When the colonists in North America first declared themselves the United States, I bet you don’t know which country was the first to officially recognize the new nation. It happened on November 16, 1776, and had to do with a ship — so there’s a hint; it had to be a country with a harbor. The ship was flying the new US flag, and when it entered the harbor, the country gave it a formal salute. The country? It was Sint Eustatius, which is a Caribbean island that today is a “special municipality” of the Netherlands. It’s small; only 8 square miles (about the size of Block Island, off the Rhode Island coast), and only 3,000 people live there, but they still celebrate November 16 as “Statia Day” (the island is also known as “Statia”) to commemorate the 1776 event.
Even though it’s very near some well-known tourist destinations like St. Kitts, Sint Eustatius doesn’t get very many visitors and doesn’t have a single Caribbean resort. In the 1700s, though, the place was booming because anybody could buy anything there. That was what the US ship was there for; it was the “Andrew Doria,” and it had arrived to buy guns. Nowadays you can fly there, as long as you charter a plane that’s not too big for their airport, which is named after Franklin D. Roosevelt. Roosevelt visited the island in 1939, bringing a gift — a large metal plaque describing the first official recognition of the US. It’s still there, next to a flagpole in Fort Oranje, which is where they fired the 11-gun salute to the Andrew Doria. It was an 11-gun salute because the ship had begun with a 13-gun salute; one for each US state. When answering a salute from a sovereign nation, your salute is always two shots less. There are a lot of rules.
Meanwhile, back in North America the Revolutionary War was still being fought, and today’s the day that Hessians (German mercenaries hired by the British to fight the colonists) captured Fort Washington. It’s in Manhattan; it was there to try to keep the British from sailing up the Hudson River. Manhattan Island was mostly forested at the time, but New York City was already growing — but at the southern end of the island, while Fort Washington is on the north end.
New Yorkers, who were mostly loyalists who disapproved of that whole “revolution” business, weren’t too disappointed when the British won the battle. In fact, they cheered when the prisoners were marched though the streets. One of the prisoners was Margaret Corbin, the first woman to fight in the Continental Army. Technically she was there because she was a nurse, but she helped her husband, John Corbin, probably by reloading, and by fetching pitchers of water for both drinking and cooling the cannon he was firing. When John was shot, though, Margaret took over the cannon herself and kept firing until she was wounded. She was released by the British and settled in Philadelphia, but was partially disabled by her injuries. in 1779 the government of Pennsylvania gave her some cash to help her get by, and the same year Congress granted her a military pension — she was the first woman to receive one. She was even technically still in the army until her discharge in 1783.
“Margaret Corbin Circle” and “Margaret Corbin Drive” are still there in New York, and in 1926 her body was exhumed and reburied with military honors in the US Military Academy in West Point. There’s still a monument at the site — but a study in 2017 revealed that whoever was reburied there, it wasn’t Margaret Corbin. It was a man. Nobody knows who he was.
On November 16, 1976 a different sort of problem arose — that time it wasn’t a matter of who someone was but where. Renee MacRae was on her way to her sister’s house in Scotland, but she never arrived. The investigation is still open, decades later; nobody knows what happened to her. It’s the longest-standing missing person investigation in the UK — although the police did make an arrest a couple of years ago, accusing Bill MacDowell of murdering MacRae.
There were attempts to locate the body over the years, and several excavations turned up nothing. That wasn’t what happened when Eric Lawes was using his metal detector on November 16, 1992, though. He was exploring a field near his hometown of Hoxne when the machine beeped. Lawes had discovered what turned out to be the biggest collection ever found of coins and other treasures from the Roman Empire. Lawes wasn’t even looking for treasure at the time; his friend Peter Whatling, a farmer, had lost his hammer somewhere in the field and asked Lawes to help him find it.
Lawes dug out only the first few coins, and a team of archeologists arrived to excavate the rest. The whole lot was shipped to the British Museum, where it was valued at nearly two million pounds. Lawes was awarded that amount as the finder, and he shared it with Whatling. Lawes didn’t find the hammer, but the archeologists did. You can go see it if you’d like; the hammer is in the British Museum too.
