CHAPTER 41

The Dutch Navy

DEVELOPMENT

BY THE MIDDLE OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY the seventeen provinces of the Burgundian Netherlands formed Europe’s economic powerhouse. Trade to and from the heartland of Europe passed along the great waterways of the Rhine, Scheldt and Maas (Meuse). There were lucrative trades to and from the Baltic and the British Isles, valuable fisheries in the North Sea and Atlantic and elaborate system of canals and inland waterways, the trekvaart, that encouraged internal trade. The Dutch also proved able to undercut potential rivals in the increasingly valuable carrying trades, and during the second half of the century they would become increasingly prominent in the Mediterranean trades and establish a presence in the East Indies. But all of this took place against a backdrop of political crisis and religious war. During the 1550s the Burgundian titles passed to Philip II, King of Spain. Protestantism, especially Calvinism, was growing in the northern provinces, but even many in the more staunchly Catholic south were alarmed at Philip’s policies, particularly his apparent subordination of Dutch interests to Spain’s. A national revolt began between 1566 and 1568, and this eventually developed into what became known as the ‘eighty years war’. Alarmed by growing religious extremism in the north, the southern provinces ultimately resumed their allegiance to Spain, but the seven northern provinces, led by the prominent nobleman William of Orange (whose connections and estates were predominantly French and German, rather than Dutch), formally declared their independence in 1581 and became known as the ‘United Provinces of the Netherlands’.

The building in Hoorn, North Holland, which housed meetings of the Admiralty of the Noorderkwartier.
(AUTHOR’S PHOTOGRAPH)

From the beginning, sea power played a significant role in the struggle for Dutch independence. One of the key events in establishing a rebel power base in the north was the capture of Den Brielle on 1 April 1572 by a group of privateers, the ‘Sea Beggars’, who had recently been ejected from English ports by an edict of Queen Elizabeth I, embarrassed by their depredations against Spanish shipping. A fleet assembled by the towns of North Holland defeated a Spanish attack off Hoorn in 1573, and in the following year Leiden was relieved after the land around it was flooded, permitting a fleet of flat-bottomed boats to get through. By the mid-1580s the Dutch had built up a substantial fleet, and this played a central role in the Armada campaign of 1588, bottling up Parma’s invasion army in its harbours. The war of independence against Spain went on until 1648 (with a twelve-year truce between 1609 and 1621), but long before then the Dutch were firmly established as one of the pre-eminent naval powers in Europe.

ADMINISTRATION

The federal, decentralised nature of the Dutch republic, in which the seven provinces were in many ways fiercely independent and jealous of each other, was reflected in the organisation of its navy. In all, there were five separate admiralties. Three were in the province of Holland: Amsterdam, the Maas (with its headquarters at Rotterdam) and the Noorderkwartier, based at Hoorn and Enkhuizen on the Zuiderzee. The admiralty of Zeeland was centred on Middelburg, that of Friesland on Harlingen. This system of multiple admiralties had been formalised in 1597 during the ‘eighty years war’, and reflected the fact that in the early days of the struggle the rebels were often confined to separate pockets of territory, each of which required its own small fleet and supporting infrastructure.1 Despite its apparent lack of logic, the survival of the system reflected both the realities of the Dutch political system, with its emphasis on provincial independence, and the existence of local vested interests opposed to any suggestion of reform (the three admiralties in Holland were especially corrupt).2 However, the system was not necessarily detrimental to the efficient organisation of the Dutch navy: the close symbiosis of mercantile and naval interests in an administrative structure that was much less centralised than its English counterpart arguably created a more dynamic system, able to respond more rapidly to the demands of contemporary naval warfare.³ The five admiralties were all meant to be agencies of the States-General, the central governing institution of the republic, and their governing colleges contained representatives of the other provinces.⁴ As well as being responsible for convoys and the setting out of fleets in wartime, they acted as prize courts and had substantial jurisdiction over merchant shipping. However, they did not have responsibility for the provisioning of the ships, as this lay with individual captains, who each received from his admiralty a fixed allowance per man per day.⁵

Several arms of revenue were reserved exclusively for the use of the navy. These included the convooien en licenten, convoy money and customs duties; lastgeld, an annual levy on the tonnage of each ship; and veilgeld, introduced in 1652, a levy of 1 or 2 per cent on the value of incoming or outgoing goods. These monies had to be raised by the admiralties themselves, who had to employ large staffs of revenue collectors. The system was strained by the unequal wealth of the areas covered by each admiralty. Amsterdam rapidly became far wealthier than any other admiralty, and by the period of the Anglo-Dutch wars the Noorderkwartier, Friesland and even Zeeland were struggling to meet their commitments to fit out sufficient numbers of ships within acceptable time-frames.⁶ In wartime, subsidies were voted by the States-General, though like parliamentary subsidies in England they were not always collected promptly enough to cover immediate expenditure.⁷

Dutch warships of c.1655, part of the surge of new construction of larger, purpose-built ships to make good the losses during the first Anglo-Dutch war.

