Hostilities between the two states had not continued quite two years, and yet, in that time, the English took no less than one thousand seven hundred prizes, valued by the Dutch themselves at sixty-two millions of guilders, or nearly six millions sterling. On the contrary, those taken by the Dutch did not amount to a fourth part either in number or value. Within that period the English were victorious in no less than five general battles, some of which were of several days' duration; whereas the Hollanders cannot justly boast of having gained one; for the action between De Ruyter and Ayscue, in which they pretended some advantage, was no general fight; and the advantage gained by Tromp in the Downs is owned to have been gained over a part only of the English fleet. Short as this quarrel was, it brought the Dutch to greater extremities than their eighty years of war with Spain.
[STORIES OF THE SECOND DUTCH WAR.]
BY JOHN CAMPBELL.
[I. The Defeat of the Dutch Off Harwich.]
The second Dutch war was declared in Holland in January and in England in February, 1665. It arose out of the conflicts of the rival companies of Dutch and English merchants in the East and West Indies and in Africa, and the refusal of Charles II. to remedy a condition of things which had become unendurable.
In 1664 the Dutch sent an embassy to the English court, to complain of the depredations from which they suffered at the hands of the Anglo-African company, of which the king's brother, the Duke of York, was then governor; but the king replied that he had received no particular information of the affairs in question and that the rival companies must settle their differences among themselves. On the other hand, the English merchants appealed to him with so much persistence, that he finally demanded satisfaction of the Dutch.
The first action of consequence that happened after the war actually broke out was an attack made upon a Dutch fleet coming richly laden from Smyrna upon the Spanish coast near Cadiz. This consisted of forty merchant ships, some of them very large, and well provided with ordnance; and their convoy was composed of four third-rate men-of-war. Sir Thomas Allen, who commanded the English squadron, had with him about nine ships. With these he attacked the enemy so successfully, that having killed their commodore, Brackel, and taken or sunk four of their richest ships, he drove the rest into the Bay of Cadiz, where for some time he blocked them up. A misfortune of the same kind befell the Dutch Bourdeaux fleet, out of which about one hundred and thirty ships were taken.
These heavy misfortunes obliged the Dutch to lay an immediate embargo on all vessels in their ports; by which their fisheries and their annual commerce were stopped for that season. They likewise settled a fund of fourteen millions of guilders for the support of the war; and, in order to show that there ought to be some difference between such wars as are made by trading nations, and those entered into by arbitrary princes, for the mere thirst of dominion, they ordered about fifty English and Scotch vessels, which had been seized in their harbours, to be set at liberty; and, on the arrival of these ships in England, the civility was returned by a like release of all the Dutch ships that had been stopped here.