Five years earlier, French armies had swept the Stadtholder, William V, from the Netherlands and proclaimed the Batavian Republic in his place. The old House of Orange fled to England. The Dutch fleet was reorganized, retrained, sworn to a new flag - but loyalty does not change with a constitution. Many officers were quietly Orangist, nostalgic for the prince across the sea, contemptuous of the French alliance they now served. When Britain and Russia agreed to invade North Holland in August 1799, the British general George Don studied the Batavian Navy and reached a striking conclusion: if the Allies played the right cards, the Helder squadron would simply hand itself over. He was right. The invasion fleet sailed in flying not the Union Jack but the Prinsenvlag - the orange-white-blue of the deposed Stadtholder. Aboard were Dutch émigrés, Orangist pamphlets, and William V's eldest son, the Hereditary Prince, ready to reclaim his father's country.

Schout-bij-nacht Samuel Story commanded the squadron that withdrew into the Zuiderzee as British troops landed unopposed near Den Helder. On 28 August he tried to bring his ships back out to fight. The wind refused. His captains anchored in the Vlieter roadstead and watched, mile after mile across the water, as the Orange flag rose over the forts and church steeples of the coast they had been ordered to defend. Sailors on the lower decks understood the implication better than their officers did. If those forts now flew the Prince's colours, perhaps the war was already over. Perhaps the Stadtholder was coming home. Mutinies began. On the seventy-four-gun Leyden, Captain Aegidius van Braam later admitted he could have suppressed the revolt aboard his ship. He chose not to. Instead he sent word to Admiral Story aboard the flagship Washington: order was breaking down across the fleet.

Story tried to play for time. He dispatched two captains under a flag of truce to the British admiral Andrew Mitchell, asking for a temporary ceasefire so he could restore discipline and await fresh orders from The Hague. It was, he insisted afterward, a ruse - a delaying tactic, nothing more. But Mitchell saw through it instantly. The two negotiators sent to plead the Dutch case were themselves the ringleaders of the mutiny they were supposedly trying to suppress. Mitchell gave Story one hour. Surrender, or face the full weight of the British fleet. Story convened his captains aboard the Washington for a council of war. A British colonel, Frederick Maitland, was present as a parliamentarian. He watched as Van Capellen, Van Braam and De Jong - the three officers most compromised by their Orangist sympathies - argued strenuously for capitulation. The council voted unanimously to lower the flag of the Batavian Republic and declare themselves prisoners of war.

One detail mattered enormously to the officers, and almost nothing to the men who would write the verdict on this day in Dutch history. The captains agreed to strike their colours, but they refused to hoist the Orange flag in its place. They were surrendering, not defecting. Mitchell, accepting the surrender in the name of the Prince of Orange, ordered the Prinsenvlag raised anyway. Some officers obeyed. To watchers ashore, it looked exactly like treason. While the captains negotiated, mutineers on the other ships finished what the wind had begun. One officer drowned. Others were beaten. The Batavian ensigns were torn apart. British prize crews took possession of every warship and sailed them to England. The Hereditary Prince visited the captured fleet, cheered by the rebellious crews, and asked the British to give him command of his new ships. They refused. He was useful as a symbol, not as an admiral.

The Anglo-Russian invasion that the Vlieter surrender was supposed to unlock collapsed within weeks. The Dutch civilian population did not rise for the Prince. The Batavian army, fighting alongside French troops, held the line at Bergen and Castricum. The Allies evacuated North Holland at the end of October, leaving behind only a propaganda victory and twelve confiscated warships. The new Batavian government wanted revenge. A court-martial convened on 8 October 1799 to punish the officers responsible. Captain Connio of the brig Gier was condemned to death and executed aboard a guard ship in December. Captain Kolff of the Utrecht received the same sentence and escaped before it could be carried out. Story himself, beyond reach in Germany, spent the rest of his life writing books defending his conduct. He died in Cleves in 1811, still insisting on his innocence. When the House of Orange returned to power in 1814, Van Capellen and the others were quietly rehabilitated. Van Capellen even commanded a Dutch squadron at the Bombardment of Algiers in 1816 - a hero of the new monarchy, forgiven for the day the Batavian fleet sailed away without him.