Talk:Capitulation of Saldanha Bay

Tidy up

Just a heads up that over the next few days I plan to do a tidy up of this article so that it can be incorporated as part of a Good Topic on which I am working. This will include a prose review and expansion, addition of new sources and some formating consistent with other articles in the series. I will not remove any sourced material, although I may reorganise some of it. I also plan to rename the article - calling it a battle is misleading as it wasn't one. I notice that although there has not been any action here for some time, this article has seen consistent maintenance over the years and I do not wish to make large-scale changes such as this without notification. If anyone has any comments or queries, please do let me know.--Jackyd101 (talk) 21:55, 12 June 2015 (UTC)

Great. Also, I agree with you that calling this a battle is misleading. Acad Ronin (talk) 02:51, 13 June 2015 (UTC)

Thanks! I have now worked to produce this new article. It is more comprehensive and more widely sourced and has been created at Capitulation of Saldanha Bay, to which this article will be redirected and the talk page moved. For reference, the old article history is at the redirect Battle of Saldanha Bay (1796). A number of references seem to have been moved over when this article was originally translated and others added since. I wasn't able to find all of these to confirm them, so I've copied them below. If they say anything substantially different to the current article then please to add more information. If there are any questions or comments, please do pass them on.--Jackyd101 (talk) 00:16, 14 June 2015 (UTC)

Former references

• Government of the Cape Colony (1899) Records of the Cape Colony from February 1793, Vol. 5.
• (in Dutch) Jonge, J.C. de, and Jonge, J.K. de (1862) Geschiedenis van het Nederlandsche zeewezen, A.C. Kruseman
• Knock, Arie Johannes (1994) Uit Lievde voor Vaderland en Vrijheid. Het journaal van de patriot Arie Johannes Knock over de periode 1784 tot 1797. Uitgeverij Verloren, Hilversum 1994. ISBN 90-6550-125-8. pp. 137–181
• Otridge, W. et al. (1800) "Dispatches from Sir George Keith Elphinstone, K.B. on board Monarch, Saldanha Bay, August 19, 1796" in: The Annual Register, Or a View of the History, Politics, and Literature for the Year 1796, pp. 84–90
• Potgieter, Thean (2003) 'Maritime Defence of the Cape of Good Hope, 1779-1803. Historia. Vol. 48 No. 1. May 2004. pp. 283–308

C. Northcote Parkinson's nonsense

I have entered a number of edits, which seem to have been received in the spirit in which they were intended :-) However, two passages, based on citations by Parkinson still stick in my throat. The first is the speculation in "Lucas' cruise" that the long duration of the voyage of the Batavian squadron was due to "bad seamanship". I have put a comment between parentheses behind the passage, in which I deprecate his reasoning. But it would be better simply to delete both passages. Because it is a solution in search of a problem. The elapsed time between Lucas' departure from Gran Canaria (17 May) and his arrival at the Brazilian coast (27 June) was not unduly long, if one takes the usual periods of being becalmed in the doldrums into account. I think Parkinson thought the entire elapsed time for the voyage (end February to early August) unduly long. But most of that is due to the length of the sojourn at Gran Canaria (34 days), which was mostly caused by the lack of haste the Spanish water suppliers showed. (De Jonge writes that Lucas threatened the Spanish governor with a bombardment of his city and that thereafter the water deliveries speeded up :-)

Besides, the ships had taken in water for 14 weeks in Gran Canaria. The elapsed time between 17 May and 6 August is only about ten weeks, so the water situation was not really desperate, though it may have been too risky to chance sailing directly to Mauritius because of the risk of adverse winds ("bad monsoon") in the Southern-Hemisphere winter. In any case, I think the scurvy problem was the most pressing. De Jonge writes that theTromp alone had 60 deaths due to scurvy.

A more pertinent question the article might try to answer for the unwary landlubber is why Lucas went all the way to Brazil when the shortest route (apparently followed by the British) was along the African coast. But there is a simple answer: in the age of sail the direct route was not always the shortest in time. The Dutch East India ships followed this route routinely, first taking advantage of the trade winds from the Canaries to Brazil, and then (at the other side of the Equator) from Brazil to the Cape of Good Hope (or even more southerly, into the Roaring Forties). In both cases the ships went more or less all the way "before the wind", without any need for strenuous tacking.

My second objection is to the supposed motivation for the British to want to capture (and hold on to) the Cape Colony, namely: "The key to controlling European access to the region was the Dutch Cape Colony on the tip of Southern Africa; a naval force based there could dominate the trade routes between Europe and the East Indies, in particular the economically vital links between Britain and British India.[1]" This is pure nonsense. Or it is at least an anachronism, more valid for the age of steam. The Dutch had been in possession of the Cape since 1653 and they had never tried (or been able) to pinch off the communication lines of the competing Portuguese, British, and French empires. This is, in the first place, because the area to be patrolled is far too large (viz. the unhindered passage of the de Sercey squadron, that the article mentions in the Saldanha Bay section). But more importantly, apart from the Dutch, ships of other nations were not dependent on the Cape. The ships of the British East India Company did not (need to) use it; those used the island of Saint Helena. Actually, not using the Cape gave the British a speed advantage Cf. Solar, P.M. and Pim de Zwart, Why were Dutch East Indiamen so slow? in: International Journal of Maritime History (2017, vol. 29, no. 4), pp. 738-751 [1]. From the history around the secret instructions Lucas received from the States General it becomes clear that he also need not have called at the Cape, as far as his superiors were concerned (and they held it against him that he did). The fact that the British held the Cape again after 1806 did not stop Dutch navy ships from sailing to Java after that year. In other words, what strategic advantage? If you ask me, Parkinson was just disingenuous.--Ereunetes (talk) 23:54, 20 January 2018 (UTC)

