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An English ship is going over on her side. The red ensign still flies from a broken mast. Her crew slide down the tilted deck and drop off her stern into the sea.

The English began the battle a fleet short, having split their forces on faulty intelligence. Prince Rupert had been sent west to intercept a French squadron that never came. George Monck, Duke of Albemarle, met the Dutch off the North Foreland on 1 June 1666 with 56 ships against Michiel de Ruyter's 84. Monck, a soldier who treated the sea as a battlefield that happened to be wet, attacked anyway. What followed had never happened before and has never happened since. The action ran four days straight, drifting between the English coast and the Flemish shoals. The two fleets ground at each other, broke off at nightfall, and found each other again at dawn like a quarrel resumed at breakfast. By the second day the English were fighting a retreat; on the third, Rupert's returning squadron appeared and evened the arithmetic; and on the same evening England's pride ran physically aground. The Royal Prince, the grandest ship afloat and a veteran of half a century of state occasions, stuck fast on the Galloper Sand. Dutch fireships closed in and she could not answer her helm. Her crew's nerve went and Sir George Ayscue struck his flag, still the highest-ranking English officer ever taken at sea. De Ruyter could not float his prize off the sand, so he burned her where she sat. The fourth day settled it. De Ruyter broke the exhausted English line, and Monck took the survivors home through the shoals. The butcher's totals were lopsided in every column. Roughly 5,000 English sailors were killed, wounded or taken, against about 2,000 Dutch. London, which had rung bells for a rumored victory on the first reports, went quiet as the truth docked. Yet the strangest fact of the Four Days' Battle is what it failed to decide. Seven weeks later the rebuilt English fleet beat De Ruyter soundly on St James's Day. The war rolled on toward its actual conclusion: the burned city, a treasury too empty to send the fleet out, and De Ruyter's masts coming up the Medway. Storck painted this battle again and again for a Dutch market that could not get enough of it, and this version keeps his habits. The sea is opened out like a stage and the flagships are correct down to their pennants. In the left foreground a broken English ship rolls her people into the water, close enough that a buyer hanging it in an Amsterdam parlor could count them.