Admiralty of Amsterdam - Pay and Bonuses

Pay and Bonuses

Unlike the English naval administration, the Dutch admiralty colleges were not permitted to use impressed sailors to man their fleets, this being deemed incompatible with the freedom that was the proclaimed basis of the Republic. A sailor in the fleet received ten or eleven guilders per calendar month. None of the non-commissioned officers or men was in bound service to the admiralty. Sailors who enlisted were housed and fed by it, and had to pay deductions for uniform clothing and equipment. Earnings through plundering or loot dried up in the eighteenth century. Like non-commissioned officers and sailors in general, commissioned naval officers were also dependent on their posting, since they received no payment from the admiralty whilst in port. Indeed, even though for officers "meals at the captain's table were . . . always free", pay was only thirty guilders for a lieutenant and sixty guilders for a commandeur (i.c. acting captain) commissioned on a ship. It has been rightly observed that their main income was from captured ships.

In 1652, at the outbreak of the First Anglo-Dutch War, the Admiralty of Rotterdam hired ships in Amsterdam.