Plunder on the beach

The story, from several sources

This account blends Rothbard’s chapter with the other sources listed below and has not yet been separated into Rothbard’s own account and the fuller story. Read Rothbard’s chapter 50 for his account.

St. Eustatius was a small Dutch island that the Dutch had made a free port, open to every nation, and it became the great entrepot through which Europe’s goods reached the American rebels. Even British merchants quietly sold to Americans there, and Rothbard notes that respectable opinion saw that trade as good for both sides. Britain decided to declare war on the neutral Dutch. On 3 February 1781 Admiral Rodney arrived with a fleet and about 3,000 troops, before the island knew of the war, and the governor, with ten guns and under sixty soldiers, gave in. Rodney, a Tory and a gambler who had once fled his creditors, set out, in Rothbard’s quoted phrase, to ‘savage’ the merchants for their perfidy. His men took the ships in the bay and emptied the warehouses along the beach, millions of pounds of goods, and Rodney claimed the whole as his personal prize. Horace Walpole called it a savage and dangerous precedent, and the West Indies merchants protested that it broke contracts founded on the law of nature. Franklin said the English were taking large strides toward becoming enemies to all mankind. St. Eustatius never recovered its trade.