Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland's Glory

by Lisa Jardine

  Samuel Pepys (at that time in overall charge of supplies at the Navy Board) was afraid of Holmes: ‘an idle, proud, conceited, though stout fellow’. On several occasions he expressed reluctance at having to deal with him on matters of naval discipline. After the second Dutch war Holmes was rewarded for his exploits with the Governorship of the Isle of Wight; he eventually became extremely rich and somewhat more respectable.79

  It was Huygens himself who was the first to raise concern about Holmes’s report (as a Dutchman, he might be expected to have a particularly low opinion of Holmes’s integrity). On 6 February 1665, in his first response to Moray, after expressing his delight at the dramatic outcome of the trials he added a small caveat:

  I have to confess that I had not expected such a spectacular result from these clocks. To give me ultimate satisfaction, I beg you to tell me what you and your colleagues at the Royal Society think of this Relation [of Holmes’s], and if the said Captain seems a sincere man whom one can absolutely trust. For it must be said that I am amazed that the clocks were sufficiently accurate to allow him by their means to find such a tiny island [as Fuego].80

  On 6 March, Huygens was still pressing Moray for ‘something of the detail of what you have learned from Mr Holmes, principally in order to know how the clocks behaved in a storm, and if in that climate rust did not eventually cause them to stop’.81

  The matter of Holmes’s trustworthiness was raised at the 8 March meeting of the Royal Society, at which Huygens’s concerns were raised, and his letter of 6 March read:

  There being also mention made again of Major Holmes’s relation of the late performances of the pendulum watches in his voyage to Guinea, it was affirmed by several of the members, that there was an error in that relation, as to the island named therein; and that it was not the island of Fuego, which the Major’s ships had touched in order to water there, but another thirty leagues distant from it.82

  Samuel Pepys (recently elected a Fellow) was ‘desired to visit the Major, and to inquire farther concerning this particular for the satisfaction of the society’. This meant visiting Holmes in the Tower, where he was imprisoned for his conduct towards the Dutch settlements at Guinea during his voyage.83 On 14 March Pepys attended ‘a farewell dinner which [Sir John Robinson, Lieutenant of the Tower] gives Major Holmes at his going out of the Tower’, ‘Here a great deal of good victuals and company.’84

  On 15 March both Pepys and Moray reported on their dealings with Holmes. Pepys had spoken to the Master of ‘the Jersey ship’ – that is, Holmes’s own vessel:

  The said master affirmed, that the vulgar reckoning proved as near as that of the watches, which [the clocks], added he, had varied from one another unequally, sometimes backward, sometimes forward, to 4, 6, 7, 3, 5 minutes; as also that they had been corrected by the usual account. And as to the island, at which they had watered, the said master declared, that it was not Fuego, but another thirty miles distant from the same westward.85

  According to the Master of Holmes’s ship, then, there was not much to choose between the old way of calculating longitude, and that using the new clocks. Moray, who had spoken to Holmes himself, corrected ‘some mistakes in the number of the leagues formerly mentioned’. He confirmed that the ships had not watered on Fuego, ‘yet they had made that island at the time, which the Major had foretold, and were gone from thence to another, more convenient, for watering’.86

  This was the meeting at which, immediately following Moray’s rather obviously fudged report, Hooke told the Royal Society ‘that he intended to put his [own] secret concerning the longitude into the hand of the president, to be disposed of as his lordship should think fit’. In his opinion, ‘no certainty could be had from [pendulum] watches for the longitude’.

  At the very next meeting, on 22 March, ‘Mr Pepys was desired to procure the journals of those masters of ships, who had been with Major Holmes in Guinea, and differed from him in the relation concerning the pendulum watches.’87 Nothing further is heard, however, of discrepancies between the ships’ journals and his ‘relation concerning the pendulum clocks’. Had that convivial dinner a week earlier perhaps predisposed Pepys to draw a veil over the matter? Holmes’s account has been firmly lodged on the record ever since.

  However, a presentation copy of Holmes’s Guinea voyage journals, which Pepys had indeed procured, as instructed by the Royal Society, survives in the Pepys Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge. This is a fair copy of the journal, prepared for James, Duke of York. I believe that I am one of the first scholars to have consulted it in the context of the Holmes trials, on that voyage, of Huygens’s longitude clocks.88

  Holmes’s journal is extremely full and specific. It is also rather well written – Holmes has a nice line in racy narratives, particularly where bombarding and plundering Dutch merchant ships is concerned.89 Day by day he chronicles the progress of his band of ships, the Jersey, the Brill, the Golden Lyon and the Expedition. Only once in the course of the entire journal does he mention the pendulum clocks (in connection with the incident we have already heard about), and it is hard to see how they could have been kept going steadily throughout, given naval battles with Dutch East Indiamen in which (for instance) Holmes’s topmast and mainsail were shot away.

