. Far from cutting contacts between North America and the foreign
Caribbean, the Molasses Act resulted in more sustained transnational interaction.
The white population of Lower Town swelled as French and North
American merchants who specialized in subverting their nations’ trade laws
moved in.
WAR OF THE AUSTRIAN SUCCESSION, 1739 –1748
Whitehall once again helped the economy of St. Eustatius during the War
of the Austrian Succession. Initially, the island did not benefit much from
the war—quite the contrary. In those days the Anglicizing process on the
island was beginning to assume clear proportion, which meant a presence
of a strong pro-British faction, which opposed trade with the enemy. When
scores of Statian vessels fell victim to British privateers, however, this
changed.
So, when on June 3, 1744, the French entered the war and British
naval supremacy severed the French lines of communication, Statian
entrepreneurs took advantage of new opportunities. Over forty merchants
traded with the French islands (see table 9). In 1745 and 1746 they
equipped 262 and 290 ships respectively to one of the French islands. In an
attempt to deceive the British war ships and privateers, the Statian ships carried papers that stated their destination as one of the Dutch colonies in
Guyana (see table 10). In 1745 at least 168 Statian vessels reached Guadeloupe.
They purchased sugar for 26–27 livres a pound and sold it at 45
livres in St. Eustatius.
That year a dozen ships from St. Eustatius, valued at
87,353 pesos, fell victim to the British on allegations of illicit trading with
the French. Despite these losses, trade with the French islands increased
(see graph 2). Merchants in the Dutch Republic also benefited from the
war.
The MCC, for instance, specially equipped several ships to sail directly
to St. Eustatius with china, furniture, sailcloth, and specie. Furthermore,
French merchants living in Holland obtained licenses to sail to the French
islands. One of them was Franois Libault of Amsterdam, who sent three
ships to Saint Domingue in 1744.72
The French sugar re-export from St. Eustatius did not go unnoticed. On
August 17, 1746, the English minister-plenipotentiary at The Hague, Robert
Trevor, Viscount Hampden (1706–83), wrote to the States General:
‘‘The King having repeatedly received intelligence that the Governor of the
Island of St. Eustatius, as a result of an odious affinity for the enemies of
His Majesty, constantly furnishes the inhabitants of the French islands, not
only with all manner of victuals, but also with arms and warlike stores and
with everything that their armateurs require for their constructions.’’ Johannes
Pietersz Heyliger, commander of St. Eustatius, 1743–52, proclaimed
the innocence of the island’s merchants, replying that no activities
were conducted from the island that went against the commercial treaty of
1674. Statian merchants had not shipped any war provisions to the French.
On the contrary, tens of thousand of pounds of gunpowder had been
shipped to the British colonies.
Free Ships, Free Goods
On December 1, 1674, after three intense conflicts over the previous
twenty-two years, the king of England and the States General signed a
treaty regulating navigation and commerce of the citizens and subjects of the two countries, allowing them to sail to each other’s ports. The colonies
were off-limits, with the exception of the free ports of Curacao and St.
Eustatius. From then until 1780, the Dutch Republic and England were
frequent allies, their cooperation backed up by formal treaties.
Since the early days of the Dutch Revolt, the Dutch motto had been that
the seas are free. A free ship meant a free cargo. In other words, the cargo
in a neutral ship (that is, a Dutch ship) was free to be shipped to any place
in the world. The commercial treaty of 1674 with England established the
principle of ‘‘Free Ships, Free Goods,’’ meaning that in time of war the two
countries would consider the cargo in a neutral ship to be neutral, too.
The English had drafted the 1674 treaty. The Dutch introduced a few
alterations into the final text, but none was fundamental. Indeed, it is not
surprising that England should be the first to assert or extend the rights of
neutrals, for in 1674 the Dutch were still at war with France, and England
was making the most of its neutrality. The explanatory convention of 1675,
by which neutral ships were to be free to trade even from one enemy port
to another, was made at the express wish of England. During the War of
the Austrian Succession this had clearly backfired for the British. Worse
was yet to come.
DEFYING THE BRITISH EMPIRE
The Seven Years’ War (1756–63) was for St. Eustatius in many ways a
repetition of the War of the Austrian Succession, but on a much larger
scale: more sugar than ever was re-exported to the Dutch Republic: almost
18 million pounds in 1761 (see graph 3). This time, however, the British
were prepared. At the start of the war, the Lord Commissioners of Prize
Appeals had adopted the Rule of War of 1756, which made a distinction
between ‘‘fair’’ and ‘‘unfair’’ neutral traders, a contrast commonly made be tween trading with an enemy and trading for him. In its basic form this law
claimed that neutrals could not expect to be allowed to trade freely during
war in areas from which they were excluded in peace. It ruled that Britain
would not trade with neutral nations who were also trading with the enemy.
The rationale was that the neutral nation was aiding the enemy. It also
ruled that Britain would not open trade with any nation during wartime.
The British Prize Courts then ruled that the treaties concerning neutral
rights did not apply to America. In practice they had annulled the Treaty of
1674.
In Holland, however, the origin of the treaty was not forgotten, as was explained to the British ministry: In 1674, when this treaty was made, the Republicq had just made up with England and was at war with France. The articles, which stipulate free ship, free goods and determine what is counterband and what not, were at that time to the advantage of England and prejudical of the Republiek, and the Republiek had then as strong reasons for not agreeing to these articles, if she had consulted her present interest then alone, as England may at present have for not executing them litterally. I do not suppose my opinion, which in the station I am in must pass for a partial one, will have any influence. But I declare that, if England and the Republicq changed situations, I should in the like case plead for England in favour of the letter of the treaty just as I now do for the Republiek. For my determination is never to make nor to admit of commentary’s treaty’s. I heartily wish my apprehension may be groundless and hope your Grace will forgive the freedom with which I open my self to you.
At the opening stages of the war, Great Britain operated carefully, to
avoid giving offence to the Dutch at sea. The victims were mainly Dutch
ships engaged in the French coastal trade in Europe. In the spring of 1758,
however, an all-out war was launched on the neutral trade between the
Netherlands and the West Indies. At one moment in 1758, seventy-four
Dutch vessels were lying idle in British or colonial ports, waiting to be
processed in Admiralty Courts. Seventeen of them had been trading directly
to or from French Caribbean settlements. Over a hundred Dutch West
Indiamen were seized by British privateers in 1757 and 1758, for a loss
of between ten and twenty million guilders. Sir Joseph Yorke (1724–95;
ambassador in The Hague 1751–80) informed Robert Darcy (1718–78, 4th
Earl of Holderness and secretary of State 1751–61) in detail about how St.
Eustatius operated as an emporium, both legal and illicit, at least in British
eyes (see Appendix III).
The ‘‘fair trade’’ was conducted by merchants from
the Netherlands and St. Eustatius for their own account, without any correspondence
with the enemy. Vessels flying the French colors were allowed to
call at St. Eustatius and to barter the produce of their islands for provisions,
after which the sugar had to be shipped in Dutch bottoms to Europe. The illicit trade, on the other hand, was conducted in two ways: (1) merchants
in Holland acted on behalf of French entrepreneurs, and (2) Statian brokers
traded on account for French West Indian planters. In the latter instances
the Dutch were trading for the enemy. The crisis, however, did not develop
into an Anglo-Dutch maritime war.
In 1759 Willem Bentinck (1704–74),
Heer van Rhoon en Pendrecht, wrote to Prime Minister Thomas PelhamHolles
(1693–1768), Duke of Newcastle:
I can not forbear giving your Grace fairly and openly my opinion on the present disputes between England and the Republick. The direct trade to and from the French colonys has been given up by us. The trade from and to our own establishments ought to remain untouched and uncontrouled and what ever is brought from thence on Dutch bottoms, ought to be considered as Dutch property and fall into the denomination of free ships, free goods.
Give me leave to tell you, that our islands, I mean St Eustatia and Curacao, are worth little and Curac¸ao particulary not worth sixpence to the Republick without the clandestine trade carry’d on between the English, Spaniards, French and Dutch, contrary to all treatys. The great profit of your trade in America arises from the smuggling-trade in and with colonys or establishments of other nations, which trade, tho’ prohibited, it is not possible to prevent. This is a fact better known to you than to us. And I may, I believe, venture to say that Jamaica, tho’ in itself so much more considerable, is much in the same case as our colonys. And it is not possible, in effect, for us, to admit of any further limitation on this point, than that of not trading directly to and from the French colonys.
The Dutch were willing to give up direct trade to the French West Indies,
at any rate on French account. That is to say: ‘‘We [the States General]
have given up the direct trade to the French colonies, without admitting
that the Treaty of 1674 does not extend to the West Indies.’’
At the same
time, the Privateers’ Act of June 1759 restricted privateering During the Seven Years’ War intra-Caribbean trade boomed (see table
11). North American and Dutch entrepreneurs were more than willing to supply the besieged French settlements. The Dutch were neutral, but British
Americans accepted the British imperial claim that this meant they were
trading with the enemy. Governor Charles Hardy of New York was informed
that in Canada the French ‘‘depend on what can be sent from Europe
and what they can purchase at the Dutch islands of St. Eustatius and
Curacao.’’ New York Judge Lewis Morris complained that the Dutch islands
had become little more than ‘‘public factors for the enemy.’’