In practice, the complex and decentralised structures that pervaded both the admiralty system and the organisation of the Dutch state as a whole could be managed by decisive direction from a few key individuals. During the first and second Anglo-Dutch wars, the key figure was the Grand Pensionary of Holland, Johan de Witt, a dynamic leader who played a surprisingly direct role in naval affairs, masterminding the attack on Chatham in 1667 and once piloting the fleet to sea himself. De Witt was blamed for the failure to prevent the devastating French attack on the Netherlands in 1672, and paid for it with his life.⁸ His de facto replacement was the twenty-two-year-old William III, Prince of Orange, who resumed his family’s traditional offices of stadholder, captain-general and admiral-general. At other times, deputations from the States-General visited the fleet and provided a much more active role in naval administration and decision making than their equivalents in the House of Commons.9

The Zevenwolden in 1665. A ship of the Friesland Admiralty, mounting between 52 and 58 guns, she was captured by the British in that year (and renamed Seven Oaks) but was recaptured in 1666.
(© TRUSTEES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM)

BASES

The peculiar geography of the Netherlands both helped and hindered its navy. The trekvaart meant that it was relatively easy to bring stores and men to the naval yards, and Dutch coastal shipping was also less vulnerable to attack than its English counterparts.¹⁰ But the Dutch had no dedicated naval dockyards after the English or French fashion, and the yards were also remote from the open sea, a fact that created a set of distinct problems.¹¹ For instance, it was difficult for the Amsterdam and Noorderkwartier contingents to cross the Pampus shoals at the entrance to the Zuiderzee; the difficulties of this route limited the maximum size of the ships that those admiralties could build.¹² The navigation of the Maas could also be difficult, and the larger ships of the Rotterdam contingent often had to drop down to take on their guns and stores at Hellevoitsluis, the closest thing the Dutch had to a dedicated naval yard, though even there, only a very limited range of naval facilities was developed.¹³ As a result, damaged Dutch ships often had to be repaired in comparatively open anchorages, off Vlissingen, Domburg or Westkapelle, with shipwrights and supplies brought down to them from all over the republic.¹⁴

Michiel de Ruyter, the greatest Dutch admiral of the period, who refused an offer of a knighthood from King Charles II.

Each admiralty maintained storehouses, slips and other dockyard infrastructure within yards that also serviced merchant shipping. With no central authority to rationalise provision, the system led to much duplication and waste.¹⁵ The location of the admiralties also meant that in wartime Dutch naval forces usually assembled in two widely separated rendezvous – the ships of the northern admiralties behind Texel island and the sea-gate at Den Helder, the southern contingents in the mouth of the Maas and the Zeeland channels. The final junction of the entire fleet could be effected if only one section sailed to join the other, which usually meant the northern ships coming south. Consequently, Dutch mobilisation in each campaign of the Anglo-Dutch wars usually (but not always) lagged behind that of the British, most of whose ships were already concentrated within the Thames and Medway estuaries and had been set out by one central admiralty from dockyards which were (with one exception, Portsmouth) within only a few miles of each other.

