A Brill Calendar: August 12

Few professions have served the Republic of the Seven United Provinces as well as her sailors.

The nautical tradition of the Low Countries became an affair of State in the High Middle Ages, intertwined with commerce and exploitation. During the course of some three centuries, standards of excellence and innovation in seamanship and technology were set in all European lands surrounding the North Sea and the Main; while cartography and navigation as commercial challenges for learned men were seen as vital tasks for Leyden scholars and governors.

A crucial stage in this professional evolution is embodied in the exemplary figure of Maarten Harpertszoon Tromp (died– off Terheyde, near Scheveningen, August 9 1653), nicknamed ‘Bestevaer’, (‘Best of sea-faring fathers’), after his reorganizing of the neglected Dutch fleet. In the history of maritime warfare it is seldom that a more fundamental strategic discovery was made as on August 12 1638, when Tromp’s fleet employed as first the naval procedure of a ‘fight in line’, ships sailing in an uninterrupted line and manoeuvre, blockading the harbour of Dunkirk. A little more than a year later, September 15 1639, Tromp would use the same tactics during the ‘Battle of the Downs’ for the first time against moving targets; his decisive victory signalling the end of Spain as a power at sea.

The ‘fight in line’ quickly became a standard manoeuvre all over the world until the end of the 18th century; and of the ‘ancien régime’ generally, while it should be noted, that Michiel de Ruyter (1607 – 1676) was still a junior officer at the time of Tromp’s seminal victory.