  In July Holmes was on San Thome off the west coast of Africa, reprovisioning and rewatering. He set out for home on 11 August. For more than a month strong currents, contrary winds and becalmings bedevilled him. By the third week of September his small fleet was well and truly lost on the open seas. There is a full sequence of entries relating to Holmes and his fellow captains getting lost and running short of water, which does, uniquely in the entire journal, mention ‘pendula’. It was with great reluctance that Holmes’s companions agreed to turn westwards. It was three days before they sighted land, during which time variable winds took them in several different directions. As Pepys had learned, they did not land on Fuego, but some time later on another of the Cape Verde Islands, Brava. Holmes had, at the very least, made greatly exaggerated claims for the part the clocks had played in the incident.

  But once Holmes had lodged his misleading report, with its bravura account of the spectacular accuracy of the pendulum clocks, Huygens’s claim to priority in relation to longitude timekeepers was assured. The account was prominently reprinted in 1673 in his Horologium Oscillatorium, and was followed within the year by the announcement from Paris of the balance-spring watch. Huygens’s impressive sequence of horological innovations – pendulum clock (1658), longitude pendulum timekeeper (1665) and balance-spring regulator (1674) – entitled him to precedence over others working close to him, and assured his lasting reputation as the pre-eminent figure in the field. By this time, however, both Moray and Oldenburg were of the opinion that Huygens was overstating his personal claims for priority. When the Horologium Oscillatorium appeared, strong protests were lodged by the most senior members of the Royal Society. The President, Lord Brouncker, John Wallis and Sir Christopher Wren all wrote to Huygens, reminding him – with chapter and verse – of the contributions made to his unfolding horological theory and practice by English virtuosi. They reminded him that Hooke’s circular pendulum had been demonstrated and discussed at several meetings, that Bruce’s modifications to the marine timekeepers had been crucial to their success, that Brouncker and Huygens had together debated the tautochronism of the cycloidal pendulum at length, that Wren had rectified the cycloid ahead of Huygens. All of these contributions were inadequately acknowledged in Huygens’s work, or (in the case of Hooke) not at all.90

  On 27 June 1673, Oldenburg himself urged Huygens to be more generous in his acknowledgements, and urged a more collaborative approach in the interest of scientific progress: ‘If candour reigned everywhere, what friendships might we be able to establish amongst the learned, and what advantages might the public derive?’91

  What is most extraordinary about the vexed (and still unresolved) issue of who was really entitled to claim priority, first for
allegedly accurate pendulum clocks carried at sea, and subsequently for the spring-regulated pocket watch, is how little the Anglo–Dutch wars apparently impinged on intellectual exchange between the participant scientists and technicians. It is as if the ferocious naval battles, marauding gangs invading colonial settlements, and predatory incursions into each other’s national territories had little or no impact on the lives of those engaged in professional life in either country. How else could it have been proposed that Dutch clocks be given to an English naval commander to test while on a confrontational expedition to the west coast of Africa whose stated aim was to seize Dutch goods and assets?

  Equally, the unanimous chorus of Fellows of the Royal Society chastising Christiaan Huygens in 1673 for having, in his claiming of priority for longitude clocks, been ungenerous in his ackowledgements of English (or at least Scottish) efforts in the same field surely needs to be taken with a pinch of salt: ‘what friendships might we be able to establish amongst the learned, and what advantages might the public derive?’

  The Horologium Oscillatorium, in which Christiaan Huygens made his full and final claims to priority in pendulum clocks and timekeepers designed to determine longitude, was published in France and ostentatiously dedicated to the French King, Louis XIV. At the time of publication, France was at war with the United Provinces, and England was temporarily allied with the French. If Huygens’s position in Paris was tenuous, his relations with the English were doubly so. Unable to cope with the emotional pressures, in 1676 Christiaan Huygens succumbed to some sort of nervous illness, of a kind which had caused his collapse some years earlier (on that occasion he had been granted a year’s sick leave by the French authorities). This time his brother-in-law, sister Susanna’s husband Philips Doublet, was sent to Paris to cheer him up, to no avail. Instead he brought Christiaan back to The Hague in July. ‘The life that I lead there [in Paris] disagrees with me,’ Christiaan wrote to his brother Constantijn junior, who was in the field with Prince William on military manoeuvres against the French. ‘I left as if I would return. But I do not believe I shall ever go back to Paris’.

  11

  Science Under the Microscope: More Anglo–Dutch Misunderstandings

  It was not only in matters concerning pendulum clocks and balance-spring watches that Christiaan Huygens interfered in the affairs of British scientific practitioners like Alexander Bruce and Robert Hooke. In this chapter I offer a further example of the way the story of scientific advance is altered once we recognise that a Dutchman, resident mostly in Paris, and an Englishman employed by the Royal Society, were effectively engaged in a long-range collaboration, in spite of the body of water, national ideologies and differences of temperament that separated them.