SHIPS

Until the 1650s the Dutch fleet employed ships for the duration of a war and then sold them off at the end. This changed after the first Anglo-Dutch war, when it became clear that a permanent force was essential; therefore, the sixty ships ordered in 1653 were expressly declared to be state property, which the admiralties had no right to sell unilaterally.¹⁶ Compared with their opponents on the other side of the North Sea, the Dutch had many more building slips available and more efficient construction techniques, so they were able to build more ships, more quickly. This was particularly important when it came to replacing war damage; the Dutch could often get a replacement to sea before the end of the same war, the British could not.¹⁷ The forty ships of the large building programme that was commenced in 1664 were largely ready for sea two years later, while the British had to suspend construction of the biggest ships of a much less ambitious programme that they began at the same time, instead turning out only nine ships of equivalent strength during the same period.¹⁸ However, until 1666, and even after that to an extent, Dutch warships were significantly smaller than their enemy counterparts. This had been due in part to simple conservatism, but there was also a desire by the admiralties to save money, for the first Anglo-Dutch war was fought only four years after the end of a decades-long Spanish war that had almost crippled several of the admiralties.¹⁹ Consequently, almost all of even the very largest Dutch ships had only two decks, and although they could carry up to eighty guns, the calibres were much smaller than those on the British equivalents.²⁰ The Brederode, Tromp’s flagship in the first war, carried no more than fifty-nine guns at most; the largest Dutch shot in regular use was twenty-four pounds, compared with thirty-two pounds in large British ships of the first war and forty-two pounds in big three-deckers of the second and third wars.* Many ships (particularly in the first war) were armed primarily with 6-pounders. Apart from cost and conservatism, the size of the ships was dictated chiefly by the coastal shoals, the shallowness of the Zuiderzee and the approaches to several of the admiralty harbours, all factors that demanded shallow draughts, and Dutch ships were therefore built with flat bottoms.²¹ The consequent ability of the more lightly armed Dutch to escape into shallow water where the British ships could not follow them saved their fleet, and perhaps their entire state, on more than one occasion.

The Dutch, like the British, relied at first on hired merchantmen to strengthen their fleet; at the start of the first war they had some ninety-nine of these available, compared with only seventy-nine ‘state warships’ provided by the admiralties. The Dutch could obtain some very large ships by this means, as their East India Company, the VOC, could provide several vessels mounting well over seventy guns. The VOC’s Maarseveen was the largest ship on the Dutch side at the battle of Lowestoft in 1665, but even the most powerful merchantmen had lighter timbers and less-well-trained crews than a state warship. The disproportionate losses among the Indiamen at Lowestoft, and during the rest of the 1665 campaign, persuaded the Dutch to withdraw them. They were replaced by a group of powerful new ships with eighty or more guns, the most famous of which was de Ruyter’s flagship, De Zeven Provincien. After 1667 no more large ships were built in the Netherlands until the 1680s, when the republic finally introduced full three-deckers, and by the time when a Dutch squadron formed a third of the allied fleet at the battle of Barfleur in 1692 there was no discernible difference in size between its ships and those of its British counterparts.22

OFFICERS

The Dutch introduced a permanent corps of officers in 1626, and thereafter, in theory at least, the best commands went to those on a list drawn from all the admiralties and appointed for life, receiving a retainer in the intervals between periods of sea service.²³ This system was gradually made more flexible in the 1660s-1680s, and some changes were clearly modelled on the British example, for instance the introduction of the rank of‘commander’ for those in smaller ships.²⁴The officers were drawn largely from the merchant shipping community, although a significant number came from the higher echelons of Dutch society (which tended to be the ‘regent’ class in the great cities, as the landed aristocracy of the Netherlands was minute).²⁵ There was always a large pool of potential candidates for posts, and many foreigners joined up in order to gain experience.²⁶ Naval service was popular at least in part because it offered many opportunities to make large amounts of money; as well as the chance of taking prizes in wartime, and transporting merchant goods in peacetime, the system by which the captain was personally responsible for provisioning the ship often allowed him to make a tidy profit.²⁷

Command of the fleet, and allocation of the subordinate flags, was an ongoing bone of contention, bound up as it was with deep-rooted provincial jealousies and political animosity between the rival supporters of the republic and the House of Orange. Even at the height of the battle of Scheveningen in August 1653, the Holland contingent would not accept Jan Evertsen as successor to the fallen Tromp, simply because he was a Zeelander. But both Evertsen and Tromp were Orangists, and their followers were hostile to the other leading admiral of the day, Witte de With, and Tromp’s eventual successor, the army officer Wassenaer van Obdam, both of whom were staunch republicans. In November 1653 Holland increased its number of flag officers to seven: one lieutenant-admiral for the whole province and a vice- and rear-admiral* for each of its three admiralties. In 1664 Zeeland appointed Evertsen as its lieutenant-admiral, hoping that this elevation would guarantee him the second-in-command’s position. Instead, Holland responded by elevating each of its three vice-admirals to lieutenant-admiral of his admiralty, giving the province a total of ten flag officers. Friesland followed suit, and the Dutch consequently fought the battle of Lowestoft with a surreal twenty-one flag officers; in most of the other battles of the second and third wars they had sixteen.²⁸ One of the few to rise above at least some of the jealousies was the greatest Dutch officer of the age, Michiel de Ruyter (1607–76), a Zeelander who nevertheless became an admiral of Amsterdam; but even he was staunchly republican in politics.

