Netherlands Enters the War
Britain declared war on the Dutch Republic in December 1780 to stop it trading with the Americans. The Dutch had spent the war profiting from neutrality. Their island of Sint Eustatius in the Caribbean, a free port of one and a half square kilometres, had become the transshipment point through which European gunpowder, arms and cloth reached the rebel colonies — some 3,000 ships a year at the peak, and the island had fired the first foreign salute to an American flag in 1776. Amsterdam merchants were also lending money to the Congress. The immediate pretext was a draft treaty of commerce between the city of Amsterdam and the United States, found aboard a captured American ship whose envoy threw his papers overboard insufficiently weighted. The larger cause was the League of Armed Neutrality formed by Russia, Denmark and Sweden that year to resist British searches of neutral shipping, which the Dutch were about to join — and Britain declared war first so that the league's protections would not apply. Rodney took Sint Eustatius in February 1781, seized goods worth several million pounds, and spent three months disposing of the plunder instead of watching the French fleet, which sailed for the Chesapeake and decided Yorktown. The war went badly for the Dutch at sea and in Ceylon and cost them their remaining position as a maritime power. The republic recognised the United States in 1782 and lent it money. Sint Eustatius is worth a moment on its own. An island of a few thousand people with no resources became the busiest port in the Atlantic because it asked no questions, and its warehouses are still visible under the waterline where the sea has taken the shore.
- Year: 1780 CE
- Category: Political
