The painting of The Dutch fleet assembling before the Four Days’ Battle by Willem van de Velde the Younger with the ‘Liefde’ and the ‘Gouden Leeuwen’ in a freshening wind. Ships in a freshening wind is what we see in this large painting of 1670 by Willem van de Velde the Younger. But what are we really looking at? What has Van de Velde actually depicted? Knowing him and his work, this is no arbitrary moment in the history of the two prominent ships. What are their names, anyway? And what are the other ships in the picture? And above all, what is this particular event? These are the questions that arise at the first sight of this impressive masterpiece. So let’s try and analyse what is going on.   THE WEATHER The detached observer gets the idea that the canvas depicts stormy weather. That is only partly true. All the ships still have their topsails set. They are the large stretches of can- vas above the lower ones, but the topgallants above them have already been reefed. In seaman’s terminology this was done when the wind had reached the strength of a ‘reefed topgallant breeze’, in other words a strong breeze that is the equivalent of the modern wind force 5. That is not quite a storm, but it seems that there will soon be a dra- matic change in the weather. A squall is approaching from the left and the wind is freshening, as can be seen from the ship in the distance on the far right, which is hastily letting fly the sheets of its main topgallant. The large ship on the right with its stern to the viewer is already lowering its fore topsail. A reefed topsail breeze is the equivalent of wind force 5-6. In other words, the artist has depicted his ships in weather that is rapidly deteriorating and is about to get much worse when the squall hits. This gives the picture the dynamic nature of a disaster about to happen. A disaster, as we shall see, that was soon to overwhelm the central ship in real life.   THE SAILS Crowds of people are milling about on the deck of the large ship in the foreground. Men are running back of forth, and some are in such a hurry that they don’t even take the time to use the steps and ladders to get from one deck to the next but are clambering over railings. Many of the figures are gesticulating wildly. What’s going on? Several of the ship‘s sails are filled, and the main topsail is stretched taut in the gathering wind, as is the triangular sail on the mizzenmast. The ship is close hauled, with its yards braced hard to the port side. Sails set like that will turn the bow even further into the wind, but that is being prevented for the moment by what is going on with the foremast. The wind has caught the front of the fore topsail and has slammed it back against the mast top, the con- cealed outline of which has been captured beautifully. The foresail below it is still unfurling. It can be seen that the sails are being set, not taken in, from the fact that no one has been sent up to the yards, which would otherwise have been full of men sitting astride them doing the dangerous work of furling the sail, with one hand for themselves and the other for the ship. It seems, then, that this is a moment of departure.   THE ANCHOR That is borne out by what is going on in the bow. Crewmen are busily stowing a half-raised anchor against the side of the hull in an operation known as catting the anchor. It has evidently just been raised from the seabed. That is also dangerous in a choppy sea, so as soon as the anchor ring breaks the surface of the water it is grabbed with a hook on a block and tackle hanging from the cathead and lifted higher out of the water. The cathead can clearly be seen below the man in the red shirt leaning against the beakhead. If the swell was to smash the anchor, which weighs hundreds of kilograms, into the side of the ship by the swell it would cause a great deal of damage. That is why a line has been hurriedly attached to the bottom of it to pull it up against the fore- most chains, to which a second anchor has already been firmly fastened. A little further aft there is the red anchor buoy, which was always attached to a cast anchor so that it could be recovered quickly if the anchor cable was cut in an emergency. That buoy usually hung in the foremost shrouds, but here it is being hauled inboard through a gun port.   