They
transshipped provisions from Ireland to the French. In June 1756 a New
York master saw five ships arriving at St. Eustatius with provisions from
Ireland. Two years later a Waterford merchant declared that 50,000 to
60,000 barrels of provisions had been sent to the island. Nearly all the food
went to the French.
Despite the fact that in January 1759 the British
conquered Guadeloupe and opened an illicit trade to Martinique, the reexport
of sugar from St. Eustatius increased.84
Trade with the French came at a high price for St. Eustatius. A distressed
Jan de Windt, commander of St. Eustatius, 1754–75, wrote: ‘‘In spite of all
my efforts to maintain good relations with the British of the neighbouring
islands . . . their privateers are committing blatant acts of hostility against
our ships.’’ Many more complaints followed. During the first few months
of 1758 the British confiscated more than sixty Statian vessels. By 1761,
238 Statian vessels had been seized, causing damages worth 1.2 million
pesos, or over 3 million guilders, while many merchants had not yet handed
in their claims, and the war would last for another two years.
It was not just the Irish and the Dutch who traded with the French during
the war. Between one-half and one-third of all ships arriving at St. Eustatius
were North American. As the bilateral trade was limited, it is clear that hundreds
of American ships were trading with the enemy. By the spring of 1756
it had become customary for North American ships to clear customs at Nevis
or St. Christopher and then head straight for St. Eustatius or Curaao. There
the ships were neutralized with a new identity. This was no problem. Agents
at Lower Town on St. Eustatius and Willemstad on Curacao worked closely with correspondents on the North American mainland and had little trouble
procuring forged certificates. On St. Eustatius the Americans repacked the
sugar in new barrels to disguise its French origin.
Recently Thomas Truxes has described the North American trade with
the enemy as an act of defying empire. North American merchants had
turned their backs on king and empire at a moment of national peril.
Whitehall saw them as unpatriotic, even perverse. The war had exposed the
bankruptcy of the British political economy of protectionism. The Seven
Years’ War had been a step in hollowing out the British Empire, and St.
Eustatius had been in the thick of it.
A CONSUMER MARKET
The people living in overseas settlements depended on imports from Europe
for many consumer goods. Initially the demand was for very mundane
goods, such as tools and cheap linen. Over time a demand for more luxurious
consumer goods developed as the colonial elite tried to uphold a fashionable
European lifestyle. In other words, the Americans wanted to drink
their tea from Wedgwood china. Both had to be imported. For the British,
tea became a central problem of the empire.
Many Americans had grown
accustomed to drinking tea by the middle of the eighteenth century. As a
result of the Seven Years’ War and the occupation of the newly acquired
territories in Canada, colonial governments had to pay for billeting newly
arrived British troops. Parliament passed several acts to raise revenue in the
colonies, such as the Revenue Acts (1764), the Stamp Act (1765), and the
Townshend Acts (1767), including a duty on tea and other commodities destined for the colonies.
The Americans started to boycott British tea,
while importing ‘‘Dutch tea.’’ By the 1750s legal tea imports were rivaled
by the great quantities being smuggled directly from foreign ports. The character of the import of sundries, especially for the more luxurious
consumer goods, was changing. North American ships had often sailed on
‘‘adventure’’ to the West Indies. They wandered, without prearranged plans,
from port to port, the master buying, selling, bartering, or carrying freight
as occasion offered. They visited St. Eustatius in the hope of getting a
return cargo. In 1767 and 1768, for instance, the Neptune had sailed from
Boston to Newfoundland, where its cargo of farm produce and livestock
was bartered for fish. Unfortunately, in Barbados, St. Lucia, and Martinique
there was no market for the already decomposing fish. The Neptune sailed
to St. Eustatius, but after a month the rotting fish was not sold. A last
resort was Demerara, where ‘‘the worst of bad fish will fetch three pieces of
eight.’’
Now, however, such merchants as Philip Cuyler in New York, John
Hancock in Boston, and Aaron Lopez in Newport entered into direct correspondence
with their suppliers in the Dutch Republic, ordering specific
quantities and qualities of tea, especially cheap black Bohea tea, which were
sent for their account and on their risk. Cuyler purchased tea from Isaack
Clockener and Zoon and Joan Hodshon of Amsterdam. Hancock purchased
tea from Joan Hodshon, Thomas and Adrian Hope, and Jean de
Neufville in Amsterdam. In October 1759 and March 1760 the Hope
brothers, for instance, bought at auction from the Dutch East India Company
a massive 595,879 pounds of tea, at a cost of more than one million
guilders. There is no doubt that they intended to flood the North American
market.
During the 1760s Aaron Lopez’s whalers in southern waters would sometimes pick up a few barrels of Bohea tea sent to St. Eustatius
by John Turner and Son, the Lopez correspondent in Holland, and smuggled
into Newport. Later, Lopez purchased his tea from Danie¨l Crommelin
and Zonen. To avoid detection, the tea, which normally was shipped in
chests, was repacked in barrels and sent on consignment to his agent Samson
Mears in St. Eustatius.94 On the island, the tea was loaded onto an
American vessel and smuggled into the thirteen colonies.
By 1770 St. Eustatius had become the main supplier of tea to North
America. In March 1770, for instance, the London Evening Post announced
that over 200,000 pounds of tea had been shipped on board a Dutch vessel
bound for St. Eustatius. In 1771 Charles Dudley reported to the Commissioners
of Customs in Boston: ‘‘It is also well known that St. Eustatius is
the channel through which the colonies are now chiefly supplied with tea.’’
By then, according to Carole Shammas, some 75 percent of all tea in British
North America was imported clandestinely.96 The British government responded
with the Tea Act (1773), which supported the East India Company
and challenged the American colonials on the nettlesome taxation
issue. British ships laden with more than 500,000 pounds of tea set off for
North America in September 1773. Opposition to the arriving tea shipments
developed in Boston and other ports. Public anger was sufficient to
induce many of the appointed tea agents to resign their positions before the tea arrived. In New York City and Philadelphia the ships’ masters quickly
assessed the situation on arrival and headed back to England. In Annapolis
one shipowner was forced by angry demonstrators to set fire to his ship and
its cargo of tea. The focal point of opposition, however, was Boston, where
Governor Thomas Hutchinson, whose relatives were the local tea agents,
decided to force the issue, which resulted in the Boston Tea Party on December
16, 1773. Dutch merchants not only reaped profit from this tea
battle, but also benefited from the rebellion that followed.
THE GOLDEN ROCK
As conflict loomed, North Americans were in great need of gunpowder,
arms, and all sorts of other provisions essential for opposing British colonial
rule. In 1774 two Boston agents were in Amsterdam procuring arms and
powder for the rebels. In August the American vessel Polly, out of Nantucket,
arrived in Amsterdam and took on 300,000 pounds of powder. In
October a Rhode Island vessel took on assorted firearms and forty small
cannon. On October 19, 1774, the British government expressly prohibited
the exportation of warlike stores and ammunition to the American colonies.
A few days later the HMS Welles appeared before the Texel roadstead (the
entrance to the Amsterdam harbor), effectively blockading the Rhode Island
ship.
Under British pressure, the States General forbade the export
of war supplies to the rebels. A better way to get ammunition to the Americas
was to load it for the coast of Africa and then take it to St. Eustatius,
where ‘‘their cargoes, being the most proper assortments, are instantly
bought up by the American agents.’’ By the end of 1774 it was noted that
there had lately been a prodigious increase in the trade from St. Eustatius.
Nathaniel Shaw Jr., a New London merchant, for instance, ordered via his
agent Peter van der Voort and Company in December 1774: ‘‘You must
send me Eight or Nine Casks of [gun]powder by the first opper. If I Should
want Four or Five hundred Casks do you think it may be had in St. Eustatia
or Curraso [Curac¸ao].’’
In Zeeland, the province specializing in the West Africa trade, the gun powder mill Eendracht increased its production from 170,848 pounds in
1776 to 367,535 pounds in 1779. In 1777 Snouck Hurgronje and Louisijn
of Flushing shipped in the Hoop 3,000 barrels of gunpowder and 750 firearms
to St. Eustatius. Close contacts between the rebels and kindred spirits in the Dutch Republic
were forged.
The Committee of Secret Correspondence, chaired by
Benjamin Franklin, appointed Charles W. F. Dumas as its correspondent
in The Hague in 1775. Franklin had visited the Netherlands in 1766 and
probably met Dumas then. Dumas was a great American enthusiast and
maintained close contacts with members of the Patriotic party, including
Joan Derk van der Capellen tot den Pol and E. F. van Berckel, who was
Amsterdam’s highest executive officer. These contacts also included the
Amsterdam merchant Jean de Neufville, who had traded with North
America long before the war. In 1757 a Mr. De Neufville had corresponded
with James Duncan of Rhode Island. De Neufville was appalled by the
severance of these trade connections and saw America as threatened with
‘‘absolute slavery.’’
