Witte de With: The Ablest Dutch Admiral Nobody Liked

Witte de With fought from Matanzas to the Sound, was nearly beheaded for deserting Brazil, and lost at Kentish Knock. Why did his own side distrust him?

5 October 2026 · Part of Dutch Republic & VOC — a guide to 11 articles →

Witte Corneliszoon de With (1599-1658) circled the globe, helped capture a Spanish silver fleet, led the Dutch at Kentish Knock and died with his flag still flying in the Sound, yet his countrymen never warmed to him. He was feared by his crews, shunned by his peers and openly insubordinate to his superiors, and the Dutch Republic used him anyway, because it had few commanders who could do what he did.

A boy from Brielle

De With was born at Brielle on 28 March 1599, in the town that the Sea Beggars had taken in 1572 and that became a cradle of Dutch naval men. According to the standard biographical accounts he was a childhood rival of Maarten Tromp, who came from the same town, and the rivalry never really ended. He went to sea in 1616 on trading voyages to the East Indies and India, and in 1620 took part in an expedition against the Barbary corsairs.

In 1626 he was vice-admiral of a small spice fleet that, by the account most biographies give, came home by way of the Pacific and so completed a circumnavigation. That alone made him unusual among Dutch commanders, who were mostly bred on the cold, short routes of the North Sea. He had also, by then, seen the Spanish possessions on the American Pacific coast from the sea. The Republic's war with Spain was a war for trade as much as for territory, as we describe in how the Dutch East India Company transformed global trade networks.

Matanzas and the Downs

In 1628 he served in the fleet of Piet Hein when it took the Spanish silver fleet in the Bay of Matanzas, the capture we examine in Piet Hein and the Silver Fleet. In 1637 he returned to the navy proper and, in 1639, fought beside Tromp at the Battle of the Downs, where a Spanish armada was destroyed in English waters. By then he was a Holland officer of the first rank.

The Dutch navy of those years was not a single fleet. It was run by separate admiralties, each with its own money, ships and local loyalties, a structure laid out in the five admiralties of the Dutch Republic. That matters for De With: he was a Hollander in a force where Zeeland, Friesland and Holland officers watched each other closely, and his temper did not help.

Brazil: the court martial

In 1647 the States-General sent him to Dutch Brazil with a fleet that was poorly equipped, to help the colony against the Portuguese. What followed was a long quarrel with the colonial council. His ships were not supplied, the fleet decayed, and in November 1649 he sailed home against orders with the two ships still seaworthy.

At The Hague he went to complain about the colonial government and was arrested instead. He was charged with insubordination and desertion on 259 counts and came close to a death sentence. According to the accounts we follow, the States of Holland intervened, pointing out that only they could condemn one of their admirals to death. In February 1651 he was acquitted of most charges and lost only the pay for the period involved. By September 1651 he was back on convoy duty.

Whether he was a deserter or a man left to rot by a bankrupt colonial administration is a question historians have answered differently. The West India Company was short of money and quarrelled with everyone, and De With was not a man who bore this quietly.

The character problem

The Dutch naval historian J. C. M. Warnsinck, as the standard summaries have it, judged that De With was feared and hated by his inferiors, avoided by his equals and always full of defiance toward his superiors. Crews on more than one occasion are said to have refused him as a flag officer on their ship. These judgements come from later historians and from Orangist and Holland party feeling, so they deserve some caution. But the pattern is consistent with his Brazil record.

His talent was never in doubt. He was bold in the attack, a capable seaman and unusually well travelled. The Republic's difficulty was that boldness and obedience rarely arrived in the same officer. A navy built on committee compromise had little room for a man like him, and had little choice but to use him anyway.

Chronology

Kentish Knock, 1652

When the First Anglo-Dutch War began, Tromp was the Republic's best-known commander. After he failed to bring the English to battle off the Shetlands in August 1652, with the Dutch fleet scattered by weather, the States-General suspended him. The command passed to De With, then the Holland vice-admiral. The appointment was political from the start, and it put him over the man he had rivalled since boyhood.

The battle was fought on 8 October 1652 by the Dutch calendar (28 September in England) on the shoals of the Kentish Knock, off the Thames estuary. De With had roughly sixty ships against an English fleet under Robert Blake of somewhat more. Many of his captains were of doubtful quality, and the Dutch fleet became disordered; a gale and the shoals did the rest. The Dutch lost two ships and withdrew. Our own record of these operations in the dataset of Dutch Golden Age naval battles lists the battle as an English victory and names him as the Dutch commander.

It was a defeat, not a disaster, and he was not alone to blame: captains who would not follow signals plagued the Dutch navy throughout the war. But it was enough. Tromp was reinstated and won at Dungeness on 30 November. The Republic's political and commercial pressures were already heavy, as the disaster year 1672 shows later on, and no committee in The Hague was inclined to forgive a loser.

The Sound, 1658

The last act came in the Baltic. In the Second Northern War, Sweden besieged Copenhagen, and the Dutch, who lived on Baltic grain and timber, could not allow the Sound to fall under one power. Lieutenant-Admiral Jacob van Wassenaer Obdam led a relief fleet, with De With as vice-admiral commanding the van.

On 8 November 1658 the two fleets met at the Sound north of Copenhagen, and the Dutch won, relieving the city. The price was De With's life. His flagship Brederode, a ship of some 54 guns, was held by the current and grounded under the guns of several Swedish ships, among them the Draken and the Wismar. Fire broke out, and De With was shot dead in the fighting. The Swedes took the flag. By tradition he fought until he fell; the Dutch sources that tell this were, of course, written by his own side.

The Swedes embalmed his body and displayed it at Elsinore before sending it to Copenhagen in January 1659. He was later buried in Rotterdam. The Rijksmuseum and the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich both hold paintings of the battle, which show how much the Sound was a battle of crowded ships in a narrow channel.

A name that stayed difficult

His reputation after death was mixed. In Rotterdam his name was given to a street and, later, to a well-known arts centre, which dropped the name in the 2020s. The museum Gevangenpoort in The Hague has written about him as a naval hero with a tainted name. We would add that the label cuts both ways: the same man who was court-martialled was also one of the few Dutch admirals to die in the line of battle.

Conclusion

De With was not a likeable man and perhaps not an easy officer to serve, but the Republic never found a replacement for his skill. His career reads as a record of a navy that depended on talent it could not control. For what Dutch wealth made possible at home, see scientific societies and knowledge networks in the Dutch Golden Age, and for the earlier Spanish naval threat that shaped the Republic's origins, the Spanish Armada of 1588.

Frequently asked questions

Why was Witte de With so unpopular? Contemporaries and later historians describe him as harsh to his crews, quarrelsome with his equals and defiant of superiors. Some of that picture comes from later writers with their own party loyalties, so it should be read with care. His Brazil conduct and the 259-point charge sheet did nothing to improve it.

Did De With lose the Battle of the Kentish Knock? Yes, the Dutch were beaten there on 8 October 1652, losing two ships. Blame is usually spread across a disordered fleet, doubtful captains and bad weather, as well as the admiral, who had taken over after Tromp was suspended.

How did Witte de With die? He was killed at the Battle of the Sound on 8 November 1658, when his flagship Brederode was grounded and boarded by Swedish ships. His body was embalmed by the Swedes and later sent to Copenhagen, then to Rotterdam.

What was his quarrel with Maarten Tromp? Both were from Brielle and the biographies describe a lasting rivalry. It mattered politically in 1652, when De With took the command from which Tromp had been suspended.

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