Curacao mattered to everyone. American merchants depended on it as a Caribbean trading hub. The Dutch governed it as a colonial possession. The French, fighting the War of the Second Coalition, wanted to deny it to the British and expand their Caribbean holdings from Guadeloupe. The British wanted control of any strategically valuable harbor they didn't already hold. Willemstad's deep natural port could shelter warships and store goods, a prize worth dispatching forces across hundreds of kilometers of contested ocean. The opening of 1800 found no American warships at the island - the sloop sent in May had arrived in June and departed soon after. When the French appeared on the horizon, Dutch Governor Johan Lauffer stood effectively alone. He refused the demand to surrender. The siege began.

Through August, more French vessels arrived. By September 5, an additional ten ships had landed reinforcements, and French forces attacked the forts protecting Willemstad, capturing one. They sent a threatening message to American consul Benjamin Phillips warning that American interests would not be spared. Phillips dispatched a messenger to St. Kitts requesting help. The Americans sent two sloops - the Merrimack and the Patapsco - which departed September 14 and wouldn't reach Curacao until September 22. For eight days the island's fate hung in the balance. The French held captured fortifications overlooking the town. The Dutch garrison held what they could. American merchants watched their property sit squarely in the line of fire. Eight days is a long time to wait when cannon are pointed at your warehouses.

The British frigate HMS Nereide, under Commander Frederick Watkins, arrived first. On September 10, Watkins sailed to Curacao's eastern point and chased off two French privateers cruising as pickets. Finding fifteen more sheltered in a bay, he bypassed them and sailed to Willemstad, engaging French positions firing from the town. An American merchantman informed Watkins of the situation: the Dutch would surrender to the British if the British protected them from the French. It was the classic Caribbean bargain - capitulate to the lesser threat to survive the greater one. Watkins landed twenty marines and accepted Governor Lauffer's surrender three days later. British protection in exchange for British control. On September 22, with the American sloops still en route, the French commander issued an ultimatum demanding the town's surrender within twenty-four hours.

The Patapsco sailed into Willemstad harbor on September 23 and landed troops to reinforce the British and Dutch garrison. That day and the next, French forces exchanged cannon and musket fire with the defenders. The volume of fire suggested an all-out assault was coming. Defenders braced for a fight that would be bloody and possibly decisive. Then, during the night of September 24, the French simply left. They abandoned their positions, boarded their ships, and sailed away. The reasons remain unclear - perhaps Pitot's refusal to commit La Vengeance had doomed the campaign from the start, or perhaps the arrival of both British and American reinforcements made the mathematics of assault untenable. The French suffered significant casualties in the exchange; the Americans reported only two wounded. Watkins asked the American captains to patrol the windward side of the island in case the French returned, while HMS Nereide secured the harbor. In ten days of cruising, the Americans captured a single French vessel before returning to Willemstad on their way back to St. Kitts.

What the Americans found upon returning to Willemstad was worse than anything the French had managed. Watkins, the British commander who had accepted help from the American sloops, had embargoed forty-one ships in the harbor - seven of them American. He had impounded a large quantity of specie belonging to consul Benjamin Phillips. He had sent privateers cruising with orders to seize American shipping. And in his official reports to London, Watkins failed to mention the Americans at all - not their reinforcement of the garrison, not the Patapsco landing troops under fire, not the ten days of patrol duty. He wrote the Americans out of the story entirely. This was standard practice in the murky world of Caribbean colonial warfare, where alliances were temporary and opportunism was policy. But Watkins had overplayed his hand. His superiors did not approve. When Lord Hugh Seymour assumed command of the Royal Navy's Jamaica Station, he stripped Watkins of his command and ordered the seized specie returned. The betrayal was corrected, but the lesson lingered: in the eighteenth-century Caribbean, the nation that came to help you and the nation that came to rob you were often the same ship.