On March 20, 1775, the Second Virginia Convention met and decided
to arm the militia. Several members of the convention were in contact with
a ‘‘reputable merchant’’ who not only agreed with their cause, but was in an
exceptional location to be of aid to the Virginia colony: St. Eustatius. A
transaction for gunpowder with Isaac van Dam, a New Yorker of Dutch
descent, soon followed. Van Dam became the rebels’ principal agent on
the island. More transactions followed. The New York merchants Philip
Livingston, John Alsop, and Francis Lewis, on behalf of the Committee
of Secret Correspondence, chartered the sloop Lucretia, master Cornelius
Haight. He took a cargo of flour to the West Indies and shipped back 388
kegs of gunpowder from St. Eustatius in December 1775. After van Dam’s
death on March 7, 1776, Abraham van Bibber of the Baltimore firm Lux
and Bowley replaced him. Ammunition, arms, and powder were obtained not only from ships calling at St. Eustatius, but also from French islands.102
Isaac Gouverneur, correspondent for Willing and Morris of Philadelphia,
presented the Provincial Congress of New York with some cannons in October
1775. Later the house of Curson and Gouverneur became the agent
of the Continental Congress on St. Eustaius. The firm had extensive contacts
with merchant houses in the Dutch Republic, including Nicolaas and
Jacob van Staphorst, Alexander Honingman, Robout van Loon, Johannes
Hoffma, and Jacob van Bunschoten, all of Amsterdam, and Hassell and
Tasker of Rotterdam.
The British, French, and Prussian diplomatic representative
in The Hague, Sir Joseph Yorke, abbe´ Desnoyers (charge´ d’affaires
1774–76), and Friedrich Wilhelm von Thulemeier (1733–1811;
extraordinaris envoye´ 1763–88), were aware of this. The illicit trade soon led to an effort to establish legitimate trade contacts
between the republic and the rebelling colonists. In 1776 Jean de Neufville
met in Aix-la-Chapelle (Aachen) William Lee, a brother of Arthur Lee,
the American ambassador to Paris, and his secretary, Samuel Witham
Stockton, and told them of his hope of reestablishing the trade. They
drafted a plan for a treaty of commerce and amity. Upon De Neufville’s return to Amsterdam, he received the strongest encouragement from
Dumas, Van de Capellen, and Van Berckel. The burgomasters of Amsterdam
endorsed the plan and Van Berckel signed this letter of intent on September
4, 1778, along with William Lee and De Neufville. Dumas sent a
copy to Franklin in Paris and another to Congress.
In the meantime business boomed at St. Eustatius, which by now had
become the Golden Rock (see graph 4). During the early 1770s, 2,000 ships
visited the island annually. By 1779 that number had risen to 3,500. Sugar, however, was no longer king. In 1779 alone over 12,000 hogsheads
of tobacco and 1.5 million ounces of indigo were shipped to St. Eustatius
from North America, in exchange for arms, powder, naval stores, and other
goods from Europe. That year the export was valued at 3.7 million pesos,
or 9.25 million guilders.
Gunpowder generated exorbitant profits—in excess
of 120 percent. No wonder merchants were lured into this high-risk
but lucrative trade. Dozens of Dutch merchant houses were active in the
elusive business of arms shipments to the rebels, but three were of particular
importance: Crommelin and Zonen, Nicolaas and Jacob van Staphorst, and
De Neufville and Zoon. Admiral Rodney would later declare:
‘‘This rock [St. Eustatius] of only six miles in length and three in breadth has done England more harm than all the arms of her most potent enemies and alone supported the infamous American rebellion.’’ [Jameson, ‘‘St. Eustatius in the American Revolution,’’ 695]
A consequence of the
Amsterdam treaty was the appointment of Henry Laurens, a South Carolina
planter and merchant who had served as president of the Continental
Congress and as the American minister to the United Provinces. He was
commissioned to borrow $10 million, but it took him almost a year to wrap up his business and set sail for Holland.
On September 3, 1780, the packet
Mercury, bound for the United Provinces from Philadelphia, was intercepted
by HMS Vestal. On the approach of the Vestal’s boarding party, and
in full view of the crew, Laurens threw a weighted bag overboard, one that
remained afloat long enough to be retrieved. It contained the Amsterdam
Pact of Amity and Commerce, as well as correspondence between American
and Dutch officials concerning financial aid to the colonies.110
The British had their smoking gun. Allegations laid before the House of
Commons claimed that ‘‘[St. Eustatius] had given every protection to our
rebellious subjects [in North America].’’ A Mr. Eyre advocated ‘‘vigorous
measures’’ against Holland. It was notorious, he stressed, that the Dutch
were not only busily employed in carrying naval stores to the French, but in
more than one instance they had openly countenanced the Americans in
their revolt. He advised the seizure of St. Eustatius, ‘‘that abominable nest
of pirates,’’ the heart of the Dutch contraband trade.
On December 20,
1780, the British government sent to Ambassador Yorke a manifesto severing
diplomatic relations with the States General. Five days later war
between Great Britain and the Dutch Republic was declared. Yorke recommended his government capture St. Eustatius in order to sever the intercourse
between Holland and the American rebels. St. Eustatius’ end came within months of Britain’s declaration of war
against the Dutch Republic. Unaware of the breakdown of Anglo-Dutch
relations, Dutch Rear-Admiral William Crul had left the United Provinces
for the West Indies with a squadron of eleven ships in October 1780, planning
to disperse and sail to different Dutch settlements when they reached
the other side of the ocean. Crul left an undefended St. Eustatius on February
1, 1781, to convoy twenty-three merchantmen back to the Netherlands.
Two days later Admiral Rodney took the island and captured the Crul convoy.
Rodney confiscated two hundred ships, along with goods in the island’s
warehouses, the estimated value of which was three million pound sterling.
More than two thousand Americans were taken prisoner. The British derived
little long-term benefit from their victory, however.113 They dispatched
the bulk of their spoils for home in a thirty-four-merchant-ship
convoy commanded by Commodore William Hotham. Only eight of the
merchant vessels, together with the warships, made it to England. A French
fleet captured the rest. Then, in November 1781, a French force under
Governor Franc¸ois-Claude-Amour de Bouille´ captured St. Eustatius. The
island returned to Dutch rule, but its relationship with North America had
changed for good, as the bulk of the fighting shifted from North America
to the Caribbean. No longer was it the Golden Rock that fed the American
Revolution. Once again it faced the challenge of surviving an imperial
war.
CONCLUSION
During the last two decades of the seventeenth century, helped by a relative
healthy environment and encouraged by a Dutch free-trade ideology,
St. Eustatius shifted from a plantation colony to an emporium. The island’s trading history evolved in several phases. From the late seventeenth
century until 1729, the island was an international slave market. After 1730
sugar, especially from the French West Indian islands, was king. North
American provisions and building materials were essential to procuring the
sugar from the French and British West Indies. Furthermore, the islanders
were dependent on the carrying capacity of the Americans. Relations with
North America intensified after the Seven Years’ War, resulting in St. Eustatius’
becoming the ‘‘Golden Rock’’ during the 1770s. The economic ebbs
and flows of the island emporium were affected by external developments
in the Atlantic world, in particular the wars of Great Britain, first with the
French, then with the North Americans. In time of war St. Eustatius’ trade
flourished. In peacetime commerce stagnated, especially the export of sugar.
St. Eustatia’s unique place in world history as a free port defying mercantilism
was well known and acclaimed. The French philosopher Guillaume
Thomas Franc¸ois Raynal (1713–96), for instance, in 1770 presented an
enticing image of the Golden Rock. For him the minuscule island, aided by
illicit trade and contraband, prevailed over the odious yoke of monopoly
that weighed heavily on the neighboring islands. Raynal recognized the
island as the general emporium of the French Antilles, and during the Seven
Years’ War merchants from a variety of nations met up with one another in
its roadstead, under the warranty of freedom of access granted to one and
all, irrespective of country of origin.
A similar image was depicted in 1776 by the political economist Adam
Smith (1723–90) in his Wealth of Nations, when he pointed out the economic
fertility of the barren Dutch islands:
‘‘Curacao and [St.] Eustatia, the two principal islands belonging to the Dutch, are free ports open to the ships of all nations; and this freedom, in the midst of better colonies whose ports are open to those of one nation only, has been the great cause of the prosperity of those two barren islands’’
For another Scottish economist, Adam Anderson (1692/3–1765), the island stood as tangible proof of how, in a condition of free trade, profitable
commerce could thrive in conditions of natural sterility or even warfare:
‘‘barren and contemptible in itself, [St. Eustatius] had long been the seat of
a very great and lucrative commerce, and might, indeed, be considered as
the grand free port of the West Indies and America, and as a general magazine
to all nations. Its richest harvests were, however, during the seasons of
warfare among its neighbours, in consequence of its neutral state and situation,
with its unbounded as well as unrestrained freedom of trade.’’
