Talk:Four Days' Battle

A Decisive Strategic Victory?

Dear 83.117.15.212, excellent source you gave! But can't you see the line of reasoning? Precisely the outcome of the St James's Day Fight shows Britain now couldn't even afford a victory unless it would entail knocking the Dutch out of the war by destroying at least the larger part of their fleet. So the Four Days' Battle was a major strategic victory indeed for the Dutch: it put Britain in a position of basically having lost the war unless it could smash the enemy fleet — a very unlikely event. By "strategic" we mean: "effecting the final outcome of the war". This is the fundamental sense of the word. Of course it's often used indicating a derived aspect of this: "effecting the size of the forces". Now in purely numerical terms British losses weren't too severe: a mere ten ships. They still had a powerful fleet afterwards. But this obscures the fact that in the real strategic sense for them the battle was a complete disaster. They had to scrape the financial barrel to put out a fleet again for a last effort at full force; when that effort failed, for the fleet a process began of inexorable deterioration. The Great Fire of London only hastened the inevitable. We also have to consider the British war aims: the Second Anglo-Dutch War was an unabashed war of aggression to reduce The Republic to the status of a British protectorate and to take over all Dutch colonial possessions in order to gain the coveted World Trade Primacy. All that proud ambition was shown to be an empty dream in July 1666. Just as we rightly consider all the tactical draws of the Third Anglo-Dutch War strategic Dutch victories as the Dutch fleet thwarted British intentions by merely surviving, so with even more justification we may call the Four Days' Battle a great strategic victory because the Dutch Navy not merely survived — though that would have been enough — but destroyed for Britain any reasonable hope of winning the war.

--MWAK 15:37, 10 July 2005 (UTC)

another painting

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Storck%2C_Four_Days_Battle.jpg

English fleet

Were there 56 or 79 English ships? This should be clarified.

The number of 79 includes the Green Squadron, joining the battle on the third day. --MWAK 11:07, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

I see Tjerk Hiddes de Vries is added; great one! -)-(-H- (|-|) -O-)-(- 06:24, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

Sovereign of the Seas

I have deleted the sentence stating that this vessel was 'knocked out of the battle'. Firstly, because the vessel in question had not carried that name since 1650, when the Sovereign of the Seas was renamed just Sovereign by the Commonwealth Navy; at the Restoration in 1660 she became HMS Royal Sovereign and bore that name thereafter. Secondly, and more importantly, ignoring the error over the name, this vessel wasn't knocked out of the battle; she couldn't be, as she was never present, but was sitting in port at Sheerness throughout the battle! Rif Winfield (talk) 09:53, 21 June 2008 (UTC)

Sources

The principal, and one of the few English language sources for the Four days' Battle is Frank L. Fox "The Four days' Battle" first published in 1996 as "A Distant Storm" and reissued in 2018. This relies principally on English and Dutch manuscript sources and printed editions of primary sources. It also makes use of C R Boxer (1974) "The Anglo-Dutch Wars of the 17th Century" and van Foreest and Weber's 1984 Dutch language account of the battle. Most other published English language sources make only brief mention of the battle.

The version of this article that existed at the end of August 2019 had no in-line citations and, although it mentioned Fox as a reference, it frequently disagreed with Fox on such matters as timings of actions, locations or directions of sailing of ships or numbers in action. Although these are often matters of dispute when describing naval engagements, as these divergent accounts are not supported by sources, they cannot be left unchallenged.

However, the Dutch Wikipedia article on the battle at https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vierdaagse_Zeeslag (which has no references or in-line citations) as translated gives a significantly different account than Fox, and several of its passages seem to have been used as the source of equally unreferenced passages in the English Wikipedia version.

Using only one source for almost all this article's description of the battle is not ideal, but in the absence of other credible and accessible sources, except for context, is unavoidable.

Sscoulsdon (talk) 07:14, 12 September 2019 (UTC) Sscoulsdon (talk) 06:35, 14 September 2019 (UTC)

Well, WP:Verifiability rules: Citations to non-English reliable sources are allowed. Nor does the policy prescribe that all non-sourced content is removed. So, though your choice is defendable and probably for you the most practical one, it is not unavoidable. The nl: article was not used as a source; it was translated from the English article that I once expanded, indeed using many Dutch sources, at a time that inserting in line citations was not yet common practice. I reinserted some details not contradicting Fox.--MWAK (talk) 08:44, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

Aldborough

HMS Henry escaped to Aldborough - this is probably a misspelling of Aldeburgh, not an inland village in Norfolk. Mjroots (talk) 18:18, 27 July 2021 (UTC)