Two 24-gun Dutch escorts in the 1696 force remain unidentified in the sources consulted for the lecture. They may have been returning East Indiamen temporarily converted from merchantmen into warships, making the boundary between escort and convoy records harder to reconstruct. Captured merchant ships were also burned, further obscuring which vessels had served in each role. Because the relevant records were probably kept aboard the flagship and its commander did not survive the action, this explanation remains an informed hypothesis rather than a settled identification. Opening here shows how ship conversion and archival loss can shape what historians can recover from a convoy battle.
Notable Point · 30:12-30:32
Why two Dutch escorts remain unidentified
Converted East Indiamen and records lost with the flagship may explain why two 1696 escorts cannot be named.