For North Americans, St. Eustatius played an important role in defying
the British Empire. Initially, the free port of St. Eustatius was a market for
procuring raw materials for the distilling industry, consumer goods, and
cash. The trade helped the Americans ease their negative balance of payments
with Britain. During the Seven Years’ War, the island supported the
North Americans in their forbidden trade with the French islands. Afterward,
Dutch merchant houses helped supply the burgeoning North American
consumer market, especially with tea. St. Eustatius was in the thick of
this illicit trade. Finally, the Golden Rock supported the American revolutionaries
with vital arms and ammunition. All necessary provisions continued
to reach the colonies through St. Eustatius, supplied not only by enemy
and neutral nations but also by British merchants working out of the homeland
and the British Antilles. For this aid, however, the islanders had to
pay a high price: the pillage by Rodney in 1781. The long-standing trade
contacts between the North American British colonies and St. Eustatius
were created by a combination of material needs and ideological beliefs
about free trade. In the words of the historian of Bermuda’s colonial trade,
Michael Jarvis, the ‘‘blooming of St. Eustatius from a ‘useless island’ into a
busy international emporium nicknamed ‘the Golden Rock’ testifies to
Dutch wisdom and the flaws in Spanish, French, and British mercantilism.’’
______________
The Dutch bedeviled the Brits in the 17th and early half of the 18th century. The Dutch were the great mercantile empire of Europe in the 17th century, in many ways establishing a model of economic colonization that the Brits soon adopted, albeit with more taxation. From 1674 until the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War of 1781, Dutch fleets and possessions were, by treaty, left alone by the Brits, at least so long as the Dutch weren't caught red handed in British waters violating British mercantile laws.
At any rate, what I learned this morn was about the importance of a small Dutch possession in the Caribbean. The Dutch established it as a "free port," with no port fees. It was the hub for smuggling throughout the Caribbean, and of incredible importance through 1781 to the Americans in the Revolution:
In 1757 St Eustatius became the first of a series of free ports set up by the Dutch in the Caribbean. The island is placed strategically at the confluence of the Caribbean and the Atlantic. The island measured only four by eight kilometers (less than eight square miles), but during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries this speck in the sea became famous in every European and American household for the goods that were exported to and imported from the 200 warehouses clustered on the shore of Oranjestad [Port Orange], its main city. Its "Long Beach" become so crowded that its bulging buildings had been built with Netherlands expertise on dyke-like jetties out into its Bay.
A Scottish traveler, Janet Schaw, arrived in St. Eustatius just before the outbreak of the revolution. She went on a shopping spree, noting with delight that she could obtain French gloves and English "thread-stockings" more cheaply in the island than she could at home. Rich embroideries, painted silks, flowered muslims, and a vast assortment of clothes and goods, "for in every store you can find every thing."6
St Eustatius, it seems, was the high seas precursor of the modern shopping mall! It was the eighteenth century equivalent of Hong Kong.
Until the American Revolution, merchants from the Netherlands, Denmark, France, Britain, Spain, the American colonies and the other Americas could all be found trading in that international free-trade emporium. The volume of international trade that funneled through that port can be judged by the fact that in 1779 well over 3000 ships from Europe, Africa and the Americas weighed anchor in Oranjestad's bay to load and unload merchandise. As many as twenty ships might arrive on a single day and two hundred ships might be in port at any one time! In that year, for example, sugar production on the island totaled 500,000 pounds, but official port records show that shipments of sugar from the island totaled 25,000,000 pounds! So lucrative was the commerce that the island was nick-named "The Golden Rock."
________________________
At any rate, it seems that Eustatius was primarily a Jewish enclave. And indeed, the most interesting of the online histories of Eustatius comes from the Hebrew History Foundation, entitled "Rescuers of the American Revolution." Unfortunately, British Admiral Rodney made the Jews of Eustatius pay dearly indeed.
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In the 18th century, St. Eustatius' geographical placement in the middle of Danish (Virgin Islands), British (Jamaica, St. Kitts, Barbados, Antigua), French (St. Domingue, Ste. Lucie, Martinique, Guadeloupe) and Spanish (Cuba, Santo Domingo, Puerto Rico) territories—its large harborage, neutrality and status from 1756 as a free port with no customs duties were all factors in it becoming a major point of transhipment of goods, and a locus for trade in contraband.[5] Its economy developed by ignoring the monopolistic trade restrictions of the British, French and Spanish islands. St. Eustatius's economy, under the Dutch, flourished. The island became known as The Golden Rock.
Edmund Burke said of the island in 1781:
Edmund Burke said of the island in 1781:
It has 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 commerceOn November 16, 1776, Captain Isaiah Robinson of the 14-gun American brig Andrew Doria,[9] sailed into the anchorage below St. Eustatius' Fort Oranje. Robinson announced his arrival by firing a thirteen gun salute, one gun for each of the thirteen American colonies in rebellion against Britain. Governor Johannes de Graaff replied with an eleven-gun salute from the cannons of Fort Oranje. International protocol required a two gun less acknowledgment of a sovereign flag. The Andrew Doria flew the Continental Colors of the fledgling United States. It was the first international acknowledgment of American independence.[Note 1] The Andrew Doria had arrived to purchase munitions for the American Revolutionary forces. She was also carrying a copy of the Declaration of Independence which was presented to Governor De Graaff. An earlier copy had been captured on the way to Holland by the British. It was wrapped in documents that the British believed to be a strange cipher. In reality the documents were written in Yiddish, to Jewish merchants in Holland.The island sold arms and ammunition to anyone willing to pay. It was one of the few places from which the young United States could obtain military stores. The good relationship between St. Eustatius and the United States resulted in the noted "First Salute".
The British took the incident seriously. Britain protested bitterly against the continuous trade between the United Colonies and St. Eustatius. In 1778, Lord Stormont claimed in Parliament that, "if Sint Eustatius had sunk into the sea three years before, the United Kingdom would already have dealt with George Washington". Nearly half of all American Revolutionary military supplies were obtained through St. Eustatius. Nearly all American communications to Europe first passed through the island. The trade between St. Eustatius and the United States was the main reason for the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War,1780-1784. For example, the British Admiral George Brydges Rodney, having occupied the island for Great Britain in 1781, urged the commander of the landing troops, Major-General Sir John Vaughan, to seize "Mr. Smith at the house of Jones - they (the Jews of St. Eustatius, Caribbean Antilles)[10] cannot be too soon taken care of - they are notorious in the cause of America and France." The war was disastrous for the Dutch economy.
Britain declared war on the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands on December 20, 1780. Even before officially declaring war, Britain had outfitted a massive battle fleet to take and destroy the weapons depot and vital commercial center that St. Eustatius had become. British Admiral George Brydges Rodney was appointed the commander of the battle fleet. February 3, 1781, the massive fleet of 15 ships of the line and numerous smaller ships transporting over 3,000 soldiers appeared before St. Eustatius prepared to invade. Governor De Graaff did not know about the declaration of war. Rodney offered De Graaff a bloodless surrender to his superior force. Rodney had over 1,000 cannon to De Graaff's one dozen cannon and a garrison of sixty men. De Graaff surrendered the island, but first he fired two rounds as a show of resistance in honor of Dutch Admiral Lodewijk van Bylandt, who commanded a ship of the Dutch Navy which was in the harbor.[5] Ten months later, the island was conquered by the French, allies of the Dutch in the war. The Dutch regained control over the looted and plundered island in 1784.
At its peak, St. Eustatius may have had a largely transient population of about 10,000 people. Most were engaged in commercial and maritime interests. A census list of 1790 gives a total population (free and enslaved people combined) of 8,124. Commerce revived after the British left. Many of the merchants (including the Jews) returned to the island. However, French and British occupations from 1795 disrupted trade and also the North-Americans, now globally recognised as an independent nation, had meanwhile developed their own trading network and did not need St. Eustatius anymore. The island was eclipsed by other Dutch ports, such as those on the islands of Curaçao and Sint Maarten. During the last years of the 18th century Statia developed trade in bay rum. The economy declined in the early 19th century. From about 1795, the population declined and in 1948 the population stood at a mere 921.
Jewish population[edit]
The first record of Jews on St. Eustatius dates to 1660. The Jews were mainly merchants with significant international trading and maritime commercial ties. Jews were captains, owners or co-owners with Christian partners, of significant numbers of ships originating out of St. Eustatius. A few were island plantation owners. Jews were estimated[by whom?] to have comprised at least 10% of the permanent population of St. Eustatius.[11]
Ten days after the island surrendered to the British on 3 February 1781, Rodney ordered that the entire Jewish male adult population assemble for him. They were rounded up and thirty one heads of families were summarily deported to St. Kitts without word or mercy to their dependents. The choice of exiling the Jews to St. Kitts was significant. The nearby British Island of Nevis had a large Jewish population and an established community capable of aiding the refugees. St. Kitts did not have any Jewish community or population. The other seventy-one were locked up in the weighing house in Lower Town where they were held for three days.
Expulsion of Americans followed on 23 February, of merchants from Amsterdam on 24 February and of other Dutch citizens and Frenchmen on 5 March. The crews of the Dutch ships Rodney took were sent to St. Kitts for imprisonment - after first stripping them of all their belongings. Because of their maltreatment, many perished. The Jews were well received on St. Kitts - where many knew them as their respected business partners. They were supported in their protest against their deportation and it proved successful. They were allowed to return to St. Eustatius after a few weeks to observe all their property being sold at small fractions of the original value after having been confiscated by Rodney.
