The War That Lasted 335 Years and Killed Nobody

This is a story that gets told constantly, so it's worth telling properly — including the part where it probably never happened.

The claim: in 1651, during the English Civil War, the Dutch admiral Maarten Tromp declared war on the Isles of Scilly, a small archipelago off the coast of Cornwall, after Dutch merchant ships were seized by Royalist privateers operating from there. The Dutch then went home and forgot about it. No peace treaty was ever signed. So, the story goes, the Netherlands and Scilly remained technically at war for 335 years — until 1986, when the Dutch ambassador to Britain visited Scilly and formally declared peace.

That much happened: the ambassador, Reinoud van Erskine, did travel to Scilly in April 1986 and did declare peace, and it was covered by the press worldwide.

The problem is the premise. Scilly was part of England, and England and the Netherlands signed a peace in 1654. There was no separate treaty to be missing. More importantly, historians have found no contemporary record of a declaration of war against Scilly specifically — the story appears to rest on a much later account, and the Dutch embassy at the time of the 1986 event was reportedly sceptical too.

So the honest version is: a country and a small island group held a charming ceremony in 1986 to end a war that most likely never legally existed, and the story spread because it's delightful, and nobody wanted to check.

Which is itself the point. The most sharable history is usually the least verified. That doesn't make it worthless — it makes it a lesson in reading the second paragraph of a story you enjoy.