‘THEY MUST BE WILLFULLY BLIND WHO COULD NOT SEE THRO’ ALL THIS…’
[DEFOE, Daniel, attributed author].
A golden mine of treasure open’d for the Dutch. By a lover of Britain.
London, [n.p.], 1718.
8vo, pp. [iv], 55, [1, blank]; woodcut vignette to title; half-title and title detached and somewhat worn; loss to last leaf touching ‘finis’, toned; disbound.
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A golden mine of treasure open’d for the Dutch. By a lover of Britain.
First edition. ‘Ostensibly by two authors: p.1-32 by a foreigner, presumably a Swede; the “Application” which follows by an Englishman. Probably, not certainly, by Defoe’ (Moore, J.R. A checklist of the writings of Daniel Defoe). While Moore, in his Second Supplement, modified his statement to ‘Certainly by Defoe’, the attribution is disputed by Furbank and Owens. The pamphlet addresses the arrests of Count Gyllenborg, Swedish minister in Britain, and Baron von Goertz, the first minister to King Charles XII of Sweden, in 1717 for their supposed involvement in a Swedish conspiracy to replace the Hanoverian George I on the British throne with the pretender James Stuart. The arrests were part of a power-play by George I, who was looking to enlarge the holdings of his Hanoverian Electorate with the acquisition of the Swedish-held German provinces of Bremen and Verden. The ‘Englishman’ argues vehemently that the bill passed to place a trade embargo on Sweden, part of the British response to the conspiracy, only served to aid the cause of the Dutch, who refused to place an embargo of their own on the Swedish and thus doubly profited by increasing their trade in the Baltic generally as well as selling the Swedish marked-up British goods.
ESTC N18258; Goldsmiths’ 5508.1; Kress S. 2777; Moore 393. See Furbank & Owens, Defoe De-Attributions, London 1994, No. 393.