The resentment the British felt for the population of this island that helped the Americans to defeat them translated in a harsh treatment of the inhabitants. There were numerous complaints about "individuals of both sexes being halted in the streets and being body searched in a most scandalous way."[12] The eighty-year-old member of the island council and captain of the civic guard, Pieter Runnels did not survive the rough treatment he received aboard Rodney's ship. He, a member of one of the island's oldest established families, became the only civilian casualty of the British occupation. British soldiers prevented the family and others paying their last respects at his funeral from using the water from the family's own cistern.
The tomb of former governor Jan de Windt was broken open by British soldiers, all the silver decorations stolen off the caskets, and the bodies of the governor and his wife exposed - without any of Rodney's officers interfering.
Rodney singled out the Jews: the harshness was reserved for them alone. He did not do the same to French, Dutch, Spanish or even the American merchants on the island. He permitted the French to leave with all their possessions. Rodney was concerned that his unprecedented behavior would be repeated upon British islands by French forces when events were different. However, Governor De Graaff was also deported.
As he did with all other warehouses, Rodney confiscated the Jewish warehouses, looted Jewish personal possessions, even cutting the lining of their clothes to find money hidden in there. When Rodney realized that the Jews might be hiding additional treasure, he dug up the Jewish cemetery.
Later, in February 1782, Edmund Burke, the leading opposition member of the Whig Party, upon learning of Rodney's actions in St. Eustatius, rose to condemn Rodney's anti-Semitic, avaricious vindictiveness in Parliament:
"...and a sentence of general beggary pronounced in one moment upon a whole people. A cruelty unheard of in Europe for many years… The persecution was begun with the people whom of all others it ought to be the care and the wish of human nations to protect, the Jews… the links of communication, the mercantile chain… the conductors by which credit was transmitted through the world…a resolution taken (by the British conquerors) to banish this unhappy people from the island. They suffered in common with the rest of the inhabitants, the loss of their merchandise, their bills, their houses, and their provisions; and after this they were ordered to quit the island, and only one day was given them for preparation; they petitioned, they remonstrated against so hard a sentence, but in vain; it was irrevocable."
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The Jews of St. Eustatius: Rescuers of the American Revolution
t. Eustatius, Caribbean Arsenal of the American Revolution
St Eustatius [In Dutch: Sint Eustatius, and now named simply Statia] is one of the Netherlands Antilles islands, along with St Maarten, Saba, Curaçao, and Bonaire.
The island earned a unique place in the annals of the history of the United States and in the hearts of Americans. The first shots in recognition of the United States as a sovereign power were fired in a congratulatory exchange between the island's Fort Orange and the American Brigantine Andria Doria.
"White puffs of gun smoke over a turquoise sea followed by the boom of cannon rose from the unassuming port on the diminutive Dutch island of St. Eustatius in the West Indies on November 16th 1776. The guns of Fort Orange on St. Eustatius were returning the ritual salute on entering a foreign port of an American vessel, the Andrea 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 to officially 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."1
"Captain Isaiah Robinson fired a salute of 13 guns... A few minutes later the salute was returned by 9 (or 11) guns by order of the Dutch governor of the island. At the time, a 13 gun salute would have represented the 13 newly-formed United States; the customary salute rendered to a republic at that time was 9 guns. This has been called the "first salute" to the American flag."2
In 1939 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt presented a plaque to St. Eustatius. Mounted on the ruins of Fort Orange, it 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 Graff, Governor of St. Eustatius in reply to a national gun salute fired by the U.S. Brig-of-war Andria Doria.. Here the sovereignty of the United States was first formally acknowledged... to a national vessel by a foreign official."3
Acknowledgment of United States sovereignty was significant, but it was the smallest part of the service the island's inhabitants rendered the United States. One of only four vessels in the Revolutionary navy, the small but swift brigantine Andrea Doria was dispatched on October 23rd, 1776 on a diplomatic mission to deliver a copy of the Declaration of Independence to the governor of St.
Eustatius and to return with a cargo of armaments. The ship proceeded to load munitions for delivery to the American rebels. "The Andrea Doria, loaded with armaments, successfully ran the British blockade and docked in her home port of Gloucester City, New Jersey, across the river from Philadelphia."4 That shipment and the hundreds of shipments that followed it from St. Eustatius were major factors in the outcome of the American Revolution. The salutary exchange between the vessel and the port authorities was apt, for "during the American War of Independence, St. Eustatius served as a major arsenal for the revolution."
In 1757 St Eustatius became the first of a series of free ports set up by the Dutch in the Caribbean. The island is placed strategically at the confluence of the Caribbean and the Atlantic. The island measured only four by eight kilometers (less than eight square miles), but during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries this speck in the sea became famous in every European and American household for the goods that were exported to and imported from the 200 warehouses clustered on the shore of Oranjestad [Port Orange], its main city. Its "Long Beach" become so crowded that its bulging buildings had been built with Netherlands expertise on dyke-like jetties out into its Bay.
A Scottish traveler, Janet Schaw, arrived in St. Eustatius just before the outbreak of the revolution. She went on a shopping spree, noting with delight that she could obtain French gloves and English "thread-stockings" more cheaply in the island than she could at home. Rich embroideries, painted silks, flowered muslims, and a vast assortment of clothes and goods, "for in every store you can find every thing."6
St Eustatius, it seems, was the high seas precursor of the modern shopping mall! It was the eighteenth century equivalent of Hong Kong.
Until the American Revolution, merchants from the Netherlands, Denmark, France, Britain, Spain, the American colonies and the other Americas could all be found trading in that international free-trade emporium. The volume of international trade that funneled through that port can be judged by the fact that in 1779 well over 3000 ships from Europe, Africa and the Americas weighed anchor in Oranjestad's bay to load and unload merchandise. As many as twenty ships might arrive on a single day and two hundred ships might be in port at any one time! In that year, for example, sugar production on the island totaled 500,000 pounds, but official port records show that shipments of sugar from the island totaled 25,000,000 pounds!
Among those vessels were those of Aaron Lopez, of Newport, Rhode Island. Lopez maintained Samson Mears as an agent on St Eustatius. As the British occupied Newport, Lopez fled the city and continued his commercial activities from Leicester, Connecticut. Lopez' Sephardic fellow-countrymen on St Eustatius proved invaluable for obtaining war materials for the American rebels from Spain, Portugal, France, Holland, and even from England!
So lucrative was the commerce that the island was nick-named "The Golden Rock." Every European power lusted for possession of the bustling trading post. It changed hands no less than 22 times over two centuries as the French, British, and Dutch wrested possession of the tiny island from each other. In 1816 the "Emporium of the Western World" became permanently Dutch.
Settlement of the Sephardim
The island's name has since been shortened to Statia. Despite its rich and meaningful history, Statia is today the least known of the Windward islets. It has one of the most distinctive profiles of the Caribbean islands. The hilly north end rises to almost a thousand feet from the central plain, and drops precipitously down to the sea. The southern area is dominated by a massive silhouette of the Quill, the crater of an extinct volcano. The lush green rain forest vegetation within the crater contrasts with the gray ancient lava flow on its exterior, wending its way down to a golden-sanded beach. The westward, Caribbean side is now thick with tall palms, breadfruit trees and banana groves. The arid southern side hosts a variety of xerophytic plants (plants needing little water). The rest of the island is covered with tough and thorny bushes and trees.
The Caribs called the island Alo, which means "cashew tree." Christopher Columbus sighted the island in 1493, and named it after St. Anastasia.
The French and English both claimed sovereignty over the island in 1625, and the Dutch staked a claim in 1632. The island remained basically unsettled until the mid-seventeenth century, when the Dutch, based on Curaçao, consolidated their Caribbean empire by establish-ing a viable presence on it. Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese Jews were among the first settlers of St. Eustatius. Many of the Jewish settlers came in 1655, and physical evidence of their arrival can still be found in the sands of its beaches. In the seventeenth century Jewish glassmakers in Amsterdam were producing a particular kind of blue beads,7 most valuable for trading abroad. Travel brochures now note that "A big deal on the beaches is searching for Statia's fabled blue-glass beads... found only on Statia."
Other Jews soon followed. They became ship owners, planters of sugar cane, and producers of rum and molasses. They arrived from Recife (Brazil), Suriname, Barbados, Holland, and France. Jewish emigration to St. Eustatius burgeoned in the period 1757-1813, when the Dutch authorities, in order to bolster its holdings abroad, issued grants in Dutch guilders to Portuguese Sephardim for leaving Amsterdam to Dutch possessions abroad against the guarantee that they were not to return in less than 20 years. The grants varied according to the size of the family, averaging about 150 guilders..8 Most grant recipients went to the Caribbean, and many ended up in St. Eustatius. Holland was wise in dispatching these Sephardim to open new avenues for trade, for they were no ordinary emigres, but hard-working, knowledgeable entrepreneurs who had helped make Spain and Portugal great powers. They came bolstered with commercial expertise and world-wide contacts, and they made Statia into the western world's emporium
The Sephardim were joined on Statia by enterprising Ashkenazim from the American continent. Over a hundred Jewish families came to constitute the core of the mercantile establishment on the island
The Statia community "included a community of Jewish traders and merchants, a bubbling kettle of Sephardic Jews - Spanish and Portuguese refugees from the murderous Inquisition - and Ashkenazim, those Jews of German and East European descent... For trade or social purposes both groups could offer a range of European languages but among themselves the Sephardim spoke Ladino, the admixture of old Castilian and Hebrew, while the Ashkenazim made use of Yiddish."
