Your esteemed letter of 22 December having indeed reached me just as the gentlemen of the admiralty left The Hague for a holiday of three weeks, I did not leave off talking to either and arranging for them to give me the requisite clarifications, notably a copy of the treaty between the republic and the Barbary States, on their return here. While I wait, as I still am, I thought that I ought not to delay any longer making a provisional response to your excellency to tell you that if they deliver up nothing to me this week, I will make a new attempt next week.

What might be a bit of a distraction to Mr. Bisdom, who is the one of the two on whose goodwill I count more, is that he has just been named to fill the important post of grand treasurer of the States General, vacant because of the resignation of Mr. Gillis who had requested and readily obtained a release.1

We here are still in a state of uncertainty regarding peace or war. It appears, if this is not a comedy, that they want to make the republic pay for them to give up the opening of the Scheldt, among other sacrifices regarded here as equally disastrous and dishonorable.

Mr. Van Berckel informs me from Philadelphia, 13 November, that at that date there were delegates from only four states at Trenton and that he was waiting, before going there, for the quorum required for Congress to convene. We just received news from Philadelphia that commissioners 495 from Congress concluded a treaty with the Six Nations of the Iroquois, the articles of which we are still ignorant of, but we know roughly that it was very advantageous for America.

A Mr. Wilson who passed through here last month asked me, when I wrote to your excellency, to mention to you that if you would like to honor him with a letter, his address is: to Mr. Philip Wilson, at Mr. Robert Holmes’s, Mercht. No. 37, St. Martins le Grand in London.

Please accept, sir, the respects of my family for you and for your dear one, along with those of your excellency’s very humble and very obedient servant