Original rendering of a snow brig by @kris_tinsart.
A Sneak Attack on the Swedes
Finding sources for the Great Northern War written in English has been a challenge. I stumbled on a volume written by Danish-born U.S. Air Force Colonel Hans Christian Adamson which has been invaluable. The stories surrounding the Norwegian sailor Peter Wessel lean to the outlandish, and I’m grateful to have a text by a military historian that leans into fact.
Dynekilen is an unexpected place for a sea battle–at the end of a narrow fjord off Skaggerak Strait, not the wide open Skaggerak Strait that separates Norway, Sweden and Denmark. The fjord was crammed with ships, with the Danish-Norwegian fleet crowding the Swedish fleet into the end of a strait that was about a mile and a half across. Imagine a sea battle on the Mississippi River, with cannons firing at close range and troops on the banks.
Apparently, the Swedes were amassing ships and troops at Dynekilen, with a small fortress on an island in the middle of the fjord, with plans to invade Norway. Adamson’s book list the number of ships, with a dozen Swedish cargo ships and even more military vessels of various kinds.
Wessel attacked in the early morning on June 26, 1716, and by afternoon had defeated the Swedes and sailed out of the strait with many captured Swedish warships and several cargo ships. The Swedes were possibly hungover from a several day drinking binge and therefore not in their usual fighting form.
This battle so far sounds confusing and chaotic, and I will return here when I can find more source material.
More Source, September 2025
Tom Garner on Dynekilen
I paid for a subscription to academia.edu due to the dearth of material in English on the Great Northern War. I found a new source from Tom Garner that gives more information on the Battle of Dynekilen. Note that no date is given for the original source on academia.edu.
First, Garner gives specific numbers of ships in the Battle of Dynekilen. The Swedes had 13 navy ships and 14 merchant marine ships with 1284 men arranged on opposite sides of the harbor to allow for crossfire. The Danes under Tordenskjold had only seven warships and 934 men. The Swedes also had a battery on an island in the harbor (Garner, p. 62).
Second, when the Swedes realized the battle had been lost, they tried to prevent the Danes from taking their ships as prizes by setting fire to them or running them aground. The Danish and Norwegian sailors managed to salvage twenty Swedish ships, partly by putting out a lot of fires, and left the harbor the evening of the same day with their prize ships and their original seven ships (Garner, p. 62).
Third, Garner gives a different date for the battle than Adamson, citing July 8, 1716, with the battle commencing at 4 am to take the Swedes by surprise (Garner, p. 62).
Tim vanGerven
Peter Wessel had been knighted by Danish King Frederick IV just prior to the Battle of Dynekilen and given the name Tordenskjold, or Thundershield. Tordenskjold’s decisive victory at Dynekilen turned the tide of the Great Northern War in Denmark’s favor and is the reason Tordenskjold had been lauded as the savior of Norway in the century following (vanGerven, p. 6). See my post on Peter Wessel Tordenskjold for a discussion of vanGerven’s work on Tordenskjold as a national memory site.
For the next post in the series, click here — Peasant Soldiers
Sources: Col. Hans Christian Adamson, Admiral Thunderbolt: The Spectacular Career of Peter Wessel, Norway’s Greatest Sea Hero. Pickle Partners Publishing, 2016.
Source: Garner, Tom. “Peter Wessel Tordenskjold.” History of War, n.d. Read via academia.edu.
Source: van Gerven, Tim. “Who’s Tordenskjold? The Fluctuating Identities of an Eighteenth-Century Naval Hero in Nineteenth-Century Cultural Nationalisms.” Romantik, n.d. doi:10.14220/JSOR.2018.7.1.17. Read via academia.edu.