Читать книгу The Life of Sir Henry Morgan. With an account of the English settlement of the island of Jamaica онлайн

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Yet on his return to England Holmes was placed under arrest and closely questioned, although Pepys describes the investigation as "a mere jest". Williamson, the Under Secretary of State, who was certainly better informed, treated the matter soberly.

"And the plain truth is," he wrote, "Holmes upon his examination, as he was examined in the Tower by the two Secretaries, gives so good an account of whatever he hath done in his late expedition to Guiney that it will plainly appear that he hath done no hostility or damage to them there, for which—besides all their former injuries and oppressions to our trade there, which it might have otherwise been not unjust to have resented—he did not first receive the just provocations from the Dutch at each particular place."[68]

The Dutch government promptly retaliated by sending a fleet to Africa under the famous De Ruyter, who not only retook all the posts they had lost but captured all the English factories. Meanwhile Holmes was exonerated, promoted, and sent across the Atlantic to attack the New Netherlands and other possessions of the Dutch in America.