Naval battles of the Dutch Golden Age, 1600–1700

How this record was compiled

A battle is included when it meets both tests: a fleet of the Republic — a States squadron, or one fitted out by the VOC or the WIC — took part, and both sides brought at least five ships to the engagement. The five-ship threshold is what separates a fleet action from the several hundred privateering and convoy actions of the period, whose scale usually cannot be established at all.

The certainty column applies to the row as a whole: date, participants and outcome. High means those three are settled in the standard literature. Medium means at least one of them is reported differently in different traditions — most often the outcome, which Dutch, English, Spanish and Portuguese accounts of the same day frequently score in opposite directions.

What was deliberately left out

• Ship and casualty counts. They are not tabulated, and that is a decision rather than an omission. For most of these actions the numbers differ between the national traditions by margins wider than the difference they are meant to establish, and a single figure in a cell would give those disagreements a precision they do not have. The five-ship threshold was applied at inclusion; the counts themselves belong in the literature that argues about them.
• Sieges and amphibious operations. The capture of Salvador in 1624 and the taking of Malacca in 1641 were decided on land after a fleet delivered an army. They belong to a different record.
• Privateering, convoy actions and single-ship duels. Excluded by the five-ship rule.
• The voorcompagnieën before 1602. The fleets that sailed east before the VOC was chartered were not a company fleet in the sense this record uses, and their actions — Bantam in 1601 among them — fall outside the first test.
• Actions after 1700. The record closes with the century, which cuts the War of the Spanish Succession off mid-conflict. That is an arbitrary boundary and it is stated rather than disguised.

Disputed entries

Four kinds of dispute run through this record, and the certainty column marks where they bite.

Outcomes. Cape Rachado in 1606 is recorded here as a Portuguese tactical victory because Matelieff lost ships and withdrew, but the blockade he had come to impose was resumed within weeks and the Portuguese position in the Strait was never restored; Dutch accounts have always read it as a strategic success. The Four Days' Battle of 1666 is scored as a Dutch victory in the Dutch tradition and as a costly draw in much English writing.

Dates. The Republic used the Gregorian calendar and England the Julian until 1752. Dates here follow the Gregorian reckoning throughout, which means several battles appear ten days later than in English sources that give the Old Style date.

Attribution of command. At Abrolhos in 1631 the Dutch commander was killed during the action and the subsequent conduct of the battle is attributed differently in different accounts. The row names the commander who began it.

Whether an action is one battle or two. The two engagements at the Schooneveld a week apart in June 1673 are counted separately here because each had its own objective and its own outcome; some accounts treat them as one prolonged action.

Sources

Twenty-five of the thirty-four rows now cite a page in an edition that was opened and read: W. L. Clowes, The Royal Navy: A History, volume II, for the Anglo-Dutch and Anglo-French battles, and J. C. de Jonge, Geschiedenis van het Nederlandsche zeewezen, volume II, for the Mediterranean campaign of 1676. Where Clowes gives an English date in Old Style and the row keeps the New Style date used in the Republic, the row says so.

Every row now cites a page in an edition that was opened and read. Five rows that could not reach that standard were taken out rather than dressed up: the action in the Bay of Matanzas in 1628, the Slaak in 1631, the action off Dunkirk in February 1639, and the two Baltic battles of 1658 and 1659. The literature that carries them is either in copyright and not open, or exists only as a black-letter scan whose optical recognition cannot be trusted to yield a page number. Four actions that could be verified took their place, three of them in Asia: the two engagements off the bar of Goa in January and February 1637, the destruction of a Portuguese fleet off Puludindin in the same year, and the English attack on the Dutch Smyrna convoy in March 1672. The record therefore holds thirty-three battles rather than the thirty-four it began with, and the difference is a subtraction that can be checked rather than a gap that cannot.

Two dates were corrected against the sources. The battle off Plymouth and the battle off Portland were carried here on their Old Style days; since this record states that it uses the Gregorian reckoning throughout, they now read 26 August 1652 and 28 February 1653.

The Asian rows carry medium certainty for a related reason: the VOC actions east of the Cape are the least well served by the general literature and the ones most in need of a direct archival reference.

Supporting reading on this site

• Cape Rachado, 1606: The Battle Both Sides Won — the Asian half of this record, and the clearest case of why the outcome column is a judgement: the Portuguese held the field and lost the Strait.
• The Battle of Abrolhos, 1631: A Victory Decided by a Cable — the Brazilian half, and the reason a trading company kept a battle fleet: sixteen Dutch ships against twenty Spanish warships to stop a relief convoy that got through anyway.