Lieutenant-Admiral Jan Hendrik van Kinsbergen, Count of Doggerbank (1 May 1735 – 24 May 1819) was a Dutch naval officer who served in the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War and French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Having had a good scientific education, Van Kinsbergen was a proponent of fleet modernization and wrote several books about naval organization, discipline and tactics.
In 1773, he twice defeated the Ottoman Navy while serving in the Imperial Russian Navy. Returning to the Dutch Republic in 1775, he fought in the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War and eventually attained the position of commander-in-chief of the Dutch States Navy as a lieutenant admiral. When France conquered Holland in 1795 he was fired by the new Batavian Republic and prevented from becoming commander-in-chief of the Royal Dano-Norwegian navy, though the Kingdom of Holland reinstated him in 1806, in the rank of fleet marshal, and made him a count.
He was again degraded by the French Empire in 1810; after the liberation the United Kingdom of the Netherlands in 1814 honoured him with his old rank of lieutenant admiral. Van Kinsbergen, in his later life a very wealthy man, was also noted for his philanthropy, supporting poor relief, naval education, the arts and the sciences.
Early life and career
Jan Hendrik van Kinsbergen was born on 1 May 1735 in Doesburg, the eldest son of the non-commissioned officer Johann Henrich van Kinsbergen. His father had been born in Neunkirchen in 1706 and started his military career in the Imperial Army of the Holy Roman Emperor, and originally spelled his family name as "Ginsberg". When van Kinsbergen was six, he moved with his parents in 1741 to Elburg. Three years later, he left with his father for the Southern Netherlands and at the age of nine enlisted in the Dutch States Army during the War of the Austrian Succession, leaving the army and returning home in 1748. Reading the biography of Michiel de Ruyter by Gerard Brandt, he decided to become a naval officer as well and went to the naval academy of Groningen, where he was trained as an engineer between 1751 and 1755. In 1756, he joined the Dutch States Navy as a midshipman on Weststellingerwerf and on 16 March 1758 was promoted to lieutenant on the Maarsen, which was part of the Admiralty of Amsterdam.
Van Kinsbergen had three younger brothers; two enlisted in the Prussian Army; the youngest, Jan Hermanus, worked for the Dutch East India Company (VOC), but in 1770 was cashiered as a captain when his ship Leimuiden with a cargo of gold bars got stuck on the rocks of Boa Vista, Cape Verde. The ship was lost and Jan Hermanus returned four months after the shipwreck with 318 of the crew members. Jan Hermanus would be later appointed a naval captain through the influence of Jan Hendrik, embarrassing the latter by becoming involved in several major accidents. Jan Hendrik started serving on Amazone in 1761; he was made commander of the frigate Swieten on 13 October 1763.
Russian service
In the late 1760s, due to severe financial difficulties, few Dutch warships were in active service and Van Kinsbergen used his free time to write a series of publications about naval modernisation. He is seen as a typical example of the new generation of Dutch naval officers of the era who no longer owed their position to either a career as a sea captain or a noble background but to a thorough scientific education.
In 1769, van Kinsbergen despaired of ever being promoted and obtained leave to enter the service of the VOC and depart for the Dutch Indies for four years. However, in the previous years he had already established a minor international reputation as a naval thinker, enthusiastically corresponding with many influential foreign contacts. He was informed by Prince Henry of Prussia that due to the ongoing Russo-Turkish War the Imperial Russian Navy was in search of naval experts. Henry immediately could obtain him a position there. On 15 August 1770, Van Kinsbergen got permission from the Dutch general admiral, stadholder William V, Prince of Orange, to depart for Russia. However, William V would not free him completely from his obligations. Van Kinsbergen was promised that on 15 August 1771 he would be promoted to captain in the Dutch navy. In exchange, by 1774 he would return to Holland should the Dutch navy have need of his services; this cycle of temporary appointments was to be repeated every three years.
In the summer of 1771, Jan Hendrik travelled via Berlin, where he visited Prince Henry, to Saint Petersburg where he on 29 September was appointed acting captain in the Russian navy; on 2 October he was promoted to captain 2nd rank. He immediately left for the Black Sea; on arrival he was charged with commanding a troop of Cossacks and fought, meanwhile learning Russian, on land during the winter campaign. In a fight he was shot through the knee and saved from under a heap of corpses by a Cossack, whom he would later get an appointment at the Amsterdam naval wharf.
From 9 February 1772 at Iaşi he repaired river vessels captured from the Ottoman Navy's Danube fleet. On 12 June he got his first naval command in Russian service, bringing dispatches on a galiot to Azov. From 13 November he brought dispatches from the southern army to Saint Petersburg. He was on that occasion introduced to Empress Catherine the Great and made a favourable impression on her with his enthusiastic plans for the Black Sea Fleet. Accordingly, on 23 April 1773 he became flotilla-commander in the Black Sea. His force was rather insignificant, consisting of just two 12-gun ketches and two yachts. Van Kinsbergen decided nevertheless that the moment had arrived to make a name for himself and acted as aggressively as his limited powers allowed. He entered the Sea of Marmara through the Bosporus, charted it as the first Western European ever, then entered the Dardanelles and finally returned to the Black Sea after duelling with an Ottoman coastal fortress in Constantinople.
