Battle
On 1 December 1652 Lieutenant-Admiral Maarten Tromp, again (unofficial) supreme commander after his successor Vice-Admiral Witte de With had suffered a breakdown because of his defeat at the Battle of the Kentish Knock, set sail from Hellevoetsluis with 88 men of war and 5 fireships, escorting a vast convoy bound for the Indies. With the convoy safely delivered through the Straits of Dover, Tromp turned in search of the English, and on 9 December 1652 he encountered the English fleet of 42 ships commanded by General at Sea Robert Blake. The English promptly left their anchorage in the Downs, either because Blake did not realize how large the Dutch fleet was, or he did not want to become trapped like the Spanish had some years earlier in the Battle of the Downs. The wind was now strong from the north-west, so the English could not return to the Downs in either case, having to settle for Dover. Next morning, the two fleets moved south-west, with the English hugging the coast and the Dutch unable to engage until the curve of the shoreline forced the English to turn on a southerly course. At about 15:00, near the cape of Dungeness, the leading ships of both fleets met in a "bounteous rhetoric of powder and bullet" (according to a contemporary account).
The wind prevented a large part of the Dutch fleet from engaging Blake, whose fleet by nightfall had lost five ships of which the Dutch captured two, and damaged many more. The Dutch lost one ship through fire. Blake retreated under cover of darkness to his anchorage in the Downs. Tromp could not be satisfied with the result however as the Dutch had missed an opportunity to annihilate the English.
Read more about this topic: Battle Of Dungeness
Famous quotes containing the word battle:
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—Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)
“That civilisation may not sink,
Its great battle lost,”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“Up from the South at break of day,
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And Sheridan twenty miles away.”
—Thomas Buchanan Read (1822–1872)