Cavalry versus Warships: A French Experiment

Most of us in the history biz, I suspect, have our favorite historical battles. Classicists might celebrate Thermopylae and Cannae, and modernists might fondly recall the ridges of Gettysburg and the bloody street of Stalingrad. My own tastes often run to the absurd, so give me instead a military encounter that borders on the ridiculous: the Second Battle of the Texel (22 January 1795), one of the very few naval battles won by a cavalry charge.

I exaggerate, but not by much. During the winter of 1794-95, French troops invaded Holland in support of Dutch republican rebels - and to grab more territory and resources for the French Republic. In January French commanders decided to take advantage of the weather by seizing an ice-bound Dutch naval squadron. The ships in question lay off Texel Island in the frozen Marsdiep strait. Dutch rebel admiral Jan de Winter took a body of cavalry and horse-drawn artillery across the ice, and sent ahead a detachment of hussars (heavy cavalry) to intimidate his adversaries.

The Dutch squadron commander, Hermanus Reintjes, remained unimpressed. His heavily-armed ships retained enough mobility to target and destroy De Winter’s horsemen, and in any event he knew the war would be decided by French forces on the mainland, not on Marsdiep. The Dutch government ships thus ignored the rebel cavalry, whose "charge" inflicted no damage except, perhaps, to the hussars' own dignity. A few days later the Captain Reintjes learned that rebel forces had taken the national capital, and he quietly surrendered his fourteen ships and 850 guns. De Winter got his bloodless victory and its attendant glory. That he received no lasting fame says a lot about historians' and history-readers' bloodthirstiness. Most of us don't see a battle as memorable unless it soaks the ground in blood.  

Source: Kat Eschner, “Only Time in History When Men on Horseback Captured a Fleet,” Smithsonian Magazine, 23 Jan. 2017.