SEAMEN

The Dutch navy did not press its men, and depended in theory on the ability of individual captains to recruit. In practice, in wartime it was able to cajole men into its service by a variety of means, notably the imposition of embargoes on shipping.²⁹ Men could also be recruited from other sources. Dutch crews were always significantly more multinational than their British equivalents, and included Frenchmen, Germans and Scandinavians.³⁰ Many Britons served in the Dutch navy; they were driven by a variety of motives, some economic and some political, but up to 17 per cent of the crews of Zeeland ships in the 1640s were British (especially Scots), as were 8 per cent of the men on Tromp’s flagship Gouden Leeuw in 1673.³¹ Soldiers served in large numbers on Dutch ships, and in 1665 Holland (but not the other provinces) created a regiment of marines.³² Pay was not fixed at a standard rate, as it was in Britain, but varied from province to province and from year to year. In 1653 naval seamen took advantage of the demand for their services to demand eighteen guilders a month, although this generous wage did not long outlast the end of the war. By 1669 Zeeland was paying only twelve guilders, but wages rose dramatically once more during the war that began in 1672. These rates were low in comparison with those in the merchant service, though respectable (if not attractive) alongside the wages available to labourers in most parts of the republic.³³ Victuals were similar to those issued in Britain: bacon, cheese, bread, peas, biscuits and beer were prominent, although stock fish was issued regularly.³⁴ Gin was becoming increasingly popular in the Netherlands during the seventeenth century, but it would be several decades before it replaced beer in the Dutch naval diet (with predictably unfortunate results).

TACTICS

Throughout the long Spanish war, the Dutch had favoured operating in small, tightly organised squadrons, in which the ships could easily come to each other’s support. Attacks were made swiftly from windward, the aim being to board as quickly as possible. Adhering to this tactic caused Tromp and his subordinates considerable problems during the first Anglo-Dutch war, partly because of the unprecedented size of their fleet, partly because the British devised new tactics, centred on a ‘line of battle’, that effectively negated the Dutch tactic and severely exposed the weaknesses of their smaller ships. The fleet contained many different kinds and sizes of ship, with widely different sailing qualities, and many were hired merchantmen, with both hulls and captains of questionable quality.35 The increasing size and standardisation after the conclusion of the first war led to a substantial improvement, but the Dutch fleet still entered the second war in 1665 with its old tactical scheme in place. This was exposed yet again in the disastrous battle of Lowestoft, and in 1666 the Dutch finally adopted the line of battle. The merit of this change was obvious: apart from its comparatively slight reverse in the St James’s Day fight of 1666, the Dutch navy was not bested in battle again during the remainder of the second and third wars.

PRIVATEERS

Privateering provided an important element of the Dutch war effort. As in Britain, privateers (or ‘capers’) were usually fitted out by consortia of private shareholders, who gave in a surety for good conduct, but an important difference between the nations lay in the office of boekhouder (book-keeper), who managed many aspects of the venture, selected the captain, and often had several ships at sea at one time. Privateering commissions were issued by the States-General until 1672 and by William of Orange thereafter, but control of their activities was the responsibility of the five admiralties.³⁶ Amsterdam issued thirty-seven privateering commissions during the second war, seventy-five in the third; Zeeland issued ninety-three and 184 respectively. Most ships carried between four and twenty-two guns, although the largest, the Nassau of 1665, carried thirty-six. Names ranged from the conventional to the almost surreal: no fewer than three ships were called Getergde Kaasboer, ‘Provoked Cheese-Monger’.³⁷ Like British privateers, Dutch capers were heavily manned and armed. The ship that English clerks rendered as the Tarbrush was set out by an Amsterdam consortium in 1672. Of fifty tons, she carried eight guns, had four barrels of powder and shot, and carried forty-three muskets and the same number of swords.³⁸ As in the navy proper, crews were multinational. The Boger of Vlissingen, captured in November 1672, was manned chiefly by Zeelanders, but also carried Hamburgers, Swedes, Flemings and one Englishman.³⁹

