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Sailors, ladders, a drum, all painted at the top of the blast arc. Van Wieringen itemized the explosion like cargo.

The Spanish fleet lay at anchor under the guns of Gibraltar on 25 April 1607, in its own harbor, in its own war, when 26 Dutch ships came around the point flying every flag they owned. The Dutch Republic was 39 years into its rebellion against Spain and had decided to make a point where it would be most educational: at home. Admiral Jacob van Heemskerck, who had already survived a winter frozen into the Arctic on Nova Zembla with nothing but ship's biscuit and polar bears for company, gave his captains a plan with no second act: sail straight in, lay alongside, and destroy everything afloat. Heemskerck did not live to see much of it work. A cannonball took off his leg in the first exchange, alongside the Spanish flagship, and he bled out on his own deck; his officers kept the news moving slowly while the battle moved fast. The Dutch doubled up on the anchored galleons, two to one, and in the middle of the afternoon the fight produced the image the whole war had been waiting for: a Spanish flagship took fire in her powder magazine and went up whole. Van Wieringen painted the moment with an accountant's literalness: sailors, ladders, gratings, and a drum, all suspended against the smoke at the top of their arc, and a jet of flame and cordage where a first-rate warship had been standing a second before. By evening the Spanish fleet at Gibraltar had ceased to exist: every ship burned, sunk, or shattered, thousands of men dead against about a hundred Dutch. The victory shocked both capitals into speeding up truce talks, and two years later Spain signed the Twelve Years' Truce, which treated the rebel provinces, for the first time, as a country you make treaties with. That is the polite version. The painting also records the other one: in the foreground boats, Dutch sailors are beating the swimmers with oars, a detail van Wieringen included because everyone knew it had happened and nobody yet thought it needed hiding. The canvas was made around 1621, the year the truce expired, commissioned as a reminder of what the last round had cost Spain. It hangs in the Rijksmuseum with the falling men mid-air, four centuries into a descent that the painter, deliberately, never lets end.