Maarten Harpertszoon Tromp

Biography

Tromp watched his father die in a fight with an English pirate when he was nine, and was himself twice enslaved — once by Barbary corsairs. He came up from nothing to command the Dutch navy at the moment it became the best in the world. His masterpiece was the Downs in October 1639. Spain's last great armada, carrying an army to reinforce Flanders, took shelter in English neutral waters; Tromp blockaded it for weeks, waited for fog, and then sailed in and destroyed it in front of the English fleet, which could do nothing. Over forty Spanish ships were sunk, burned or taken. With the land route cut and the sea route now closed, the Army of Flanders could not be reinforced at all, and the Netherlands were lost to Spain for good. He fought the war's last act and then the first of the next one: within four years of the Peace of Münster the Dutch were at war with the English, and Tromp — who supposedly flew a broom at his masthead to say he had swept the Channel clean, though the story is probably a myth — was killed leading the fleet at Scheveningen in 1653. He is buried in Delft, near William the Silent.

Key Battles