THE OTHER SHIPS The large ship on the right still has almost all its sails set, but that is changing rapidly, as can be seen from the fore topsail, which is being lowered. Crewmen are scrambling up the shrouds to take it in. Ahead of the bows is another ship with its sails braced back and its head to wind. It appears to be waiting to see what will happen next. That ship does not have any topgallant masts or sails (the third sails up from the deck), which was unusual for a man-of-war at the time. The ship on the far right is the last one to feel the effects of the change in the weather heading in from the left, but the unsheeted topgallant on the mainmast shows that it soon will. The ships of the squadron in the distance also seem to be having problems with the freshening wind, and are all heading into it. The galliot on the left has turned into the wind and is waiting with flapping sails to see how the situation devel- ops. Two crewmen are securing the jolly boat, which has been brought up alongside, while a third one is steering the vessel. Galliots often sailed with the fleet, transferring people and messages between ships, provisioning them, and maintaining contact with the shore. This one may just have delivered the last members of the large ship’s crew, or perhaps even a commander appointed at the last minute.   FLAGS Flags are prominent features in depictions of seventeenth- century ships, and this picture is no exception. A great deal can be deduced from the size, colours and positions of the flags on a warship, but unfortunately their meaning was only fixed from one campaign to the next so as to prevent the enemy from guessing a commander’s intentions. And that means that we, too, are very much in the dark. One general rule, though, was that flag officers could fly a pen- nant, a tapering, swallow-tailed flag, its position defining the officer’s function within the fleet. The admiral flew his pennant from the mainmast, the vice-admiral from the foremast and the rear admiral from the mizzen. There is clearly a senior officer on board this ship, and another pennant is visible on one of the ships in the distance. Van de Velde’s painting evidently shows two parts of a larger fleet coming together. Once the entire fleet had assembled the flags and pennants were modified by agreement between the senior officers.   IDENTIFICATION The large ship in the foreground is not easy to name, because its transom with the identifying marks on the stern is turned away from the viewer. However, the num- ber of its guns enables several candidates to be selected from the fleet lists, and by a process of elimination after comparing various details of the woodwork it is possible to say with a probability bordering on certainty that this is the Liefde man-of-war. It was built by the Amsterdam Admiralty around 1660 and could mount a maximum of 70 cannon. It had a crew of 270, and served as Michiel de Ruyter’s flagship in 1663. In 1665 it flew the flag of Cornelis Tromp, and was lost on 11 June 1666 under the command of Captain Pieter Salomonszoon. The other large ship in the painting is showing its stern, and the escutcheon on the taffrail is clearly recognis- able as two lions with their backs to each other. They identify the vessel as the Gouden Leeuwen of 50 guns, which was built in the yard of the Dutch East India Company in 1665.   DATING On the one hand, then, we have a ship that was wrecked on 11 June 1666 and another that joined the fleet in 1666. The combination of the two pins down the moment depicted in this painting. There can hardly be any other conclusion than that the event is the moment when part of the assembled Dutch fleet was sailing out to meet the enemy in a battle that would go down in history as a glori- ous victory for the Dutch Republic: the Four Days’ Battle of 11-14 June 1666. Both ships did indeed take part in the battle. For one it was the first, for the other the last. Things did not go well for the Liefde. On the very first day of the battle it collided with Tromp’s Hollandia, and then fell victim to a fireship dispatched by the English vice-admiral, Sir William Berkeley, who perished in the action. Most of the crew were picked up in time by the Gouda, including Captain Pieter Salomonszoon, but he died shortly afterwards.   CONCLUSION Knowing how disastrously the battle ended for the Liefde enables us to view the mood of Van de Velde’s painting with fresh eyes. It is tempting to interpret the dark clouds gathering over the ship as an almost symbolic reference to impending doom. On top of that, Van de Velde succeeded brilliantly in giving the fairly uninteresting subject of a squadron of ships sailing out on the eve of a major battle such an emotive charge that the viewer senses in advance that something dramatic is about to happen. The vivid scene, the ships pitching and rolling with their massed crews on deck, the whipped-up waves and the rapid turn in the weather are rendered in such a virtuoso way as to make the picture far more than a scene of a departing fleet. It captures the tension and dynamic movement that is associated with a dramatic act of war. In this case with a battle that is undoubtedly one of the crowning feats of arms in Dutch naval history.   With thanks to Frank Fox, Jim Bender and Herbert Tomesen. Sources

• –  John Harland, Seamanship in the age of sail, Naval Institute Press 1984.
• –  Vreugdenhill, List of the fleet of the United Netherlands, Publications of the Navy Records Society, Vol. 85.
• –  Michael S. Robinson, The paintings of the Willem van de Veldes, Greenwich 1990.
• Biography-Willem-van-de-Velde-the-Younger