Jacob Collaart
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Jacob Collaart (fl. c. 1625-1635) was a renegade Dutch admiral who served as a privateer for Spain during the Dutch War of Independence. Raiding shipping on the southern coast of The Netherlands, he was responsible for the capture of destruction of at least 150 fishing vessels, bringing 945 captured sailors back to his base in Duinkerken for ransom. A leading admiral over the next decade, he would have later encounters with other Dutch corsairs of the period including Captain Claes Compaan who escaped from him after sighting the corsair off the Spanish coast.
From 1633 until 1637, Collaart served as Vice Admiral with the Royal Spanish privateer fleet out of Duinkerken and, in 1635, his attacks against Dutch herring redders would cost the city of Flemming over 2 million gilders in income.
Although the city of Duinkerken was under a Dutch blockade during early-1635, the blockade was temporarily weakened as several warships under Lieutenant Admiral Filips van Dorp were supporting French naval forces in the Gulf of Biscay and, on August 14, Colleert sailing out of Duinkerken and successfully broke through the Dutch blockade with a fleet of twenty-one vessels.
Within three days, Collaart's fleet located a herring fleet numbering 160 under the guard of a single man-of-war, armed with 39 guns and an 85-man crew. Easily disabling the escort, 74 vessels were either sunk or set afire with the surviving vessels escaping to the Isle of Vlie.
On August 19, after chasing off the six men-of-war escorts, Collaart's forces destroyed around 50 herring boats near Doggersbank. Of the surviving fishermen, 150 sailors including wounded as well as the young and the elderly were put on a merchant vessel from Hamburg and returned to the Dutch Republic while the remaining 775 were held captive.
After this latest attack, a Dutch fleet was soon raised by the Staten-Generaal of the Dutch Republic who ordered all available vessels to set out after the Collaart's fleet. Sailing out of Rotterdam, its commander Willem Codde van der Burch was ordered rendezvous with Filips van Dorp, recently returning from La Rochelle, and Vice Admiral Quast at the Isle of Texel.
Collaart soon encountered the Dutch fleet of van der Burch and van Dorp, consisting of a combined twenty warships, and managed to damage four before the arrival of Quast's fleet forced Collaart to abandon the fight. In part to bad weather, Collaart was able to escape to Duinkerken, arriving with 975 captive fisherman on September 8, 1635.
The following year, while sailing with two other privateers, Collaart and Mathieu Romboutsen were captured (the third captain managing to escape to an English port) near Dieppe after a five hour battle against Captain Jan Evertsen on February 29, 1636.
In 1638, Collaart was appointed Admiral of the Spanish privateer fleet and later submitted a proposal to Philip IV to reinforce the harbor and other coastal defenses for the port of Duinkerken. However, insufficient funds among other factors would be disregarded.
[edit] Further reading
- Van Der Hoven, Marco, ed. Exercise of Arms: Warfare in the Netherlands, 1568-1648. Brill Academic Publishers, 1997. ISBN 90-04-10727-4
- Roding, Juliette and Lex Heerma van Voss, ed. The North Sea and Culture (1550-1800). Larenseweg, Netherlands: Uitgeverij VerLoren, 1996. ISBN 90-6550-527-X
