Dutch ship armaments in 1665

By the Battle of Lowestoft, Dutch ships seemed to have carried a large number of guns for their size. The little Rotterdam ship Vrede carried 40 guns. In the case of the Vrede, the ship carried many 12pdr and 6pdr guns. My opinion was that the ship was greatly over-armed for a small frigate. This was the ship that Jan van Brakel commanded at the raid on the Medway when he is often said to have broken the chain on the Medway. The truth seems to be that the fireship Pro Patria, commanded by Jan Daniëlsz van Rijn, was the ship that broke the chain.

Abel Roelantsz

I have been searching on the Gemeentearchief Rotterdam website. I saw what I had known about: "capiteyn Abel Roelantsz Verboom". I believe that he had been flag captain for Tromp on the Brederode in 1652. In 1653, he commanded Witte de With's old flagship, the Prinses Louise (36 guns). He also may have functioned as a division commander.

The Gewapende Ruyter

I had never seen the ship Gewapende Ruyter mentioned in any document from the Nationaal Archief in The Hague before yesterday. That is no longer the case. Yesterday, I received photographs of a letter from Admiralty of Amsterdam secretary David de Wildt, from 18 November 1653, with what Jane's Fighting Ships used to call "War Losses". These were the ships lost by the Admiralty of Amsterdam in the First Anglo-Dutch War. The second ship mentioned was the Gewapende Ruyter (kapitein Boëtius Schaeff), 36 guns. David de Wildt categorized the Gewapende Ruyter as being taken and brought to The Downs.

My possible Dutch connection

I found out today that my ancestor's name was not Matilda Lemon, but Matilda Lehman. Lehman is apparently a Mennonite name, and this page makes it seem plausible that Matilda Lehman could have a Netherlands connection. Lehmans moved to Ohio, at one point, and the Beardsleys lived in Ohio at the right period. It was in an 1870 census where Solomon Beardsley said that his mother was born in "Holland". Matilda Lehman is said to have been born in 1812 and died in 1860.

Bronze 15pdr guns

I had thought that I did not know the weight of any 15pdr guns, but from a page dated 27 March 1653, I have the weights of two bronze 15pdr guns carried by the Zeeland ship Hollandia, commanded by kapitein Adriaen Banckert. The two guns were 2750 and 2733 pounds.

Copper 6pdr guns for the Gorcum

I was surprised to see that the Rotterdam ship Gorcum (or Gorinchem) carried two copper 6pdr guns in 1652. The Friesland ship Breda had copper 4pdr guns at the same time. The Admiralty of Friesland had acquired the Breda from Amsterdam, as I recall. Nico Brinck had told me that the "copper" guns were actually made from a composite of iron, lead, and beaten copper. The copper was not cast, but beaten to shape with hammers. As far as I can tell, the Gorcum had the copper 6pdrs replaced by Jun3 1653.

Amsterdam ships completed in the summer of 1653

I was working on my annotated list of ships that fought in the Battle of Lowestoft in 1665, when I noticed that the Oosterwijk was 140ft long. The Amsterdam and the Oosterwijk were built under the First Anglo-Dutch War building program and came into service late in the summer, after the Battle of Scheveningen. They were both 140ft long ships. They were a non-standard size, as supposedly, they were going to build 150ft, 136ft, and 130ft ships under the two thirty ship programs. In fact there were many deviations.

My estimate of the 1628 bronze 24pdr drake gun weight

My first attempt at an estimate where I have an idea of dimensions for a gun is a 24pdr bronze drake from 1628. I have a lower resolution scan of Nico Brinck's drawing, so I had some trouble reading the numbers. The gun is about 2273mm long (8ft long in Amsterdam feet). My weight estimate, based on metal volume is 2739 pounds (Amsterdam pounds of 494.09 grams). I do all the important calculations in metric measurements.

I have more from Nico Brinck

Thanks to what Nico Brinck has given me, including in May, I have enough to make more progress on a Dutch gun model. There seems to be value in switching to metric lengths and estimating the actual bore length and diameter. Unlike the English, gun lengths are not on even 6in intervals. I am also using metric weight measures, the motivation for metric is to be able to deal with things like Rijnland feet and Amsterdam feet interchangeably as well as Swedish feet and pounds.

I need to calibrate my formula for Dutch guns

I am finally dealing with the difference in the Dutch pound and the English pound and the Amsterdam foot and the English foot in my gun calculations. I need to find one of Nico Brinck's gun drawings that I have a both a weight in Dutch pounds (one pound is 494.09 grams) and the measurement in centimeters (I think that is what is used for dimensions). That will allow me to calibrate the formula. My original formula was based on English feet and inches and English pounds. The Amsterdam foot is aboutg 283mm and is divided into 11 inches.