My understanding of the British EIC's routes to India and China support the routing via San Salvador (and Rio), and the relative lack of importance of who held the Cape. The lack of Dutch privateers, however, contributed to the Cape's irrelevance. Had they had privateers operating out of the Cape as the French did at Mauritius, it might have been a different story. An aggressive Dutch base at the Cape would have killed whaling at Walvis Bay and up at Delagoa Bay. It would also have impeded the British transportation of prisoners to Australia. The convict transports often sailed with stops at Rio and the Cape for watering and reprovisioning, as well as repairs. I would certainly support your removing the Parkinsonian analysis to Lucas's "slow" voyage. I think the strategic role of the Cape should undergo more debate. (Would that we had a wargaming wing to Wikipedia that could run simulations and come up with a consensus.) Thanks for the good work on the Saldanha Capitulation article. Acad Ronin (talk) 00:14, 21 January 2018 (UTC)

Glad you agree about the Parkinson remark. I have commented out the "offending" passage and my retort, instead of deleting it forthwith. The result is the same. As to the motives of the British to capture the Cape: I think it was simply that an occasion presented itself to strike a blow for the EIC to the detriment of the VOC. A case of the flag following trade, so to speak. The British were not to know that the VOC would be eliminated as a rival within a year. The Cape was far more important for the VOC as a provisioning point than that it was seen as a strategic location to harm others. For that reason in peacetime everybody who wanted to call was welcome at the Cape, even the prisoner transports to what used to be called "New Holland", a relatively recent habit of the British. The danger of Dutch privateers seems mainly imaginary to me: I don't think those ventured that far from home. As far as French privateers are concerned: those could have used Mauritius, but apparently didn't. However, it may be true that the British feared that revolutionary France would take over the VOC and WIC colonies (without necessarily having strategic designs), which certainly would have been inconvenient, but in that case the French would probably have made that a condition of the Treaty of The Hague (1795), which they didn't.--Ereunetes (talk) 00:08, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

The French did use Mauritius as a privateer base until the British finally succeeded in capturing it in 1810. The privateers were a serious threat and succeeded in capturing a number of vessels, including EIC Indiamen, and whalers, the latter particularly at Delagoa Bay. The Dutch could have done likewise from the Cape. They just didn't; they also weren't even that active in the North Sea.

The trouble I have with assessing the strategic importance of the Cape is seeing the issue with only the knowledge and beliefs extant at the time. Looking back we cannot fully suppress hind-sight bias. I haven't looked into the matter, but there must be some statements after the first and second captures of the Cape discussing the significance, or lack of it. Is there anything in the Dutch literature that would support the idea that the Cape was really only weakly important to either side? Cheers, Acad Ronin (talk) 00:42, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

I doubt that there was any contemporary on the Dutch side thinking big thoughts about the strategic importance of the Cape. That is because the colonies were strictly a matter for the VOC. The Dutch navy did not venture beyond the Cape before the start of the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War. The article about the Battle of Saldanha Bay (1781) is illustrative. This was just a matter of a number of VOC ships being waylaid by the Royal Navy. The Dutch navy was not involved, because the VOC was set up to defend its own interests (and at the time the Dutch navy was just cowering in port, afraid of their British cousins. This to the dismay of what later would become the Patriot faction who considered this one of their major grievances against the stadtholder regime. Why build a big fleet when you are too cowardly to use it?). So the question becomes: did the VOC have any strategic interests in the Cape (beyond making it secure as a provisioning station for its own fleets, because VOC ships to and from the Indies usually traveled in packs, for security reasons, so they easily saw off any privateers stupid enough to venture too close). But again, this seems unlikely. The VOC of course tried (often successfully) to bar competitors from the Indies. But the VOC navy was sufficient to accomplish this. There was no need to invest good money into dominating the world's sea lanes (except in places like Sunda Strait and such). It is difficult to realize this if one thinks in terms of the "Dutch Empire" as something similar to the "British Empire". But that is only a 19th-century phenomenon (if at all), after the Dutch state itself started to get interested in colonialism. And by then the Dutch naval power was too feeble to do anything significant; keeping the natives quiet was difficult enough :-) The only ones to have done any strategic theorizing at the time may be the British and the French. But if so, there should be contemporary documentary proof. It would be anachronistic to extrapolate back from late-19th-century theorizing (Mahan).--Ereunetes (talk) 23:36, 22 January 2018 (UTC)