On the morning of 28 November 1627 ten ships of King Sigismund III's fleet sailed out from Wisłoujście at the mouth of the Vistula against a Swedish squadron of six blockading Gdańsk. In a short, fierce fight off Oliwa the Poles boarded and took the Swedish flagship Tigern, and the Swedish galleon Solen was blown up by her own master rather than surrender. The blockade was broken, but the Polish commander, Arend Dickmann, was killed.
A blockade of the Commonwealth's richest port
In the war of 1626 to 1629 Swedish warships blockaded Gdańsk, the port through which, as Interia's history writer Jakub Krzywiecki notes, most of the Commonwealth's grain exports passed. The Museum of Wrecks in Stockholm, which displays the remains of the Solen, explains that Sweden's naval strategy was to blockade Polish ports and collect customs from neutral merchant ships. Krzywiecki writes that the Swedish squadron off Hel had once numbered 25 ships, but by November, seeing the Polish fleet stay in harbor, the Swedes had sent most home and six remained.1
Sigismund III had built the fleet to fight Sweden, and he had forbidden it to attack a stronger enemy. Against six ships, his admiral now had ten, though only four of them were galleons against five Swedish ones.2
Boarding the Tigern
Dickmann, a Gdańsk citizen of Dutch origin, led the attack in the galleon Święty Jerzy (Saint George) and steered straight for the Swedish flagship, the Tigern. The ships grappled, and Krzywiecki relates that the Swedish commander, Vice Admiral Nils Stiernsköld, was hit by musket fire and then lost an arm to a cannonball before the Tigern was taken. The largest Swedish ship, the Solen, was boarded by the Polish galleon Wodnik; rather than give her up, her master blew her up, and she sank in the Bay of Gdańsk, where her wreck was found more than three centuries later.3
Dickmann was killed by a cannonball while on board the captured flagship, and he is buried in St Mary's Church in Gdańsk. The Museum of Polish History's dzieje.pl puts the Swedish losses at two ships and about 350 sailors, and the Polish ones at 47 dead. The blockade was lifted and the victory, the first over a Swedish fleet, was celebrated across Europe, though, as dzieje.pl notes, the battle was too small to change the course of the war. Sweden, still using the Julian calendar, dated it 18 November. The full story is in our article on the Battle of Oliwa.4
Also on this day
- 1870: Battle of Beaune-la-Rolande. The French XX Corps under General Crouzat, seeking to relieve besieged Paris in the Franco-Prussian War, struck three Prussian brigades resting in the village of Beaune-la-Rolande.