"...It is estimated that this community consisted of 101 [adult, male] men and their families. With the material and moral assistance of their brethren of Caraçao and Amsterdam, the Jews of Eustatius built a synagogue to which they gave the title Honen Dalim... The One who is merciful to the poor. The still impressive shell of that building is here... [as well as] their own goat-cropped burial place, with the great mound of the Quill for background; and, for those who pushed the bier along that sad road, a glimpse of the sea which brought them to this last haven."9
The synagogue and its archives and the records of other Judaic institutions and families were destroyed during the British occupation of Statia in 1781, as will be seen below. The British ransacked and razed the island during their occupation, leaving little but ashes. It can be assumed however, that the culture of the Statia Jews was similar to that of the Jews on the leeward islands. We can therefore construct a picture of that community from the surviving records of neighboring islands.
Traders and settlers from all of Europe and America came to profit from Statia's bustling business, but the Jews, Sephardim and Ashkenazim, remained the largest and most effectual group of the island.
The Jews, like the other white residents of the Antilles islands, employed slaves. From the outset, however, the relationship of the Jews with the black slaves appear to have been qualitatively different, as the records of the Dutch Leeward Council and Assembly demonstrates. A difference between the Jewish and Christian relations with the slave population is evidenced in an act of August 31, 1694, passed by the Assembly. The act was specifically directed at the Jews and states that it is:
"'An Act against Jews ingrossing Commodities imported in the Leeward islands, and trading with the slaves belonging to the inhabitants of the same.' The important role the Jews played in the introduction of sugar planting and sugar trading in Nevis prompted the repeal of the same act on 10 December 1701, when the Leeward Islands Council met in Nevis, the reason given as the "many grievances sustained by reason from the said act.'"
The Jews continued to deal with slaves at the markets on a person-to-person level. This led the island's Christian minister, Reverend Robinson, to disdainfully set his constituency apart from the Jews and from Christians who deigned to follow the example of the Jews. "...A description, by Nevis historian Karen Fog Olwig, of the market where slaves sold their products, explains that... "It is no longer acceptable for the white population to trade at the markets, perhaps because they were held primarily by slaves, and on Sundays, and Robertson noted that only Jews and lesser sort of Christians traded with slaves.'"10
The Problem of Supply for the Rebels
Military histories devote their attention to battles, personalities and political maneuvers. Little attention is paid to logistics, yet the ability to conduct war and to achieve military success hinges on keeping an army supplied with food, clothes, tents, and especially munitions and ordnance.
Obtaining, and then maintaining a flow of military equipment and supplies was crucial to the conduct of the American Revolution. Time and time again, the victorious conclusion of a battle or of a phase of the Revolutionary War hung precariously upon the availability of munitions and ordnance. From the very outset of American resistance to British rule, this speck of an island played a pivotal role in providing the means by which a ragged assembly of American patriots ultimately won victory over a well-established and well-equipped army. The success of the Revolution can be attributed in large measure to the activity of the traders of the tiny island of St. Eustatius.
At the outset of the revolt against British rule, there were few facilities for the production of arms and munitions in the colonies. "Long before the Second Continental Congress assumed responsibility for the support of the Continental Army, colonial governments had looked to foreign markets for the procurement of essential military supplies. When the First Continental Congress met in September 1774, few colonists anticipated open warfare. Yet patriots, acting in provincial congresses and conventions, initiated preparatory measures. Militia drilled more conscientiously, and communities of safety collected guns and ammunition at safe deposit points. The Mass-achusetts Provincial Congress in October of that year went so far as to appropriate funds to purchase powder, shot, and shells, flints, field pieces, mortars, muskets, and bayonets."
"The British government had good reason to suspect that colonists were carrying on illicit trade in gunpowder and other military stores with Holland through the island of St. Eustatius in the West Indies. Determined to prevent the accumulation of such stocks, it enacted a law prohibiting the importation of saltpeter, gunpowder, or arms into the colonies and made the law applicable also to coastwise trade."11
"Shortly after the Second Continental Congress met, it realized that to support the Continental Army it would have to import ordnance and ordnance stores. On 18 September 1775 it authorized the Secret Committee to import 500 tons of gunpowder... Congress also empowered the Secret Committee to procure forty brass 6-pounder field pieces, 20,000 musket-locks, and 10,000 stand of good arms... [It waived non-exportation agreements and] authorized the Secret Committee to export to the non-British West Indies, on behalf of the Continental Congress, as much produce... as was necessary to pay for the arms, ammunition, sulphur, and saltpeter imported. Before the end of the year the Secret Committee reported the necessity of procuring 20,000 stand of arms, 300 tons of lead, 1 million flints, 1,500 boxes of tin and assorted hardware, and 500 sheets of assorted copper for the support of the Continental Army. These orders were but the first of many to the Secret Committee."12
The colonial interests of France, Spain, and the Netherlands led them to support the American rebels. At first, the United States currency, the Continental, having no substantial backing, decreased rapidly in value, leading to the still current phrase, "Not worth a continental." This financial difficulty was resolved largely by the remarkable Haym Solomon, who raised large amounts of desperately needed cash to bolster the currency by negotiating bills of exchange with France and the Netherlands.
Solomon had already served the revolution in a significant way. He was a Polish Jew who spoke several languages, including German. He served as George Washington's spy among the British forces by becoming a translator for the British in passing orders to their Hessian troops. Zealous as a saboteur (He was caught helping French and American prisoners to escape and persuading Hessians to defect), he was apprehended and imprisoned by the British. He escaped, "leaving behind his wife and a one month old baby and belongings worth about five thousand pounds."13 Solomon returned to finance and rebuilt a fortune while putting his talents and the proceeds of his successful ventures at the disposal of members of the Continental Congress and of the Revolution.
The Continental Congress appointed Solomon Broker to the Office of Finance of the United States, and the French consulate appointed him Treasurer of the French Army in the United States.13 Solomon staked his entire fortune in support of the military effort, as did another Jewish financier, Isaac Moses, founder of the Bank of New York.
The first recorded moneys received from abroad were two million livres from Spain in hard currency and war material. Thus the United States currency, the Continental, was secured by Spanish silver dollars."14 Other financial assistance followed from Spain, ultimately reaching a value of some $6,000,000.
France was particularly helpful before it became engaged in war with Britain. Albeit the French and Dutch, at first, maintained a facade of neutrality, they nonetheless were "showing the same favors at Martinique to the rebelling American colonies as the Dutch were at St Eustatius."15
On March 15th 1776, "Joseph Reed, Washington's military secretary, wrote the general from Philadelphia: 'The French vessels begin to find their way to our ports...but their cargoes are chiefly West Indian goods - a little, very little powder merely as a cover.' Yet within three weeks a total of 121,200 pounds of powder had arrived at the colonies. On April 20ththe Virginia Gazette reported the arrival of 1,200 casks of gunpowder...The Dutch island of St. Eustatia and the French Island of Martinique were the principle entrepots of the ammunition traffic...On May 7th an American wrote from St. Eustatia that a Danish ship had arrived there with fifty tons of powder and two others were expected shortly."
"Besides these, near 20 sail are expected from Amsterdam... St. Eustatius was so important as a source of arms and munitions that [without its help] the war could not have been won."16
"Especially during the American Revolution merchants demanded better protection on the high seas. They used the Dutch island of St. Eustatius to supply the rebels with all the supplies they could pay for, stretching the concept of neutrality to the limit. It was an awkward situation because, until war [between the Netherlands and Britain] was declared in 1780, the Dutch Republic and Britain were officially allies."17
The contacts that the Caribbean Sephardim maintained with their cousins throughout the Diaspora (including in England) stood them in good stead. Trade proved so lucrative that "large numbers of British merchants were enticed into providing supplies for their country's enemies."18
The French and the Spanish, in order to keep up the appearance of neutrality, formed "a 'dummy' world trading company -- Roderique Hortelez et Cie. Based in Paris, but operated out of St. Eustatius... the Bourbon Kings of Spain and France each provided one million livres to start the company in May of 1776, six weeks before the Declaration of Independence."19 This bogus business became the means by which the French and Spanish Courts "would assist the Americans by sending, in the fall of 1776, arms and ammunition worth 200,000 pounds sterling from Holland to St. Eustatius, Martinique or Cape Francois."18A
By the beginning of March, 1777 ten "Hortalez" ships were already engaged in bringing military supplies to the revolutionaries. Until these supplies arrived in 1777, The revolutionaries were at a disadvantage for "the rebelling Americans had been forced to rely on their own efforts to support the war."
