Excerpt from The Illustrated Naval and Military Magazine, Vol. 3: A Monthly Journal Devoted to All Subjects Connected With Her Majesty's Land and Sea Forces; September 1st, 1889 At least we may say of the first Dutch war, that it was, on a very extended scale, that sort of bare action at sea, of which we have seen Sir William Monson speak somewhat slightingly at an earlier date. Yet the Dutch themselves admitted that they were brought to greater straits by this twenty-three months of sea war than by the eighty years of land war which they carried on against the Crown of Spain.' But we shall see presently that just as the Spanish contest taught us what the nature of naval war really was, and started us, as it were, on the new footing when we came to take up a new war, so this first Dutch war confirmed the belief, hinted at by Monson and Raleigh, that a great struggle may begin and end on the sea; and went a step further in establishing rules of naval warfare. I am not concerned in this treatise to go much into the causes of the wars I use for illustrations, and I shall pass over those which led to the second Dutch war. It was the practice in those days to begin early in the way of what men were pleased to call reprisals; and long before the formal declaration of war by the Dutch in January, and by the English in March l665, 'i there had been covert attacks going on between the two nations, both on territory and shipping. In the matter of shipping, the most notable reprisal was the attack by Sir T. Allen, with eight or nine men-of-war on some forty Dutch merchant ships ofl Cadiz, which were under convoy of four war ships commanded by Commodore Brackel several merchant ships were taken or sunk, and the Dutch commodore was killed. This was on the 29th December 1664, consequently before the actual declaration of war. A great seizure was also made of 130 merchant ships from Bordeaux, but many of them were reclaimed by France and released as not being good prize. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.