As in Britain, privateering was primarily an autumn and winter activity, thus ensuring that recruitment for privateers did not interfere with that for the fleet.⁴⁰ Dutch privateers tended to operate further afield than their British counterparts, with many seeking prizes in southern waters and operating from friendly French and Spanish Atlantic ports (in the second and third wars respectively).⁴¹ Privateers often operated together and fought ferociously to save their own skins. The Vlissingen privateers Unity (thirty-two guns) and Unicorn (twenty-two guns) sailed in 1665 with enough victuals for six months, intending to go ‘northabout’ around Scotland in order to cruise in the mouth of the English Channel. On 13 April the Unity ran into the frigate Diamond, which chased her for four hours. The Unity event-ually surrendered when three of her crew of eighty-three had been killed and another fourteen or fifteen were wounded. Meanwhile, the Unicorn fought the Fourth Rate Yarmouth off her namesake town. Another four-hour battle cost the caper six killed and fifteen wounded from her crew of fifty-three men and seven boys, who had been armed with thirty muskets, thirty pistols, thirty swords and six carbines. Her captain was Cornelis Evertsen ‘the youngest, aged twenty-two, later to become one of the greatest of Dutch admirals.⁴²

The former warehouses of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) at Hoorn in North Holland give some idea of the scale and value of the greatest of the ‘rich trades’ .
(AUTHOR’S PHOTOGRAPH)

The capers were successful and profitable. During 1665–7, Amsterdam boekhouders received 567,000 guilders for forty-six prizes; four rich Virginia ships sold for 230,000 guilders. During the third war, privateers took almost 600 British and French merchantmen, most of which were taken by Zeeland ships; Zeeland boekhouders benefited to the tune of 812,000 guilders from just twenty-nine ships.⁴³ In all, auctions of prizes in Zeeland during the second and third wars brought in some six million guilders, with another three million realised at Amsterdam. However, as in Britain, privateering was not entirely unproblematic, and it seems that the proceeds from prize income, spectacular though they seemed on paper, did not compensate the Dutch admiralties for the income that they lost from duties, thanks to the disruption of trade in wartime.⁴⁴

MERCHANT SHIPPING

The Dutch merchant marine comprised some 50,000 men and 1,500 2,000 seagoing merchant vessels, with a cargo capacity of some 400,000–450,000 tons.⁴⁵ The most common form of ship employed by the Dutch in these trades was the fluit, known in English as the ‘flute’ or ‘flyboat’. Cheap to build and requiring only a small crew, it was ideal for transporting bulk goods economically; it carried about 180–240 tons of cargo, and enabled the Dutch significantly to undercut the prices charged by their potential competitors, notably the English. The dominance that it established in the transportation of Baltic grain and timber was important in the early development of Dutch economic pre-eminence, but by the 1650s and 1660s it was marginal compared with the so-called ‘rich trades’ to Spain, the Levant and the West and East Indies.46 The Dutch were also dominant in the North Sea fishery. A College of the Great Fishery, based at Delft, regulated several hundred herring‘busses’, which set off each June to work the grounds off Shetland. The busses followed the herring southwards, reaching the Yarmouth area by September and the Thames by December. The fishery provided both a reserve of manpower for the Dutch fleet and on ongoing cause of conflict with British monarchs.⁴⁷

THE DUTCH EAST INDIA COMPANY (VOC)

The Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC, founded in 1602), had virtually an entire navy of its own, which numbered 119 ships in 1659 (though most of these were permanently in Asian waters).⁴⁸ About twenty ships departed from the Netherlands for Asia each year, with about a dozen returning home. Most sailed to the main VOC factory at Batavia, though a few went to Ceylon or Coromandel.⁴⁹ The company also had trading posts in Persia, Melaka, Bengal, China, Thailand and Taiwan, and at Dejima in Japan, where the VOC had the only trading rights permitted to Westerners by the xenophobic shogunate. The Cape of Good Hope was acquired in 1652 as a staging post for VOC ships. Although relatively few ships returned from the east each year, the value of the cargoes of spices, peppers, silks, textiles and other luxury commodities was very high, producing a handsome profit for the company and thus ultimately for the state.⁵⁰ The VOC was organised federally, as were the Dutch admiralties. There were six chambers, of which Amsterdam was the wealthiest and most powerful; an initial on the ensign distinguished the ships of each chamber.⁵¹ Unlike the navy, though, the VOC had an overall executive authority, the Heren XVII, consisting of representatives of all the chambers. The company had its own yards and warehouses and a large workforce, both at home and in Asia, where it maintained an army that numbered some 10,000 men by the 1680s.⁵²

