Original rendering of a snow brig by @kris_tinsart.
Peter Wessel Tordenskjold
Peter Wessel Tordenskjold was a Danish larger-than-life figure in the Great Northern War. I was happy to find a book in English by Col. Hans Christian Adamson that recounts some of the stories about the famed Danish admiral.
It was common for ships to fly with colors from another country, but it was considered a breach of naval etiquette to fire on another ship while flying a false flag. Peter Wessel encountered two warships flying Danish flags while he was flying a false flag of the Netherlands in the area where the North Sea meets Skaggerak Strait. The warships immediately ran up Swedish flags and began firing on him. Fortunately, he got away.
On another occasion, he encountered a ship flying a British flag, The ship even looked British, but it fired on him. He changed his Dutch flag to Danneborg and fired back. The other ship ran up a Swedish flag, identifying itself as the enemy. The firing resumed until Captain Wessel was down to forty-four rounds of powder. He ran up a white flag and sent men to row to the other ship and tell the captain that he can go freely because he was out of powder, but that if he wanted to continue the battle, he would have to lend him some more powder. It turned out the other captain was British, but sailing a ship that had been sold to Swedish privateers, but kept him on as captain. (Adamson, 2270-2381)
Flying under false flags was common and accepted, but naval etiquette implied that ships shouldn’t fire their cannons while flying a false flag.
The military historian I consult with thinks this story provides a commentary on how poorly the peasant soldiers were treated in the Great Northern War. For a ship commander to make sport of a battle and consider continuing it when it was really unnecessary illustrates how the crew was considered expendable–literally cannon fodder. He points out that the captain rarely dies in a sea battle–it’s the deck crew that sustains the heaviest casualties.
Source: Col. Hans Christian Adamson, Admiral Thunderbolt: The Spectacular Career of Peter Wessel, Norway’s Greatest Sea Hero. Pickle Partners Publishing, 2016.
Update – September 2025
Due to the dearth of material in English on the Great Northern War, I subscribed to academia.edu.
An article by Tom Garner, which does not have a date in the academia.edu scan, gives more details about the incident in which Captain Wessel sent a message to the British ship requesting more ammunition so they could continue the battle. The incident occurred on the 26th or 27th of July, 1714, and the British ship was under the command of a sailor names Bactmann. The two ships apparently met after their battle and drank to each other’s health. As my military historian implied should have happened, Wessel was actually court-martialed for that incident by Frederick IV, although he was later released and promoted to captain (Garner, p. 60).
Source: Garner, Tom. “Peter Wessel Tordenskjold.” History of War, n.d. Read via academia.edu
Tordenskjold as a National Memory Site
I am currently reading a fascinating paper on Tordenskjold as a national memory site for Denmark-Norway and Sweden by Tim van Gerven. It is a PhD dissertation and available via a paid subscription to academia.edu. I will share some highlights here for those who don’t have the means to subscribe to the full article. Van Gerven implies that the stories about Tordenskjold have been embellished over time to create a folk hero to represent the people of Denmark.
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.
For the next post in the series, click here —King Karl XII