Who won the Battle of Oliwa?
The fleet of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth won the Battle of Oliwa on 28 November 1627. Ten royal ships under Admiral Arend Dickmann sailed out of Gdańsk against a Swedish squadron of six blockading the port, captured the Swedish flagship Tigern by boarding and saw the Solen blown up by her own master. Both admirals were killed. It was the largest victory in the history of the Commonwealth's navy, though it did not change the course of the war.1
Before dawn on 28 November 1627, off the mouth of the Vistula, sailors of King Sigismund III's young navy were singing psalms on their decks. Their admiral had called his captains aboard the flagship and told them the plan: two squadrons, straight at the enemy, and board. By noon the Swedish flagship was in Polish hands, a second Swedish galleon lay on the bottom of the bay, and the admiral who had given the orders was dying on the deck of his prize.2
A stranglehold on Gdańsk
The war of 1626 to 1629 grew out of a dynastic quarrel. Sigismund III Vasa, king of Poland, had been deposed as king of Sweden, and his Swedish cousin Gustavus Adolphus wanted him to give up that claim for good. In 1626 Gustavus carried the war to Prussia, reasoning that a grip on the mouth of the Vistula would bring Poland to its knees.3
The invasion began in July 1626 with the capture of Pillau. The Swedes took Frombork, Elbląg, Tczew and Puck, and their warships began blockading Gdańsk, stopping ships and charging them heavy tolls. For the Commonwealth this was a blow to its purse: most of its grain left the country through Gdańsk.4
A navy from scratch
For most of its history the Commonwealth had no real navy. Sigismund III set out to build one for his wars with Sweden. With the councilors of Gdańsk he set up a Royal Ship Commission, whose commissioners oversaw shipbuilding, armament, hiring and training. Many of the ships were converted merchantmen.5
The crews were a mix of nations: Poles, Dutchmen, Englishmen, Danes, Scots and Germans, hired for their seamanship and mostly drawn from townsmen, since the nobility thought service at sea beneath them. Arend Dickmann was typical. A Dutchman settled in Gdańsk, he had commanded a merchant ship carrying the city's grain before he joined the king's fleet.6
Fleets and commanders
All summer the Swedish squadron off Hel was too strong to challenge, and the king forbade his captains to attack a larger force. Then autumn changed the odds. Storms, disease and short rations sent most Swedish ships home for repair, leaving two squadrons of six to take turns watching the bay, one based at Pillau. At the end of October Admiral Nils Stiernsköld held the watch off Gdańsk with five galleons and a pinnace, about 140 guns in all.7
The royal fleet at Wisłoujście, the fortress guarding the Vistula mouth, had ten ships and about 170 guns, but only four were galleons that could stand up to the Swedes. On 23 November the commissioners decided to fight. Because the admiral, Wilhelm Appelman, was gravely ill, they appointed Dickmann to command. A first sortie on 26 November was driven back under the guns of the fortress.8
On the night of 27 to 28 November the fleet moved out beyond Wisłoujście in two squadrons of five. The first, around Dickmann's flagship Święty Jerzy (St. George), included Panna Wodna, Latający Jeleń, Żółty Lew and Czarny Kruk. The second followed the vice admiral's ship Wodnik, with Król Dawid, Arka Noego, Płomień and Biały Lew. The Swedes had Tigern (the flagship), Pelikanen, Solen, Månen, Enhörningen and Papegojan.9
Battle: Tigern
At about six in the morning the Polish lookouts saw the Swedish ships coming from the direction of Hel. The wind blew from the south, off the land, which favored the Poles. Dickmann fired a gun as the signal to weigh anchor and asked to be shown the Swedish flagship so he could steer for her and board.10
The Swedes had not expected the Poles to come out and tried to turn away to the open sea, but the maneuver failed. As the flagships closed, Dickmann opened fire with four bow guns and Tigern answered, hitting Święty Jerzy in the bow. Then the two ships ground together side by side. Swivel guns and muskets swept the decks, and Stiernsköld was badly wounded early in the fight.11