  In this instance, the fortunes of a set of scientific ideas depend on the movement of a copy of a published book – Hooke’s Micrographia, or Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses with Observations and Inquiries thereupon (1665). This reminds us that books moved around the Continent of Europe with a speed and efficiency that almost match those achieved by online booksellers today. In August 1655, for example, the antiquarian William Dugdale received a letter from Sir Edward Walker, Garter King of Arms and loyal servant of Charles II, exiled in Amsterdam. Walker congratulated Dugdale on his recently published antiquarian history book, a copy of which he had seen in the hands of a friend to whom Dugdale had sent a personal copy. In reply Dugdale wrote that ‘God be thanked that we have disposed of above 400 of these allready, (though it came out but in Easter Terme,) the one half whereof are gone beyond sea; but our money for them will not come in till ye next spring.’1

  What this second example of Anglo–Dutch scientific interaction shows is the way our understanding of the trajectory of development in emerging science has tended to get deflected and sidetracked, because accounts of the scientific debate are overly preoccupied with the local communities – treated as enclosed and self-sufficient – in which those who played a leading role (in this case, the Dutchman Christiaan Huygens in Paris, and the Englishman Robert Hooke in London) worked at the time.

  The end of this particular story also reminds us how political upheaval can dramatically alter the perceived importance of an individual’s work, and thus posterity’s opinion of its significance. At the Royal Society, the arrival of William III of Orange in England at the end of 1688 resulted in a significant reorganisation in every English institution, as we might expect when a foreign invasion is followed by long-term occupation. The result for the Society was a particularly dramatic version of ‘régime change’: the meteoric rise of figures hitherto of only middling importance within the institution, while others were swiftly and permanently marginalised, the significance of their scientific work downgraded and thenceforth diminished in importance in the historic records.

  The design, manufacture and skilled use of microscopes, like that of clocks, developed very much in parallel, in the seventeenth century, in England and the United Provinces. To the Dutch goes the credit for initially perfecting a lens-based device which could provide a high level of magnification of objects too small to be appreciated using the naked eye.2

  There is a measure of consensus amongst historians of science that the Dutch use of magnifying lenses originated in the hands of painters involved in creating ‘lifelike’ representations of natural phenomena, particularly plants and insects. The names regularly associated with the meticulous rendering of detail only accessible with a microscope are Jacob de Gheyn II and Joris Hoefnagel. Intriguingly for the present story, both men and their families were closely associated with the Huygens family. Sir Constantijn Huygens’s mother was a Hoefnagel, and he himself took lessons in miniature painting with a Hoefnagel uncle. The de Gheyns were neighbours in The Hague, and the young Jacob de Gheyn III was Constantijn’s companion on his first diplomatic visit to London. Huygens himself took a keen early interest in microscopy in the 1620s.

  In the 1670s and ’80s, both Christiaan Huygens and Constantijn Huygens junior became enthusiastic grinders of lenses for telescopes and microscopes, and practising microscopists. Both corresponded with and visited the famous Dutch microscopist Anton van Leeuwenhoek in Leiden. So it is hardly surprising to find the entire Huygens family captivated by the newly published English book with which Robert Hooke’s name and reputation are most lastingly associated, Micrographia.

  Although Robert Hooke’s reputation as an experimentalist and instrument-maker was already considerable at home in England in the early 1660s, he became a figure of note in the Europe-wide community of virtuosi beyond the Royal Society, particularly that in the United Provinces, with the publication of Micrographia in January 1665. The sumptuously illustrated book established his reputation in the international scientific community virtually overnight.3 Immediately it appeared, intellectuals across Europe began exchanging views on the book, and above all its magnificent engravings, in their correspondence.4

  The interest of Christiaan Huygens, still at this time domiciled in the family house at The Hague, was immediately aroused when his London-based Scottish friend Sir Robert Moray mentioned Micrographia to him – and the fact that it included information on lens-making (a topic Christiaan was particularly interested in) – in January, and promised to send him a copy shortly thereafter. Moray expressed his satisfaction with the book, one of the first publications licensed by the new Royal Society, but confessed that he had not had time to do more than glance at it himself.5

  On 26 February Moray dispatched a copy of Micrographia to The Hague with a covering letter, entrusting it to the English diplomat Sir William Davidson to deliver.6 Because Huygens somehow missed Davidson, however, the book and letter did not reach him until 25 March. The following day he wrote an enthusiastic letter to Moray telling him that he had had no idea the book was of such consequence, and particularly praising the quality of the illustrations and engraving.

  But before the book reached him and gained his immediate respec
t, Christiaan Huygens had unfortunately had some less flattering things to say about Hooke’s abilities in general, based on face-to-face encounters with the Curator of Experiments while Huygens was visiting London some years earlier. Between the dispatch and arrival of his copy of Micrographia, Christiaan had formed some superficial views on it based on selected extracts from the text sent to him by his father, Sir Constantijn Huygens, who happened to be in Paris on Stadholder business in February 1665 and had swiftly obtained a copy.7 Christiaan had at this point not yet had sight of the vital accompanying engravings of a whole sequence of natural phenomena much-magnified, nor had he any idea that the illustrations were the glory of the entire publication.

  Writing to his son, Sir Constantijn was full of praise for Micrographia. Christiaan, by contrast, basing his judgement on the selected extracts, expressed surprise at the ‘rashness’ of some of Hooke’s conjectures. Hooke was neither amiable, nor a good enough mathematician for his activities in any field to be taken seriously, he confided to his father: ‘Thanks for the extracts from Hooke [Micrographia]. I know him very well. He understands no geometry at all. He makes himself ridiculous by his boasting.’8