THE DUTCH USE OF ‘NEUTRAL’ SHIPPING

The British Isles straddled the routes taken by the ‘rich trades, and after the generally disastrous attempt to ‘run the gauntlet’ during the first war, the Dutch resorted to more sophisticated methods of overcoming the problem. In particular, they began to employ ‘neutral’ shipping, some of it belonging to states that were of at best dubious constitutional provenance. Ameland, one of the most easterly of the West Frisian islands, was a ‘free lordship’, and in the 1650s the number of ships registered at Ameland increased markedly.⁵³ In 1664–5, as tensions between England and the Netherlands developed once more into open war, the Ameland merchant fleet underwent another curiously coincidental expansion. The same was true of certain other miniature states, and throughout 1665 English sea-captains regularly seized vessels flying the flags of Emden and Hamburg. Emden, like Ameland, was nominally a separate jurisdiction, as was East Friesland. In practice, both were garrisoned by the Dutch and were Dutch satellite states.⁵⁴ Hamburg was a very different case. As she was an imperial free city, no-one doubted her independence, but much of her trade was with the Netherlands and dominated by Dutch merchants, and the sympathies of the citizens were overwhelmingly pro-Dutch.⁵⁵

For Dutch shipowners, the best ‘flag of convenience’ of all was that of Spanish Flanders, and especially that of the city of Bruges, only a few miles from the Dutch border. There are several recorded cases of Dutchmen boasting about how easy it was to get a ship registered there. In 1667, for instance, one Dutch master bragged that ‘he did not fear the English, for that he could go over to Bruges and make over a bill of sale to some person, and make himself a burger there and then he could with the said ship sail or go where he pleased’.⁵⁶ In 1667, therefore, the English Privy Council requested a true list of Bruges ships from the town’s authorities, and a similar request was made to other neutrals in 1672.⁵⁷ Several of the stories of intercepted ‘neutral’ shipping bordered on the farcical. In 1666, the Nostra Senora Concepcion of‘Bruges’ was intercepted when bound from Cadiz for ‘Ostend’ with sherry. It transpired that she had been conveniently ‘sold’ by her Dutch master to Flanders merchants just four or five days before leaving Cadiz, but her disguise was pitiful: she was flying yellow, red and white colours which the crew swore were Spanish, but was actually the Middelburg flag, flown upside down.⁵⁸ Also in 1666, the Annunciation of Mary of‘Bruges’ was intercepted by the Eaglet Ketch when en route from Bordeaux with brandy. Her master claimed to have lived at Bruges for a year; but he was previously of Amsterdam. He claimed to have bought the ship at Easter 1666; but he was unable to remember from whom. He had no bills of lading, charter party or letters (a surprising number of ships’ masters claimed that these had been lost overboard, or that they were being sent overland), and could not remember if the factor at Bordeaux had ever given him any. The master thought that the factor was French, but his steersman swore he was Dutch. Finally, the master attempted to bribe the captain of the Eaglet Ketch to clear his ship.⁵⁹

The British knew full well what was going on. In 1665, when France was neutral, the Duke of Albemarle commented caustically to the French ambassador that the French merchant marine seemed to have expanded remarkably since the beginning of the war.⁶⁰ A nearly contemporary anonymous commentator, reflecting on the reasons for Britain’s failure in the Anglo-Dutch wars, remarked that ‘most of the Dutch trade was the last wars managed with clandestine sea briefs, charter parties, and bills of lading’.⁶¹ However, the response to the problem was piecemeal and not entirely consistent. In February 1665 a clampdown was ordered against Hamburg, Emden and Ameland ships, which henceforward were to be treated as Dutch. In November 1665 the same treatment was extended to East Friesland ships, and an order was issued to seize all Dutch and Hamburg built ships, regardless of the flag they flew. In future, too, ships were to be regarded as hostile if only one part or share was owned by an enemy. It was relatively easy to act against small, easily intimidated ‘statelets’, but political realities dictated that little could be done if France and the Spanish Netherlands effectively colluded with the Dutch.

* The Dutch pound was about 10 per cent heavier than its English equivalent.

* See Part Twelve, passim.

* Dutch rear-admirals actually bore the delightful title of schout-bij-nacht, literally ‘sheriff (or lookout) of the night, derived from the post’s original function as the acting commander of a fleet during night-time.