Four Days' Battle - Results

Results

The biggest sea battle of the Second Anglo-Dutch War and in the age of sail was a Dutch victory. However, the outcome is sometimes described as inconclusive, because both sides initially claimed victory. Immediately after the battle the English captains of Rupert's squadron, not having seen the final outcome, claimed De Ruyter had retreated first, then normally seen as an acknowledgement of the superiority of the enemy fleet. Though the Dutch fleet was eventually forced to end the pursuit, they had managed to cripple the English fleet, and lost but four smaller ships themselves, for the Spieghel refused to sink and was repaired. The contemporaneous Dutch view on this matter is expressed in a famous epigram by the poet Constantijn Huygens:

Two fight — and for their lives
The one that caused the row
is beaten — but survives
And boasts: "I've won it now!
As master of the field!"
And did he win? For sure!
Face-down he couldn't yield:
His victory was pure
The other took his hat,
his rapier and his gold
And left him lying flat,
The glorious field to hold
So master he has been:
Our Neighbours are the same:
If thus they like to win,
we wish them lasting fame

Two months later the recuperated English fleet challenged the Dutch fleet again, now much more successfully at North Foreland in the St. James's Day Battle. This proved to be a partial victory as the Dutch fleet wasn't destroyed. The enormous costs of repair after both battles depleted the English treasury, so the Four Days Battle is usually seen as both a tactical and important strategic victory for the Dutch.

Read more about this topic:  Four Days' Battle

Famous quotes containing the word results:

    Pain itself can be pleasurable accidentally in so far as it is accompanied by wonder, as in stage-plays; or in so far as it recalls a beloved object to one’s memory, and makes one feel one’s love for the thing, whose absence gives us pain. Consequently, since love is pleasant, both pain and whatever else results from love, in so far as they remind us of our love, are pleasant.
    Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–1274)

    Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries in a thousand years have set in best order the results of their learning and wisdom. The men themselves were hid and inaccessible, solitary, impatient of interruption, fenced by etiquette; but the thought which they did not uncover in their bosom friend is here written out in transparent words to us, the strangers of another age.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    “The ideal reasoner,” he remarked, “would, when he had once been shown a single fact in all its bearings, deduce from it not only all the chain of events which led up to it but also all the results which would follow from it.”
    Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930)