Sint Eustatius
Sint Eustatius, known locally as Statia, is an island in the Caribbean. It is a special municipality of the Netherlands.
The island is in the northern Leeward Islands, southeast of the Virgin Islands. Sint Eustatius is immediately to the northwest of Saint Kitts and southeast of Saba. The regional capital is Oranjestad. The island has an area of. Travelers to the island by air arrive through F. D. Roosevelt Airport.
Formerly part of the Netherlands Antilles, Sint Eustatius became a public body of the Netherlands in 2010. It is part of the Dutch Caribbean, which consists of Aruba, Bonaire, Curaçao, Saba, Sint Eustatius, and Sint Maarten. Together with Bonaire and Saba, it forms the BES Islands, also referred to as the Caribbean Netherlands.
Sint Eustatius played a major role in the American War for Independence, supplying American insurgents with war material, especially gunpowder. The British captured St. Eustatius, which was a major blow to the U.S. and its European allies. The French navy later in the war recaptured the island.
Etymology
The island's name, Sint Eustatius, is Dutch for Saint Eustace, a legendary Christian martyr, known in Spanish as San Eustaquio and in Portuguese as Santo Eustáquio or Santo Eustácio.The island's prior Dutch name was Nieuw Zeeland, named by the Zeelanders who settled there in the 1630s. It was renamed Sint Eustatius shortly thereafter.
The Arawak name for the island was Aloi "Cashew Island".
History
Early history
The earliest inhabitants were Caribs believed to have come from the Amazon basin and migrated north from Venezuela via the Lesser Antilles. In the early 20th century, settlement traces were discovered at Golden Rock and Orange Bay. Multiple pre-Columbian sites have been found on the island, most notably the site referred to as the "Golden Rock Site".While the island may have been seen by Christopher Columbus in 1493, the first recorded sighting was in 1595 by Francis Drake and John Hawkis. From the first European settlement in the 17th century, until the early 19th century, St. Eustatius changed hands twenty-one times between the Netherlands, Britain, and France.
In 1625, English and French settlers arrived on the island. In 1629, the French built a wooden battery at the present-day location of Fort Oranje. Both the English and the French left the island within a few years due to lack of drinkable water.
Dutch West India Company
In 1636, the chamber of Zeeland of the Dutch West India Company took possession of the island, reported to be uninhabited at the time. In 1678 the islands of St. Eustatius, Sint Maarten and Saba were under the direct command of the Dutch West India Company, with a commander stationed on St. Eustatius to govern all three. At the time, the island was of some importance for the cultivation of tobacco and sugar. More important was the role of St. Eustatius in the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the intercolonial slave trade.Free port and slave trade
Sint Eustatius became the most profitable asset of the Dutch West India Company and a transit point for enslaved Africans in the transatlantic slave trade. The ruins of the Waterfort on the southwest coast of the island are reminders of this past. A slave house of two floors was in the Waterfort. Plantations of sugarcane, cotton, tobacco, coffee and indigo were established on the island and worked with labor of enslaved Africans. In 1774 there were 75 plantations on the island with names such as Gilboa, Kuilzak, Zelandia, Zorg en Rust, Nooit Gedacht, Ruym Sigt and Golden Rock.In the 18th century, St. Eustatius's geographical placement in the middle of Danish, British, French and Spanish territories—along with 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 African slaves, goods, and a locus for trade in contraband. Transshipment of captured Africans to the British, French, and Spanish islands of the eastern Caribbean was significant enough that the colonists built a two-story slave house at the fortress Amsterdam to serve as a depot of enslaved Africans until around 1740. The depot housed about 400–450 people.
St. Eustatius's economy flourished under the Dutch by ignoring the monopolistic trade restrictions of the British, French and Spanish islands; it became known as the "Golden Rock". Edmund Burke said of the island in 1781:
It has no produce, no fortifications for its defence, nor martial spirit nor military regulations... Its utility was its defence. The universality of its use, the neutrality of its nature was its security and its safeguard. Its proprietors had, in the spirit of commerce, made it an emporium for all the world.... Its wealth was prodigious, arising from its industry and the nature of its commerce.
"First Salute"
The island sold arms and ammunition to anyone willing to pay, and it was therefore 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". On 16 November 1776, the 14-gun American brig Andrew Doria commanded by Captain Isaiah Robinson sailed, flying the Continental Colors of the fledgling United States, into the anchorage below St. Eustatius's 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. It was the first international acknowledgment of American independence. The Andrew Doria had arrived to purchase munitions for the American Revolutionary forces. She was carrying a copy of the Declaration of Independence which was presented to Governor De Graaff. An earlier copy had been captured by the British on its way to Holland. It was wrapped in documents that the British believed to be a strange cipher, but were actually written in Yiddish, addressed to Jewish merchants in Holland.President Franklin D. Roosevelt visited St. Eustatius for two hours on 27 February 1939 on USS Houston to recognise the importance of the 1776 "First Salute". He presented a large brass plaque to St. Eustatius, displayed today under a flagpole atop the walls of Fort Oranje, reading:
In commemoration to the salute to the flag of the United States, Fired in this fort November 16. 1776, By order of Johannes de Graaff, Governor of Saint Eustatius, In reply to a National Gun-Salute, Fired by the United States Brig of War Andrew Doria, Under Captain Isaiah Robinson of the Continental Navy, Here the sovereignty of the United States of America was first formally acknowledged to a national vessel by a foreign official. Presented by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, President of the United States of America
The recognition provided the title for Barbara W. Tuchman's 1988 book The First Salute: A View of the American Revolution.
Capture by British Admiral George Rodney 1781
The British took the Andrew Doria incident seriously, and 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 of 1780–1784. Notably, 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 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 Dutch Republic on 20 December 1780. Even before officially declaring war, Britain had outfitted a massive battle fleet to take and destroy the weapons depot and vital commercial centre that St. Eustatius had become. British Admiral George Brydges Rodney was appointed the commander of the battle fleet. 3 February 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 more than 1,000 cannon to De Graaff's one dozen cannon and a garrison of sixty men. De Graaff surrendered the island, but first 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. Ten months later, the island was conquered by the French, allies of the Dutch Republic in the war. The Dutch regained control over the looted and plundered island in 1784.
A series of French and British occupations of Sint Eustatius from 1795 to 1815 during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars diverted trade to the occupiers' islands. St. Eustatius's economy collapsed, and the merchants, including the Jews left. St. Eustatius reverted permanently to Dutch control from 1816.
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 of 8,124. Commerce revived after the island returned to Dutch control. Many of the merchants returned to the island. However, the French and British occupations disrupted trade and also the 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, dropping to 921 in 1948.