Dutch gun speculation

The two bronze 24pdr guns carried by the Zeeland ship Goes in 1652 and 1653 are interesting, because they only weighted 2384 pounds. To me, that means that they were short and had thin metal, certainly being chambered guns. They seem to have been the sort of mid-Seventeenth Century equivalent to a 24pdr carronade. The problem is that I have no way of knowing just how thin the metal was. My wild speculation puts the length at 5-1/2 Amsterdam feet.

Dutch guns

My project for yesterday was to compile a spreadsheet of Dutch ship gun inventories. I don't have complete coverage, but there is enough to be useful. There is limited information on 36pdr guns. All that I have is from the gun inventory for the Zeven Provincien that was published. There was a larger type of bronze 36pdr that averaged 6635 pounds. There was a somewhat smaller 36pdr that averaged 6282 pounds. The heavier 24pdr averaged 4923 pounds. The Zeven Provincien only had two of these. I knew about the other four that were carried by the Zeeland ship Vlissingen in 1653. Most bronze 24pdr guns carried by the Zeven Provincien averaged 4420 pounds. I can see that I have some reorganizing to do on the list, so that there may be some small adjustments in the averages, but those are about right, as is.

Hosting for two sites is down

Two of my web sites, Graphic-Artist-2.com and AngloDutchWarsBlog.com are both down due to a fire at the hosting service, Avahost. They really do not know how long it will take to get back up. I could tell there was a problem with traffic from those two sites disappeared from my tracking.

My current short project

Frank Fox called me to today to ask about guns carried by Dutch ships at the Battle of Lowestoft that he needed to know about. That got me started on making a list of ships with dimensions and gun lists that I know about, giving credit to the source for the dimensions and gun lists. I was actually able to put a good number of hours in on this, so that I made significant progress this afternoon. Of course, very little of this information has been published. I will at least supply this to Frank Fox, as he has shared a lot of information with me. Naturally, before I did anything with this, I would get photographs of the original source documents. I have a pretty good idea where to look. It is just that my focus has been on 1648-1654.

The notation about Cornelis Tiebij and the English ship lying at Veere in late July 1653 still interests me. There is another page that places the Bonaventura at Veere in that period, as well. We believe, however, that contrary to published sources, the Bonaventura was not at the Battle of Scheveningen and was not sunk there. Sources had indicated that the Bonaventura had been hired by the Directors of Middelburg and that the ship was used in the battle. We don't think that Cornelis Tiebij's ship Luipaert was the Bonaventura, renamed, but you have to wonder at the reason for the note about him and the English ship.

The ship Edam in English service

Both the figure 103ft given by Pepys and the 86ft figure given in Van Foreest and Weber's book both seem incorrect for a keel length for the captured Dutch ship Edam. The Edam was called the Black Bull in English service, after the symbol of Edam. There are conflicting figures for the length of the Edam. The published figures all were 120ft, but there is considerable documentary evidence that indicates that the length was 124ft. Using my rule of thumb, a length of 124ft in Amsterdam feet would give an English keel length of 94ft (or perhaps 93ft). If the Dutch length were 120ft, the English keel length would be 89 or 90 ft., not 86ft.

The Wkipedia page on the Brederode

I ended up looking at the version in English of the Wikipedia page about the Dutch ship Brederode. I decided to go ahead and make several corrections at the bottom of the piece.

Yet another source that says that the Graaf Hendrick was a Groningen Directors' ship

Early this morning, I was reading documents from late 1652 and saw another reference to the ship Graaf Hendrick, commanded by Jan Reijndersz Wagenaer, being a Groningen Directors' ship. All the lists from 1653 assign the ship to the Admiralty of Friesland. The document that I read this morning was dated 6 December 1652, four days before the Battle of Dungeness.

The Goeree Gat

After looking at the island of Goeree in Google Maps, I still wonder which side is the "Goeree Gat" mentioned in The First Dutch Wars volumes. Also, after the Zeeslag bij Nieuwpoort (the Battle of the Gabbard), a few ships sought shelter at Goeree. Were they in the water immediately to the north or to the south of the island? Does someone know? Google Maps is useful from my desk at work, but Google Earth really gives you the capability to see what an area is like, with the ability to view from an angle above the earth, or even down to the water level.

A list of ships from 30 June 1652

I have this list of ships under the flag of Admiral Tromp, dated 30 June 1652. I suspect that the number of ships is greater than the number in the printed list of the fleet that is divided into three squadrons. Still, I would be interested to see the comparison between the two lists. If the printed list is at all valid, we should be able to tell which captains are meant by the names we do not recognize in that list. The handwritten list gives the admiralty, the captain's name, the guns and the crew size for each ship. The ship names are omitted, but we know which ship each captain commanded, so that is not an issue.