Qualla: Battle of Texel (1694)

Battle of Texel (1694): Introduction

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Eugène Isabey, Public domain. France was eating bark. In the winter of 1693 to 1694, harvest failures and a punishing war had killed perhaps two million people across the kingdom, and the survivors were turning to anything chewable. Louis XIV's solution was unromantic and desperate: buy grain from neutral countries in the north and run it past the Dutch blockade. On 29 June 1694, off the Dutch island of Texel at three in the morning, that grain - 120 ships full of it, captured days earlier by the Dutch - was floating quietly under prize crews when a Dunkirk privateer named Jean Bart appeared out of the dark. By six o'clock, the convoy was French again, and the rest of Bart's life had been written.

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Image: Eugène Isabey | Public domain

Battle of Texel (1694): Not the Famous One

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Eugène Isabey, Public domain. When people say "the Battle of Texel," they almost always mean the 1673 fight - Michiel de Ruyter against an Anglo-French fleet, the Spice Fleet saved, the Third Anglo-Dutch War effectively ended. The 1694 battle is a smaller, stranger affair fought in the same stretch of North S...

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Image: Eugène Isabey | Public domain

Battle of Texel (1694): Jean Bart Arrives Late

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Yornik Heyl, CC BY-SA 3.0. Jean Bart was a Dunkirk fisherman's son who had become the most feared privateer in northern Europe. The French Navy had finally commissioned him as a regular officer; the Dutch and English still treated him as a corsair. On 29 May 1694 he was ordered to sail to Norway and bring ...

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Image: Yornik Heyl | CC BY-SA 3.0

Battle of Texel (1694): What Half an Hour Cost

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Eugène Isabey, Public domain. The numbers from the boarding action are stark. A hundred Dutch sailors were killed. A hundred and twenty-nine were wounded. Four hundred and fifty-five were taken prisoner. Among the wounded was de Vries himself, the Frisian admiral, hit during the close fight on the Prins Friso...

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Image: Eugène Isabey | Public domain

Battle of Texel (1694): Rewards from Versailles

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Eugène Isabey, Public domain. Two days after Dunkirk, Bart was at Versailles. Louis XIV received him in person along with his son François Cornil Bart, a teenage naval officer who had fought in the action, and his brother-in-law. The king embraced him. On 4 August 1694 Bart was formally raised into the French...

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Image: Eugène Isabey | Public domain