France entered into an alliance with the United States after the victory of the Americans at Saratoga in the fall of 1777. France could no longer pretend neutrality, and French vessels and the French Caribbean islands became subject to British harassment and attack. The Dutch-owned free port of St Eustatius became all the more important as virtually the sole center for the transhipment of military supplies to the Americans.
General Washington was constantly pressing the Congress for more supplies. "I am so restrained in all my military movements," he wrote General Trumbull, "that it is impossible to undertake anything effectual." The capture of British supply ships by privateers and of weapons in the field did not assure a steady nor sufficient supply of arms. The brave attempt to locally manufacture gunpowder and ordnance proved inadequate for producing the necessary level of military goods for sustaining the war, let alone for winning it. So desperate was the need for conserving ammunition that Washington ordered that no musket was to be loaded, "until we are close to the enemy and there is a moral certainty of engaging them."20
"The Kings troops, Washington explained, never had less than 60 rounds per man in their possession. To supply a proposed 20,000-man army with the same amount of ammunition per soldier would require 400 barrels of powder. Given the small amount of powder on hand and faced with the dire prospect that an accident would leave the army destitute. Washington allowed each man no more than 12 or 15 rounds. His difficulties were increased by the arrival of militia with little or no powder."21
Liaison of the Continental Congress with St. Eustatius
Samuel Curzon, in partnership with Isaac Gouverneur Jr. , acted as the Caribbean local agent for the Continental Congress in St. Eustatius. When France formally entered into war with Britain in 1778, Martinique could no longer even pretend to be a neutral port. Until the Dutch likewise became a belligerent in 1780, St. Eustatius became almost exclusively the transhipment port for war materials destined for the United States.
The island was a favorite of the founding fathers of the American Revolution. During the perilous times for sea traffic, Benjamin Franklin employed St. Eustatius as a maildrop to assure delivery abroad.
The Fate of the Jews of Statia
The British harbored a seething resentment against the Dutch since the brash salute was made to the fledgling American flag from St. Eustatius. The British had informed the Dutch "that it must formally disavow the salute to the rebels, punish the culprit and recall and dismiss the Governor of St. Eustatius.. 'His Majesty will not delay one instant to take such measures as he think due to the interest and dignity of his crown.'"22 It was an empty threat, and Britain realized by 1781 that the war against the revolutionaries could only be won if the lifeline from St. Eustatius to the continent would be severed.
The festering hostility the British had against Holland finally turned into war, and the pretense of the neutral status of the Dutch possessions was no longer a deterrent to British attack upon Dutch possessions. On January 27, 1781 British Admiral Sir George Rodney was informed that Britain was now at war with the United Provinces (Holland) and recommended as "first objects of attack St. Eustatius and St. Martin."23
Britain's forces in the United States were then suffering severe setbacks, yet so vital was severance of the flow of military material from St. Eustatius considered that two of Britain's most redoubtable military figures were consigned to the campaign against St Eustatius with a formidable fleet and force. Admiral Sir George Brydges Rodney and Major-General Sir John Vaughan were dispatched to raid and occupy the island. Rodney's name "ranked with the names of the Royal navy's most illustrious figures, Nelson, Blake and Hawke and it is honoured in St. Paul's Cathedral..."24
Major-General Vaughan had served in England, Scotland, and in Germany in the Seven Years' War. The General earned a somewhat dubious reputation in the war against the American revolutionaries by burning Kingston.
"The admiral's own force represented six hundred... guns, the ninety-ton Sandwich being accompanied by five seventy-fours -Terrible, Torbay, Shrewsbury, Resolution and Belliqueux. With these vessels were the Princessa, of seventy guns, the Prince William (64) and the Convert (32) plus fireships and Bomb vessels expedited by Laforey. Shortly, Rodney would add Sir Samuel's six ships -Barfleur (90), the four 74's Alfred, Alcide, Invincible and Monarch and the Sybil (28)... The most modest estimate suggests a minimum of ten thousand seamen crewing the British ships but in all probability their numbers were considerably greater. Each vessel of any consequence also carried a detachment of Marines with Vaughan's reinforced army now in the order of three thousand souls."25
The lone Dutch frigate defending Statia could not even consider taking on the fifteen great British warships. Nor could a token garrison of sixty soldiers consider resisting the massive British force that debarked onto Statia.
The British fleet arrived on a Saturday morning as the Jews were at Sabbath prayer in their synagogue. The virtually defenseless island succumbed quickly to the British forces. Rodney confiscated all the merchandise stuffing the warehouses, valued at three to four million pounds sterling. Vaughan wrote that "150 Sail of Ships and Vessels of all Sorts" in the harbor were likewise seized along with their cargos. Included was the Dutch Frigate of War of 38 guns and a number of American vessels.
"The British commanders engaged in the indiscriminate plunder of St. Eustatius. They continued to fly the Dutch Flag over St. Eustatius to trick unsuspecting enemy ships of which 'the largest proportion belonged to America.'"26
The North American agents were sent to England as prisoners. The English and Danish merchants were stripped of all their property and extradited. The French agents were treated more circumspectly, for a powerful French fleet was deployed in the Caribbean. The French were shipped off to Martinique and Guadaloupe. Rodney instructed that they be permitted to carry with them '...their families and their household furniture."
"The indiscriminate plunder of the British commanders at St. Eustatius had violated the spirit and customs of the laws of war which were 'generally understood' to allow a conquered people 'the enjoyment of their property' as subjects of the victorious state. This was at least the convention toward fellow Europeans... This was the practice of the French toward the occupied British islands during the American Revolution. The British commanders had set a precedent which critics feared the French might imitate if any more of the British islands 'should hereafter have the misfortune of falling into the Enemy's power.'"27
The Jews, however, were isolated, brutally beaten, and robbed of everything they had. "Rodney singled out the Jews... and ordered them stripped for cash or precious stones or whatever might be secreted in their clothing. Acting out a common antipathy with unnecessary zeal, he ordered the Jews expelled on one days notice, without notice to their families or access to their homes."28 8,000 pounds sterling was extracted from their persons. "The men of the community were rounded up, their wives and families being denied news of them or access to them, and assembled in Statia's weigh-house pending deportation. ... the prisoners were brutally handled and so thoroughly searched for concealed money that their clothing was ripped apart in the process."29
Thirty Jewish men were deported to the island of St Kitts. "The rest were locked in a weighing house for three days when they were released just in time to witness the auction of their properties."30
"Rodney's behavior... suggests anti-semitism... Earlier in his career as a naval commander in Jamaica, Rodney had lashed out against the Jews who conducted a 'Pernicious and Contraband Trade' at Kingston where he insisted that 'particularly the Jews' traded illegally with the Spanish. He confiscated two of their ships which were condemned for sale in the vice-admiralty court. The 'Sons of Israel, who are possessed of most of the ready money in [Jamaica]'met with a lawyer and considered making an appeal. None of the correspondence of the other naval commanders in the Caribbean made such special mention of the Jews."31
Rodney's hatred for the Jews found expression in his letters. He urges Vaughan on 13 February - a day of reckoning for the Jews, "they cannot too soon be taken care of - they are notorious in the cause of America and France." Again he promised to "take Care of this Nest of Villains to condign [fitting] Punishment: they deserve scourging and they shall be scourged." Once again, as for the island: "...take Care this Nest of Thieves shall be leveled with the Earth, as an Example to Perfidious States."32
Rodney's indiscriminate looting subjected him to a mass of lawsuits in Britain. The Jews (even the few that were British citizens), however, had no such recourse. So heinous was Rodney's treatment of the Jews that he came under fire in Britains Parliament by the most prestigious voice of the Opposition, Edmund Burke. After denouncing his plundering of Statia's citizens of various nationalities, Burke focused on the egregious manner in which Jews were separated and brutalized. "Speaking of the order exiling them on one day's notice without their property and without their wives and children he described their vulnerability through statelessness...'If Britons are injured,' said Burke, 'Britons have armies and laws to fly to for protection and justice. But the Jews have no such power and no such friend to depend on.'"33
Rodney's insatiable appetite for loot is amply evident from his letters. In a letter of February 6 to Vaughan, for example, he wrote: "One of my officers will wait upon you, upon a very good affair - a Rascal of a Jew has his a chest with 5000 Joes [Johannes - i.e., Portuguese gold coins] in a cane patch - a negro will shew the place, upon a promise of Freedom and reward."
Historically speaking, however, Rodney's greed proved to be the determining factor in the last significant battle of the American Revolution: Washington's campaign against the British forces under General Cornwallis.
The capture of St. Eustatius would undoubtedly affect the long-range ability of the Americans to sustain resistance. The fact was, however, that the passage of material to the Americans from St. Eustatius had already provided the Americans with the essentials for victory.
The Revolutionary's victories at King's Mountain (Oct. 7, 1780) and Cowpens (Jan. 17, 1781) sapped Cornwallis' reserves. Cornwallis regrouped, marched his 7,800 man army to the coast. He entrenched them at the Chesapeake Bay port of Yorktown, Virginia. Cornwallis expected that the British domination of the sea would provide a lifeline to military reinforcements and supplies and the means by which he could recoup his military strength.
