Mr Vandervelde’s Lectures: the Prize

The Sole Bay Lectures

By M.W. Vandervelde

Number 3 'The Prize'

The Stavoren was captured between four and fuve o'clock in the afternoon of May 28th, 1672. Ever since the tide had turned and they'd put about, the English and the Dutch fleets had been sailing roughly southeast in two long lines, firing at each other. There was still very little wind, and the tide was against them. It must have been immensely slow.

The Dutch ships were to windward where the English would like to have been. If you were to windward, you had 'the weather gage' and if you hammered your opposing ship so hard that she had to stop firing or could no longer sail properly you could use the wind to bear down on her then come alongside and capture her. The captain and crew who took a ship earned a lavish financial reward.

It looked as if the Dutch were going to be lucky. When the tide had turned at noon  Dutch admiral Van Nes had captured the Royal Katherine, an 82-gun second-rate English 'great ship'. He’d taken her captain and officers on board his own vessel and put some of his men onto the Royal Katherine to sail her back to Holland. The English crew were imprisoned below decks.

Unfortunately for Van Nes he’d done the first part of his job too well. The Royal Katherine was an awkward ship at the best of times, and she was now so badly damaged that she wouldn't go to windward at all. She couldn't point in the right direction for Holland.

And she was leaking. So, when the English crew locked down below, began yelling, “The ship sinks! The ship sinks!” the Dutch allowed them back on deck to help save her. Instead, the English attacked the Dutch, locked them below and headed the Royal Katherine for Harwich with those few precious breaths of wind comfortably on her quarter. 

This line-of-battle fighting was toughest on the smaller ships. They couldn’t use their qualities of nimbleness to get out of the way and might be trapped into a long duel with an enemy who had twice as many guns. Once they were too badly damaged to keep their place in the line they would have to fall back, easy prey for her enemies. It makes me think of those TV documentaries where some weaker animal is separated from the main herd and the predators close in to finish it off.

That’s what happened to the Dutch 54-gun ship, the Josua. She’d been battered by the 96 guns of Sir John Kempthorne’s St Andrew until she could sail no more.  She was so badly damaged that the last survivors of her crew took to their boats and abandoned her. She wasn’t even worth taking as a prize so the English ship, the Edgar, carried on firing at her until she sank.

The Stavoren suffered during that long slogging match that lasted the full length of the ebb tide. Eventually she could no longer keep up with the rest of her countrymen. She drifted helplessly to leeward until she found herself in the midst of the English line-of battle – easy prey for the Greenwich, a slightly larger ship of sixty guns.  'Between four and five o’clock I saw the Greenwich board a disabled Dutch ship which had fallen among our ships. The Greenwich took her and carried her away.'

But where was she taken? Harwich was the nearest port with shipbuilding and repair facilities and that was where most, though not all, of the damaged English ships headed when they could no longer continue fighting. The wind was fair for Harwich and fair for the Thames as well.

In July 1672 there were 180 Dutch prisoners close to starvation in Harwich. Some of these could have come from the crew who’d attempted to take the Royal Katherine and then been overpowered – but I'm guessing that most were from the Stavoren. She had a crew of 200 and there must have been many casualties before she was sufficiently weakened to be captured. It’s likely that her captain, Daniel Elsevier, and his officers were removed separately, perhaps in hope of a ransom. They could even have been exchanged later for the captain and officers of the Royal Katherine. So my best guess is that the 180 Dutch prisoners struggling to survive in Harwich on a 1/2d a day each were from both of the two ships.

What happened to them? There doesn't seem to have been any system in place for ordinary prisoners. Well, I have some suggestions that I’ll make in the last of this series.

But they’ll only be guesses. What's certain is that the Stavoren herself was repaired and sent out again the next year as part of the English fleet, fighting against her own countrymen at the battles of Schoonvelde and the Texel. The English didn’t trouble to change her name. They wanted the Netherlanders to see their own vessel turned against them, their own figurehead sailing to attack, their own guns rolled out against them. She was now His Majesty’s Ship Stavoreen.

The Stavoreen didn’t distinguish herself. She had to be sent home for repairs after the Battle of the Texel in August 1673 and then the war was over. During the years of peace, she could have been used to protect merchant men or the fishing fleet or she could have been sent to the Mediterranean to fight the Barbary corsairs. There’s no evidence that she did or didn’t do any of these things. The years after 1674 until the new war with the French in 1689 were years of great reduction in the size of the English navy. All that is known of the Stavoreen is that in 1682 that she was officially declared useless.