The plan for Dutch ships in 1652

When described in books, the Dutch plans for equipping the navy with ships in 1652 seem to be very well-defined. There were the 40 convoyers authorized in 1648, the 36 cruisers authorized in 1651, the 50 Directors' ships and the 100 ships, both authorized in 1652. The reality was that the plan was less certain then what was published. There may only have been 36 of the 40 still in service by May 1652, for example. As for the 100 ships, there were never that many ships hired or activated from the reserve.

"We gather together"

I had not heard this story before about the inspiration for the hymn "We gather together". I know the song well, but didn't realize that it derived from the Dutch. The battle it commemorated was at Turnhout in 1597. The Dutch name for the hymn was "Wilt Heden Nu Treden". Yesterday was the Thanksgiving holiday in America. "We Gather Together" is a typical Thanksgiving hymn.

A few big guns on small Dutch ships

A typical practice at the time of the First Anglo-Dutch War was for Dutch many ships to have a few larger guns. I consider this practice to be a continuation of the Elizabethan arming scheme for ships. The Zeelanders certainly followed this pattern:

Zeeuwsche Leeuw      2-bronze 24pdr
Westcappel           2-bronze 16pdr
Amsterdam            2-bronze 24pdr, 2-bronze 20pdr
Wapen van Zeeland    2-bronze 18pdr (the ship of Joost Willemsz Block)
Hollandia (in 1652)  4-bronze 24pdr, 4-bronze 18pdr, 2-bronze 15pdr
                                        (Johan Evertsen's flagship)

Dirck Cleuter

I received a page this morning that shows that Dirck Cleuter was the luitenant of Evert Anthoniszoon when the Hollandia was lost at the Battle of Scheveningen in 1653. The sum of the small pieces of information is how I build the larger picture. My approach to historical research is a bottom-up process.

Someone asked me about my ancestry

This morning, I was talking to my fellow "greeter" and she asked me about my ancestry, given my last name. That question got me thinking again about Matilda Lehman (not Lemon), who married a Beardsley in the 19th Century. Her son told the 1870 census taker that his mother was born in Holland. Other indications were that she was born in Ohio, but I can accept that she might have in fact been born in Holland, in the early 19th Century. What I have learned over the last few months was that the name Lehman was associated with Anabaptists in Germany and the Netherlands in the 17th Century.

The Beardsleys apparently had the custom of greeting men in the family by their middle name. My grandfather was called Moore. The president of Miles Laboratories, who thought of the idea for Alka Seltzer, was called Hub or Hubble, his middle name. He was my great-grandmother's brother. In the 1950's, there was a Beardsley man who they called Lehman, obviously his middle name. They pronounced it Lay-man, not Lee-mon. The name came from my ancestor, Matilda Lehman.

The French intelligence reports from the 1670's

I just had one of those flashes of inspiration. In the French intelligence documents that Jan Glete gave me in 2003, there is a ship called "Tsuy derthuis". I just realized that this was the Amsterdam ship Zuiderhuis!