CASUALTY RECORD // June 13, 1665
Battle of Lowestoft
Estimated casualties — killed, wounded, captured, and missing — by side, with confidence labels per surviving record.
Casualties by side
1 sides catalogued · combined 2,500 estimated
Dutch Republic
2,500
Medium-confidence figure
Battle context
The Battle of Lowestoft, fought on 13 June 1665, was a major fleet engagement of the Second Anglo-Dutch War in which a Dutch force of more than a hundred ships under Lieutenant-Admiral Jacob van Wassenaer, Lord Obdam, met an English fleet of equivalent size under James, Duke of York, forty miles east of Lowestoft in Suffolk. Dutch casualties reached approximately 2,500, pointing to a substantial English advantage in the engagement's outcome. The battle was one of the largest naval clashes of the war, pitting the leading admirals of both sides — including Prince Rupert, the Earl of Sandwich, and Johan Evertsen and Cornelis Tromp among the Dutch commanders — against one another in open waters. Within the Second Anglo-Dutch War, an Anglo-Dutch rivalry over commercial and naval supremacy, engagements of this scale directly contested control of the North Sea and the sea lanes on which both nations' trade depended.
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