Twice that year, he defeated an Ottoman fleet and won the title 'Hero of the Black Sea'. On 23 June, he encountered an Ottoman flotilla of one 74-gun ship of the line and three 52-gun frigates, and despite the disparity in firepower at once attacked and wiped the flotilla, the first major "Christian" naval victory in the Black Sea in four centuries. His superiors were very pleased and gave him permission to raid Sinope, but this was soon changed into a mission to intercept a transport fleet headed for the Crimea. In the morning of 2 September he spotted an Ottoman fleet off Novorossiysk but at the same time a messenger brought him the order to abandon the attack in view of the force imbalance: van Kinsbergen's original two ketches had only been reinforced by a single 32-gun frigate and a fire ship, while the Ottoman fleet numbered four ships of the line, seven frigates and six troopships with 5,000 troops aboard.
Determined to give battle anyway, van Kinsbergen declared in front of his officers that such an order could not possibly be authentic, arrested the messenger and pursued the attack. Conforming to the standard tactics of the day, the Ottoman fleet sailed in a formal line of battle. Van Kinsbergen realized that doing likewise would only result in the quick annihilation of his flotilla and therefore applied a modern concentration of forces: using the weather gauge he attacked the leading Ottoman vessel from the front, causing the following Ottoman ships to break formation. During the ensuing melee the Ottoman fleet got so damaged and confused that it abandoned the landing attempt and withdrew. Van Kinsbergen's insubordination was soon forgiven and he was on 22 September rewarded with by becoming a knight of the Order of St. George, although only the order's fourth degree, which disappointed him.
After the war, van Kinsbergen feared he would not be promoted and in November 1774 obtained a temporary discharge from Russian service. Although Catherine, who would gladly have kept him on in the Russian navy, promoted him to captain 1st rank and knight in the third degree (from 1776 even second degree) he asked to be allowed to return to the Dutch navy in May 1775, which was accepted. From August, he travelled via Saint Petersburg and Berlin to the Dutch Republic, obtained a final honourable discharge from Russian service in December, and early 1776 was back in the service of the Dutch navy.
Return to the Dutch Republic
In 1776, van Kinsbergen was readmitted into the Admiralty of Amsterdam as a full captain, which raised quite a few eyebrows as the deal with stadtholder William had been kept a secret. In this period, Anglo-Dutch tensions caused by the American Revolutionary War, led to Dutch efforts to build up the fleet and therefore to increased career opportunities for Dutch officers. On 17 May 1776, van Kinsbergen was sent on an international expedition, as captain of Amphitrite, against Morocco to enforce a treaty upon Mohammed ben Abdallah to end the Dutch-Moroccan War, and to limit the activities of the Barbary corsairs; on 27 June he was as an envoy present at the signing of the treaty at Salé, returning to the Republic in October. In 1778 he was captain of the frigate Argo; in October he went again to Salé to deliver the treaty document ratified by the States-General of the Netherlands. After returning, Argo was part of the convoy temporarily detained by a superior British fleet on 31 December 1779 in search of French contraband, which became known as the affair of Fielding and Bylandt.
The Dutch public was outraged by this event, refusing to further cooperate with measures directed at blockading the United States. War with Britain became inevitable, even though the Dutch were ill-prepared for it. In 1780, van Kinbergen became a member of a commission that should strengthen the Dutch coastal defences. Meanwhile, he had published a great number of articles and booklets regarding naval reorganisation; in 1780 his Sailor's Compendium appeared, written with cooperation of the religious author Joannes Florentius Martinet and aimed at improving discipline. Officers should themselves be an exemplary role model and abstain from gambling, boozing, whoring and swearing — except in the latter case when giving orders, as in Van Kinsbergen's experience they tended to be followed much better if containing a few curses.
Late Republican naval service
In 1780, Britain declared war on the Dutch Republic, initiating the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War. The inferior Dutch home fleet mostly avoided a direct confrontation but Van Kinsbergen, on 12 February having been appointed temporary schout-bij-nacht, played an important role in the only major naval battle of the war, the Battle of Dogger Bank, as flotilla commander, second in command to Schout-bij-nacht Johan Zoutman. Van Kinsbergen on Admiraal-Generaal escorted a merchant convoy when he by accident encountered a British squadron superior in firepower. The ensuing engagement was inconclusive, though the Dutch convoy arrived at Holland fully intact. Van Kinsbergen was honoured by stadholder William V by being awarded a special Dogger Bank Medal, as the Dutch Republic had no honorary military orders.