![]() | Capitulation of Saldanha Bay has been listed as one of the Warfare good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can reassess it. | ||||||||||||
![]() | Capitulation of Saldanha Bay is part of the East Indies theatre of the French Revolutionary Wars series, a good topic. This is identified as among the best series of articles produced by the Wikipedia community. If you can update or improve it, please do so. | ||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||
![]() | A
fact from this article appeared on Wikipedia's
Main Page in the "
Did you know?" column on
July 19, 2015. The text of the entry was: Did you know ... that a year after the successful British
invasion of the Cape Colony in 1795, a Dutch reinforcement convoy was forced to surrender at the
Capitulation of Saldanha Bay? | ||||||||||||
Current status: Good article |
![]() | This article is rated GA-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
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)
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)
![]() | Capitulation of Saldanha Bay has been listed as one of the Warfare good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can reassess it. | ||||||||||||
![]() | Capitulation of Saldanha Bay is part of the East Indies theatre of the French Revolutionary Wars series, a good topic. This is identified as among the best series of articles produced by the Wikipedia community. If you can update or improve it, please do so. | ||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||
![]() | A
fact from this article appeared on Wikipedia's
Main Page in the "
Did you know?" column on
July 19, 2015. The text of the entry was: Did you know ... that a year after the successful British
invasion of the Cape Colony in 1795, a Dutch reinforcement convoy was forced to surrender at the
Capitulation of Saldanha Bay? | ||||||||||||
Current status: Good article |
![]() | This article is rated GA-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
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)
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)