Navies, warships, and campaigns
8
WINTER OPERATIONS
With so much written about the war of 1664-1667, it may be surprising that one
aspect of the naval struggle has hitherto been almost completely ignored - the
ongoing operations at sea during the winter seasons. And not merely for this
war where the issue is dealt with at all, seventeenth-century naval operations are
usually held to have been entirely or almost entirely limited to a main campaign
season' during the best weather conditions (roughly April-September). The caveat
suggests that naval historians do not absolutely exclude the possibility of winter
operations: they do even mention some instances at other times. The winter cam
paigns we shall see were eventful affairs, containing a game of 'Blind Man's Buff'
that could have changed the course of the war for either side in the first weeks (and
thereby yielded a strategic result in the first summer); daring raids into the heart of
the enemy's position; and real fear of an invasion - all undertaken at great risk and
often with great suffering. Here we shall look at the first two of the three winter
seasons: the last, 1666-1667, is not covered - principally because the Zeelanders'
main effort was put into Abraham Crijnssen's famous trans-Atlantic expedition.
But first we must step aside briefly to look at how navies 'worked'.
The Second Anglo-Dutch War took place during a period of flux in navies and
naval warfare - part of a naval aspect of the early modern Military Revolution. The
leading naval powers were well progressed in their development of permanent
navies, replacing the ad hoc temporary navy; the latter might consist of limited
number of state-owned warships that is, ships designed especially as gun-plat
forms for war - but the bulk consisted of merchant ships taken into service by the
state when required and converted for naval use. In the early seventeenth century
ships evolved to carry more and heavier guns to such a point that the purpose-built
warship had shown itself far superior in combat to merchant vessels converted for
war a major lesson of the war of 1652-1654: merchantmen were designed as
cargo-carriers and consequently more weakly-constructed and unable to mount
the new armaments or take the damage that these inflicted. During 1664-1667,
merchantmen were still taken into service, but not in the same numbers - so
they formed only small proportions of fleets - and often only as auxiliaries, or in
theatres of war distant from the central theatre in north-west European waters. The
war of 1652-1654 was also a turning point in tactical terms: the British introduced
linear tactics the line of battle' (to maximise use of ships' broadside firepower);
linear tactics were thus another aspect shared with developments in land warfare
during the Military Revolution.
There were two main types of major warship. By 1664 the British and Dutch
essentially shared the concept of the 'capital ship': a warship mounting 40 or more
guns that was reckoned to be capable of giving and taking punishment in a stand-
up fight; in other words, a battleship. Here, the British had led the way: the reali
ty of gunpower had been proven in the war of 1652-1654 - the Dutch had been
shown by a string of defeats the need to build larger warships able to hold their
own with the more powerful British types. By 1664 the Dutch had closed the gap
