A British vessel, stopping on the way back from India at the Comoro Islands in the Mozambique Channel, finds the native inhabitants in revolt against their Arab masters; and when they ask why they have taken arms, are told: "America is free. Could not we be?"

"Considérations sur la Révolution de l'Amérique", a memorandum written at Breda in 1784, and published in Brieven en Gedenkschriften (The Hague, 1866), vol. 1, p. 407. English translation in R. R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959), ch. 9, p. 258