The astute General Washington sensed an opportunity. If Chesapeake Bay could be bottled up, and British ships prevented from succoring Cornwallis, and if enough time could be gained to march in enough forces from around the colonies, an assault upon the still powerful forces under Cornwallis could be launched that could clinch the success of the Revolution.
The American navy, such as it was, was inadequate for the Job. The French, however, concerned with protecting her interest in the Antilles, had "issued orders to Admiral François de Grasse to take a strong fleet of supply to the Leeward islands, and from there... to cooperate with the generals of the Revolution in whatever military action they planned."34
Rodney's first great mistake was his failure to intercept the French fleet under Admiral de Grasse on its way to the Chesapeake Bay. Rodney was expected to intercept the French fleet, but he was so involved with looting Statia's treasures that he assigned this task to Admiral Hood, who later stated "'...What Sir George Rodney's motive for it could be I cannot conceive, unless it was to cover him at St. Eustatius.'"35
On September 5, 1781, Washington rode into Chester, a town on the Bay "when a courier from de Grasse's fleet came riding up to tell him that the Admiral had arrived in the Bay with no less than 28 ships and 3000 troops, and that they were already being disembarked and placed in contact with Lafayette." The Cornwallis trap was laid! "After announcing the stunning news to his troops, Washington turned his horse northward to inform Rochambeau, who was coming down by barge. As Rochambeau's boat neared the dock at Chester, he and his staff saw the astonishing sight of a tall man acting as if he had taken leave of his senses. He was jumping up and down and waving his arms in sweeping circles, with a hat in one hand and a white handkerchief in the other. On nearing the shore they could see that the eccentric figure was undoubtedly George Washington, ordinarily so grave and well-contained. No one had ever seen the General so unres-trained and joyful, and almost childlike in his happiness."36
In the ensuing engagement, the British Chesapeake fleet, outnumbered and out-gunned, was crippled and dispersed. De Grasse made the Chesapeake Bay his domain. In addition, naval reinforcements under the command of de Barras "slipped in from Newport, with his siege guns and his beef and his eight fresh ships."37
The blockade and a massive bombardment by land and sea of the entrapped British forces brought that campaign to an end. "While the bands played in New York, Cornwallis watched the horizon in vain for masts to appear. A dispatch from Yorktown told how he was 'in daily expec-tation of the appearance of the British fleet to relieve him."38
No sails appeared. On October 19, Cornwallis' petition for surrender was granted. His defeat determined the eventual victory of the rebels.
While Cornwallis was entrenching his army of 7,800 men at Yorktown, Rodney, his officers and men were amassing vast stores of loot from Statia's warehouses and population, and lading it aboard a convoy of 34 vessels to England and in enriching themselves in the process.
Had the British fleet under Rodney provided the critical support to the beleaguered British army at Yorktown, the war might have taken an entirely different course.
Instead, Rodney assigned a sizable part of his naval force to protecting the convoy. Rodney's occupation of Statia began on February 3rd, 1781. Already, in a report of March 5, 1781, General Vaughan advised Rodney against attempting to keep the island. Rodney did not follow Vaughan's advice. Professing to be ailing, but evidently swayed more by consolidating the riches gained than with geopolitics, he departed for England, leaving a garrison of 670 men behind on decimated Statia, and assigned a naval contingent to protect them.
The Encyclopedia Britannica notes in "American Revolution" under "The War at Sea" that "[Rodney] became so involved in the disposal of the enormous booty that he dallied at the island for six months."
"Rodney was so pre-occupied with stopping and plundering the Statian merchants that he failed to cut off the French fleet that was headed to the Chesapeake Bay. The arrival of the French fleet, together with the British army's failure to send promised reinforcements from New York, forced General Charles Cornwallis to become trapped between Washington's and Lafayette's forces and the sea at the decisive Battle of Yorktown."39
The British occupation of Statia was terminated on November 20th 1781 by a French invasion. They found the place in ashes, and virtually depopulated.
St. Eustatius played two roles in the victorious outcome of the American Revolution. It had first served as a main artery for the creation and sustenance of an American revolutionary military force. Admiral Sir George Rodney himself bitterly declared in a letter to Rear Admiral Sir Peter Parker that "had it not been for that nest of vipers... this infamous island, the American rebellion could not possibly have subsisted." In a letter to Lady Rodney he stated: "This rock had done England more harm than all the arms of her most potent enemies."40
Statia's ultimate contribution to the American Revolution was not made voluntarily. The dazzling wealth of goods in the warehouses of the island, in the ships in its harbor, and the personal possessions of its three hundred and fifty Jews diverted Rodney and the commanders under him from preventing the disaster that befell the British forces under General Cornwallis. The sacrifice made by the inhabitants of St. Eustatius, and above all, the sacrifice of the Jews among them, was a major factor in the outcome of that critical battle of the American Revolution.
The Jews of the island, Sephardim and Ashkenazim alike, had staunchly supported freedom, and were instrumental in bringing it to reality on a new continent. In a "Petition of the Philadelphia Synagogue to Council of Censors of Philadelphia," on December 23, 1782 (document 8), it was pointed out that: "The Jews of Charlestown, New York, New-Port, and other posts, occupied by British troops, have distinguishedly suffered for their attachment to Revolutionary principles; and their brethren in St. Eustatius, for the same cause."
. "Rodney set fire to St. Eustatius and burned it flat, destroying at the same time all the precious records of that golden epoch. A historical catastrophe! That is when the Sephardic Jews of St. Eustatius raised themselves from the great disaster and moved to St. Thomas."41
Jews did come back to Statia, but those who had escaped to St. Thomas built a new synagogue and began a new and illustrious history.
The ruins of the Honen Dalim synagogue on St. Eustatius now stand as a lonely monument to a glorious history.
Notes1: Barbara Tuchman, The First Salute, A View of the American Revolution, 1988, 5.
2: Department of the Navy, Origins of the Twenty-One Gun Salute, Washington Navy Yard. www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq40-1.htm
3: Hank Rice, Footnotes in History, "The First Salute." Sons of the American Revolution, June, 2000. www.flssar.org/dayjun00.htm.
4:Rice, Idem.
5: George Maria Welling, The Prize of Neutrality Rijksuniversiteir, 1998, 192.
6: .Andrew J. O'Shaughnessy, The Other Road to Yorktown, presented to The Library Company of Philadelphia May, 2000, quoting Evangeline and Charles Andrews, eds. Journal of a Lady of Quality, New Haven, 1921, 136-7.
7: Lois Rose Rose, Hebrew History Federation Fact Paper 20-I, Ornament and the Jews: Beads.
8: List of Portuguese-Sephardim who were paid to leave Amsterdam 1757-1813 by Vibeke Sealtiel Olsenn, Amsterdam 1999.
9: Ronald Hurst, The Golden Rock, Naval Institute Press, 1996, 6-7.
10: Mordechai Arbell, The Sephardim of the Island of Nevis, quoting Karen Fog Olwig, Global Culture, Island Identity - Continuity and Change in the Afro-Caribbean Community of Nevis, Chur, Switzerland, 1993, 48.
11: Erna Risch, Supplying Washington's Army, Special Studies Series, Center of Military History, United States Army, Washington D.C., 1981. Ch, 12, "Supply of Ordnance and Ordnance Stores" 334-5.
12: Risch, Ibid," 335-6.
13: "Builders of America," Wimberly Library Special Collections and www. Archives, LYSCA@Fau.edu.
14: Dr. Mildred Murry and Chuck Lampman, Spain's Role in the American Revolution From the Atlantic to the Pacific, www.Americanrevolution.org.
15: Risch, Ibid., 336
16: "Ammunition Supply In Revolutionary Virginia"; Part 2, Black Powder Journal, Vol 2, No. 3, June, July 1997.
17: Welling, Ibid., 191
18: Risch, Ibid, 337, quoting from Jameson, "St. Eustatius in the American Revolution," American Historical Review, 8:688. and: Fortescue, A History of the British Army, 3:260.
18A: Ibid. 337-8.
19: Murry and Lampman, Ibid.
20: Risch, Ibid., 345
21: Risch, Ibid., 341.
22: Tuchman, Ibid., 57.
23: Tuchman, Ibid., 94.
24: Hurst, Ibid, 7-8.
25: Hurst, Ibid. 109.
26: O'Shaughnessy, Ibid..
27: O'Shaughnessy, Ibid.
28: Tuchman, Ibid., 97.
29: Hurst, Ibid., 141.
30: O'Shaughnessy, Ibid.
31: O'Shaughnessy, Ibid.
32: Hurst, Ibid., 133 .
33: Tuchman, Ibid., 102.
34: Tuchman, Ibid., 215.
35: O'Shaughnessy, Ibid.
36: Tuchman, Ibid., 260.
37: Tuchman, Ibid., 262.
38: Tuchman, Ibid., 278.
39: U. S. Virgin Islands Update, August 8, 2000 www.usvi.net/usvi/press/html/000808.html.
40: Rabbi Bradd H. Boxman, A Short History of the Hebrew Congregation of St. Thomas, 5.
41: Rabbi Bradd H. Boxman, ibid., 8.
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