Witte Corneliszoon de With
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Witte Corneliszoon de With (28 March 1599-8 November 1658) was a Dutch naval officer of 17th century. He was born on a farmstead near Brielle (in which town Maarten Tromp had been born a year earlier). His father died in 1602. The De With family were Mennonites and strict pacifists; in 1610 Witte, as an anabaptist not yet baptised, obtained a baptism by a calvinist preacher so that he would no longer feel constrained in using violence as he was by nature not a peace-seeking boy. After some failed minor jobs he went on his first sea voyage to the Dutch East Indies when he was seventeen, as a cabin boy. He became flag captain of Jan Pieterszoon Coen in 1622 and returned with Coen in 1623. That year he participated as flag captain on Delft of Vice-Admiral Geen Huygen Schapenham in the spectacular raid organised by the Admiralty of Amsterdam, sending the "Nassau fleet" against the Spanish possessions on the westcoast of America; this fleet then crossed the Pacific to reach the Indies. He returned in September 1626 as Vice-Admiral (in service of the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie) of the Spice Fleet, then worth five million guilders, thus having circumnavigated the globe.
In 1628 he was flag captain of Admiral Piet Heyn when the latter captured the Spanish treasure fleet near Cuba. Out of the bounty De With was granted 1700 guilders, with which he was very unsatisfied, as he imputed to himself a crucial role in the capture. In 1629 the five Dutch admiralties refused Heyn, their new factual supreme commander, to enlarge his staff with a special tactical officer, for which function Heyn had De With in mind. Disappointed De With left the direct navy service to become Commodore of the Grote Visserij, the administrative body controlling and militarily protecting the Herring Fleet. Maarten Tromp became Heyn's new flagcaptain. In the Eighty Years' War against the Spanish De With fought at the Battle of the Downs (1639), having become Vice-Admiral of Holland and West Frisia in 1637, when the highest ranking navy officers were replaced because of incompetence. However De With was again severely disappointed that he hadn't become supreme commander; he now was second in command under Tromp. De With became very jealous of Tromp's popularity after his destruction of the Spanish fleet at Downs.
In 1640 De With was trialed when he had returned to Hellevoetsluis alone when his fleet had been dispersed by a storm. The court martial was presided by Tromp. Though he was acquitted, De With had the compulsive notion that Tromp had tried to influence witnesses against him. In 1645 De With with an enormous convoy of merchantmen — 702 on the return voyage — forced the Sound against the Danes, who had tried to impose higher toll rates. In 1647 De With was sent with a poorly equipped fleet to assist the Dutch colony of Brasil, that was attacked by the Portuguese.
In the First Anglo-Dutch War against the Commonwealth of England, when Lieutenant-Admiral Maarten Tromp fell in disgrace with the States-General he commanded the Dutch fleet at the Battle of the Kentish Knock but failed and fought again as subcommander under Tromp in subsequent actions including the Battle of Portland, the Battle of the Gabbard and the final Battle of Scheveningen in which Tromp died. After the war he was denied command of the Dutch fleet because of his difficult personality in favour of Lieutenant-Admiral Jacob van Wassenaer Obdam. He fell in the Battle of the Sound, during the Northern Wars, commanding the avantguard of the Dutch fleet relieving Copenhagen from the Swedish, when his ship Brederode was grounded and surrounded by the enemy. He was first shot through the left thigh by a musket ball and hours later through the breast. When Swedish soldiers boarded the ship he refused to surrender his sword, wrestling with two of them on his knees and exclaiming: "I have faithfully wielded this sword so many years for Holland, so I won't give it up now to some common soldiers!". He collapsed, was brought to his cabin to recover, insisted on walking by himself over the gangplank to the Swedish ship, there collapsed again and died. He body was balmed on orders of Charles X of Sweden and displayed as a war trophy in the town hall of Elsinore by the Swedes, who January 1659 delivered his body to the Danish court in Copenhagen; after the Danes had paid their homage, it was transported to the Netherlands and buried with great pomp in Rotterdam on 7 October, in the St Lawrence, where the marble grave memorial, restored after being damaged by the German bombardment of 14 May 1940, can still be seen.
He had a lifelong rivalry with Admiral Maarten Tromp. De With was feared and hated by his inferiors - on several occasions crews refused to let him on board to use their ship as flagship - shunned by his equals and always full of insubordination against his superiors. In 1649 he was almost condemned to death when he withdrew his fleet from Brazil against orders. He was also seen as courageous, competent and an excellent sailor. He was embittered by the neglect of the fleet between 1639 and 1650.
One of the more remarkable aspects of De With's personality was his being a notorious pamphleteer, publishing many booklets, anonymous or under the name of friends, in which he sometimes praised but more often ridiculed or even insulted his fellow officers. Tromp was a favourite subject for all three categories.
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