10
WINTER OPERATIONS
formance and required cleaning - either by careening (deliberately listing) the ship
at a sheltered shoreline, or - for full maintenance in dock. The naval officer corps
were increasingly permanent too, but the crews were not: other vital tasks were to
recruit the sailors and pay them - in our period, each fleet needed up to 25.000
men, larger than the population of most towns and to organise their food and
drink. All of this plus the infrastructure, raw materials, and necessary bureaucra
cy and administration was quite simply the most expensive project any state
could undertake.9
The laying-up/fitting out cycle of the warship and her periodical refits also took
place during naval wars: this is one source of our main historiographical problem
that is, to what degree were these maintenance routines actually concentrated in
the winter (so as to have as many ships as possible ready as soon as the 'campaign
season' started), and were any warships kept at sea during the winter? The second
aspect is whether the warships that were kept at sea were capital ships, or cruisers,
or a mix of the two types. This brings us to ships and weather.
The seventeenth-century climate was dominated by the Little Ice Age: weather
conditions were much more severe than today. Winters were much colder: around
our brief period the average winter temperature was 1.5 degrees: one of the cold
est times of the era. Our period also saw particularly heavy storms. We know that
a very hard frost hit all of Holland on 20 December 1664 the cold was so severe
that trees split. The Maas froze over at Rotterdam often in January and February
1665; during the same time ice closed the trekvaart canal network between
Haarlem and Leiden for seven weeks. Across the North Sea, in Essex, southern
England, the winter lasted through to 24 March. Further afield, the Danish Sound
froze in February; the Seine and the Weser also froze intermittently.10 The follow
ing winter, 1665-1666, a very severe storm surge in early December affected much
of north-west Europe. The cold was not as severe as the previous winter, with
storms and some milder spells in January, though the cold continued into March.
The trekvaart between Haarlem and Leiden was closed by ice from late December
for three weeks.11
For ships, the cold meant they could get iced in at Amsterdam or the Texel; there
was ice in the Scheldt. Crucially, any problems with access to the open sea would
have meant communication was limited to the trekvaart itself subject to closure.
J.R. Jones maintains that the Dutch sea gates were not blocked by ice at this
time.12 The winter campaigns below shed new light on this, as well as on ice con
ditions generally: as late as mid-March 1665 ice caused problems at the Texel and
Vlie.13 Gales and storms were stronger and more frequent - at the higher latitudes,
in the winter, at the equinoxes, and there was frequently bad weather in the sum
mer.14 This increased the risk of accident that might result in disablement or even
loss: damage to masts, spars, rigging, or sails might lead to a ship becoming
unmanageable because she could not manoeuvre well enough relative to wind and
wave conditions. In bad weather relatively minor battle damage might become
very dangerous. Ships might be torn from their anchors and driven ashore and
lost. The effects on ships could be terrible: in November 1683 eight Dutch capi
tal ships with thousands of men were lost in a storm off north Holland.11 Broadly
speaking, smaller ships were able to manoeuvre more easily than large ships in bad