The pinnace Panna Wodna came up under Tigern's stern and added her fire. In the confusion, the National Maritime Museum's reconstruction relates, Latający Jeleń fired a full broadside into Tigern without knowing Poles were already aboard, then fouled Panna Wodna with her bowsprit. The boarders drove the Swedes below decks, and Tigern surrendered.12
Battle: the sun sets at noon
While the first squadron fought for Tigern, Vice Admiral Hermann Witte in Wodnik attacked the Solen, a much bigger galleon. The Swedes had the better of it at first and threw back the Polish boarders again and again, stabbing at them with pikes from below. Król Dawid failed to obey an order to attack Solen's other side, but the small Biały Lew came to Wodnik's aid.13
Trapped, Solen's master went down to the powder room and set it alight rather than surrender the ship. Polish sailors and some Swedes leapt for Wodnik or into the water. The explosion tore the galleon apart and set Wodnik's sails on fire before her crew could push the burning wreck away. The Polish Army Museum and Polish Radio both tell the story, and the Swedish wreck museum quotes a contemporary who praised the "honest Swede and faithful man" who threw fire into the powder. Poles later said that on that day the sun, Solen in Swedish, set over Gdańsk at noon.14
Victory at a price
The rest of the Swedish squadron turned for the open sea and Pillau. Some Polish ships gave chase, without result. One of the Swedish ships, Pelikanen, had come alongside Święty Jerzy during the fight and struck her colors after a Polish broadside, then slipped away when the wind allowed. As Dickmann returned to Tigern to finish the business, a shot struck him in both legs. Accounts differ on whether it came from the fleeing Pelikanen or was simply a stray ball. The wound was fatal.15
Stiernsköld died of his wounds as well. Sweden lost two ships, about 350 men killed and some 60 taken prisoner. The Commonwealth lost about 47 to 50 sailors, and several ships needed repair. Swedish records date the battle and the admiral's death to 18 November, because Sweden kept the Julian calendar, then ten days behind the Gregorian, until 1753.16
Aftermath
The blockade of Gdańsk was lifted, but only until spring, when the Swedes returned in strength. The victory's real weight was in prestige. It showed Europe that the young royal fleet could beat the strongest navy in the Baltic, and the royal court spread the news in printed accounts and engravings.17
The fleet did not last long. On the night of 5 to 6 July 1628 Swedish batteries on the Vistula opened fire on the ships at anchor near Wisłoujście and sank two of them, among them the pinnace Żółty Lew and, by Portal Stoczniowy's account, the flagship Święty Jerzy herself. The war ended in 1629 with the Truce of Altmark, which left Sweden most of the Prussian ports and the right to levy tolls on Gdańsk's trade.18
On land the war's hardest fight was still to come: the hussars caught Gustavus Adolphus himself at Trzciana in June 1629.19› Battle of Trzciana, 1629
Memory and the wreck of the Solen
Dickmann was buried at the king's expense in St. Mary's Church in Gdańsk, with a guard of honor of marines and more than 60 Swedish prisoners marched before the coffin. Every November reenactors lay wreaths on his grave in the chancel. On a hill near Pachołek in Oliwa stands an obelisk to the battle, converted in the 1970s from a monument of 1889 to Queen Louise of Prussia.20
The Solen came back to light in 1969, when a wreck was found 16 meters down in Gdańsk's northern port. Its excavation was a pioneering project of maritime archaeology and yielded more than 6,000 finds, from crewmen's belongings and rigging to guns and over 1,200 coins. Two of the Solen's original guns now stand in the National Maritime Museum's exhibition in the granaries on Ołowianka island in Gdańsk, beside an animated reconstruction of the battle.21
Oliwa remains the best-known victory of the old Polish fleet, and it belongs with the land battles of the same war in the wars of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the greatest battles in Polish history.
