7 - The Raison d’Être and the Actual Employment of the Dutch Navy in Early Modern Times

Summary

Formulating the raison d’être for the Dutch Navy in early modern times is not difficult. The Low Countries and later the Dutch Republic bordered the North Sea, and on the inland side the Zuyder Zee. Salt water offered possibilities for invasion or raids from overseas. The Dutch themselves used the sea for merchant shipping and fisheries. They were eager to open the whole world for their economic activities. Naval forces were the foremost safeguard against invasion. Protection of commercial shipping and fisheries required convoys. Overseas expansion required offensive sea power.

The Sixteenth Century

The Habsburg rulers of the Netherlands, Charles V and Philip II, started the organisation of regular naval forces. The city of Veere in Zeeland became the centre of all their naval activities. At some periods there were even some permanent warships. Differences of interests between the provinces hampered the introduction of fixed convoys on shipping routes to western and southern Europe and also for the fisheries, but some occasional state protection could nevertheless be provided. The incursions of the Protestant rebels called ‘Sea Beggars’ from 1566 to 1572 proved the vulnerability of the coastal areas along the North Sea and Zuyder Zee. Hereafter, nobody in the rebellious North and in the loyal South had to be convinced that a navy was an absolute necessity.

In the North it was impossible to establish one centralised naval organisation. Provincial and local interests, the accidents of war and simple power politics created five different admiralties, located in the three maritime provinces of Zeeland, Holland and Friesland, and specifically in the cities of Middelburg, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Hoorn or Enkhuizen, and Dokkum, later Harlingen. The newly born Republic badly needed naval forces in a war that would last for eighty years until 1648. Spain and the Southern Netherlands, and in particular the Dunkirk privateers, represented a constant threat, not only by numerous raids and invasions, but also by their efficient attacks on herring and other fishing boats, and of course on all kinds of merchantmen. The enemy endangered the Dutch economy, which was growing very fast in particular from the 1590s. The Dutch entered into the Mediterranean trades and crossed the equator.