As soon as war was declared with the Dutch, orders were sent to Rodney, who returned from America to the Antilles at the end of 1780, to capture St. Eustatius. From a mass of barren rock this Dutch island had suddenly become a place of first-rate commercial importance. In order to supply our West India planters with food for their slaves, parliament allowed trade to be carried on there with the Americans. In St. Eustatius the goods of all nations were bought and sold; and British and French planters, American dealers and Dutch merchants traded with one another as in a time of peace. English planters and merchants also used it as a place of deposit, believing that their goods would be safer there than in their own islands, which were open to attacks from the French. The wealth of the island was prodigious; the rents of the dwellings and warehouses hastily constructed on it amounted to a million a year; it had, as Burke said, risen from the waters like another Tyre to become the mart of the world. Like the British island of Nassau during the American civil war, it carried on along with legitimate commerce a brisk contraband trade, and its merchants supplied the Americans and French, their principal and most favoured customers, with vast quantities of naval stores and ammunition. It was practically undefended, and, together with its dependencies, St. Martin and Saba, was surrendered to Rodney without resistance on February 3, 1781. Over 150 vessels were taken in the bay, besides a richly laden convoy of Dutch ships which had lately put to sea. Rodney held that the island was a "nest of villains," and that its "infamous and deceitful inhabitants" owed their wealth to their support of the king's enemies by contraband trading; they "deserved scourging," and he vowed that they should get it. He confiscated all the property on the island, private as well as public, save what belonged to the French, who were open enemies. There was much truth in his indictment, but his indiscriminate confiscation was monstrously unjust.