A retired Dutch merchant came back to sea and humbled the English navy
By 1651 Michiel de Ruyter had made enough trading to Morocco, Brazil and the Caribbean to retire to his hometown. His retirement lasted less than a year. War with England pulled him back, and he went on to raid the Medway, tow away England's flagship and become the Netherlands' best-loved admiral.
De Ruyter grew up in Vlissingen in Zeeland, the son of a seaman who became a beer porter; his birth date was 24 March 1607. He worked at a ropewalk and went to sea at 11 as a boatswain's apprentice, the usual age for Zeeland boys. At 15 he served as a cannoneer under Maurice of Nassau at the relief of Bergen-op-Zoom, then climbed through the merchant fleet to become a ship's master at thirty. With little schooling, he still spoke passable French and fluent English, perhaps learned, one English biographer claimed, while working in Dublin for the Lampsins trading house.
Even his surname is a puzzle. In his Zeelandic dialect he signed himself Machgyel Adriensoon, and De Ruyter was probably a nickname, either from an old verb meaning to raid, fitting his privateering days, or from a grandfather who rode as a cavalry trooper. His personal life held grief: his first wife died in 1631 after childbirth, and the baby weeks later. He sailed on whaling voyages to Jan Mayen, hunted Dunkirk raiders from 1637 and served as third in command of a Dutch fleet aiding Portugal against Spain in 1641.
When the First Anglo-Dutch War began in 1652 he joined the navy under Maarten Tromp and ended it a vice admiral. Named lieutenant admiral and fleet commander in 1665, he won the gruelling Four Days' Battle in 1666. The next year's Raid on the Medway destroyed much of the English fleet and captured HMS Royal Charles, helping secure favourable peace terms. In the Third Anglo-Dutch War, his actions at Solebay, Schooneveld and Texel stopped an Anglo-French invasion of the Dutch coast.
Fighting the French off Sicily in 1676, at the Battle of Augusta, he was struck by a cannonball and died a week later in Syracuse; Amsterdam gave him a state funeral. His sailors called him Bestevaêr, grandfather, a name Dutch media still use. The Dutch Marine Corps counts him among its founders, and several navy ships have carried his name.
Source: Michiel de Ruyter
