126
IN THEE STAITS SERVIS
Plate 2. The Dutch fleet seen from the dunes near Dishoek in 1674. Drawing by Zacharias
Blijhooft. ZA, KZGW, Zel. 111. 11-145.
Dutch recruitment centred instead on the use of embargoes on merchant shipping
in the spring and summer or when war seemed imminent - to complete the
crews for the campaigning season. Half-measures before the Second Dutch War
with only the whale fishery periodically embargoed - proved 'defective', so that the
navy was 'much worse-manned than the British'.39 From 1664, however, embar
goes were more stringent, with only the herring fishery and the VOC exempted.
With the Republic facing extinction from the onslaught of the French army in the
Third Anglo-Dutch War, more draconian measures were imposed - on the fish
eries or all merchant voyages.40 Additional measures might also be used: with war
in Europe imminent in the winter of 1664/5, the States General ordered the admi
ralties to retain their sailors throughout the winter in order to be ready as soon as
required.41
Effectively, the removal of alternative employment options meant that the vast
majority of seamen in the Dutch Republic were forced to enlist in the navy in
order to subsist: it has been said that crews came aboard Dutch ships 'under the
lash not of the press but of penury and need'.42 Contemporary English opinion
probably agreed with this assessment: 'because they are a free state, they may not
presse to sea, but by all wayes oppresse them [the seamen] soe as to constraine
them to sea'.43 Rowland Gilbert, of English parentage and long-term residence in
Holland, was captured at the battle of Lowestoft (1665) and released on the rec-
