Maarten Tromp

Maarten Tromp was the Dutch admiral who defeated a Spanish armada in the Downs and then fought the English to a standstill. Born in Brielle in 1598, the son of a naval officer, he went to sea at nine. His father was killed by pirates in an action off Guinea in 1610 and Maarten was taken captive, spending about two years as a servant to an English privateer captain, and was later captured again by Barbary corsairs off Tunis. He rose through the Dutch navy and was made lieutenant admiral in 1637. In 1639 a Spanish fleet of some seventy ships carrying troops for Flanders anchored in the Downs, off the English coast, hoping for neutral protection. Tromp blockaded it, waited for reinforcement, and on 31 October attacked in English territorial waters with fireships and gunfire, destroying most of it. The battle ended Spain's ability to reinforce the Netherlands by sea and is usually taken as the end of Spanish naval power. He introduced the line of battle as standard practice, in which ships fight in column so that broadsides can be used without masking one another — the tactical basis of naval warfare for two centuries. In the First Anglo-Dutch War from 1652 he beat Robert Blake off Dungeness, was beaten at the Gabbard, and fought the running Three Days' Battle off Portland while protecting a convoy of merchantmen, which is generally regarded as his finest performance. The story that he flew a broom at his masthead to sweep the English from the sea is not contemporary. He was killed by a musket ball at Scheveningen in August 1653.

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