The attack, named after the commander of the landing force, Rear-Admiral Robert Holmes, was successful in destroying by fire a large merchant fleet of 140 ships.

More to the north, the vast wealth of the city of Amsterdam could only be reached by recklessly entering the Zuyderzee past most of the still active vessels of the Dutch fleet, lying in wait in the Texel.

The naval port of the Admiralty of Friesland, Harlingen, lies at the southern edge of the Waddenzee, the vast stretch of mudflats between the Frisian Isles and the continental coast.

Harlingen's exit to the North Sea, located 20 miles (32 km) to the northwest, is the Vlie, the ancient estuary of the IJssel river, between the islands of Vlieland and Terschelling.

The channel was often used as moorage and it was, correctly, assumed that a large number of merchant ships were at anchor here, sheltering from the English fleet and waiting to resume their voyage to the Baltic, each year the destination of thousands of Dutch vessels.

Today the situation has changed considerably: the channel has shifted four miles to the southwest, eroding the north coast of Vlieland and causing Terschelling to grow in the same direction.

Holmes on Thursday 19 August, the adverse southeasterly having eased to a breeze, around 8:00 AM entered the Vlie, using Tyger as his flagship and leaving Hampshire and Advice behind as a covering force.

Holmes and his new-found pilot personally reconnoitred the channel in the Fanfan, and discovered that a large merchant fleet was indeed present, estimated at fifty vessels.

However, when his Tyger as first ship arrived at the Reede van Speckhoeck anchorage (Whalers' Moorage or Schelling Road), west of the Hobbesandt shoal, to his puzzlement he saw only a tiny village, Oost-Vlieland, on this island and interrogation of some prisoners confirmed that no important buildings were present there.

In these circumstances Holmes considered it unwise to commit his landing force, covered by only a handful of frigates, to an attack on what basically was an empty dune area, while expecting the enormous merchant fleet with thousands of sailors to remain passive to his south in the Vlieree (Vlie Road) while this was going on.

The other three fireships now attached themselves to an equal number of large Dutch merchantmen on the northern edge of the fleet and burnt them, causing a mass panic on the other vessels, the sailors of which mostly abandoned their ships, escaping to the south in the boats.

During the following hours the ships one after another became victim of the fire until the last remaining nine were saved when a large Guineaman and some armed ketches stood and fought and thus managed to protect some other vessels behind them in a cul-de-sac formed by the Inschot creek.

On their way south they encountered two deputies of the States of Holland, Gerard Hasselaer and Baerding, who had been committed to supervise the fleet at the Texel and hearing of the English threat had travelled to the more northern island to investigate.

The smoke and flames were clearly visible to the English fleet before the Texel, twenty miles to the south, and interpreted as a sure sign that Holmes had succeeded in burning the warehouses.

[15] Holmes in the evening of 19 August became aware he had been misinformed; the main shore installations were on the opposite island, Terschelling, in this period called simply Schelling.

A few armed men opposed the landing with musket fire but were soon scared away when six English companies came ashore—though Holmes's personal report gives the impression that all of his troops were committed.

Scouts, spreading out in all directions, soon reported that the population had fled, some to more eastern villages, others on any vessel they could find; three companies now entered to plunder and burn the town, while Holmes with two hundred men remained on the outside to the south.

Holmes therefore decided not to burn the eastern villages, to remove his troops from Terschelling, quickly execute a short landing at Vlieland in conformation with his original orders, and retreat before any Dutch counterattack could materialise.

[19] A day earlier, the secretary of prince Rupert James Hayes, using the Julian calendar, had already written to England: "On the 9th, at noon, smoke was seen rising from several places in the island of Vlie, and the 10th brought news that Sir Robert had burned in the enemy's harbour 160 outward-bound valuable merchantmen and three men-of-war, and taken a little pleasure boat and eight guns in four hours.

On 21 August the news of a second catastrophe at the Vlie caused rioting in Amsterdam, where the stock market collapsed; an angry Orangist mob tried to plunder the house of De Ruyter.

Commentators in England predicted the fall of the leader of the States faction, Grand Pensionary Johan de Witt, expecting him to flee to France.

Everybody understood that in wartime soldiers would plunder, but laying waste to an entire town, as Holmes had done, was seen as a betrayal of mutual trust and thus caused a storm of indignation.

[23] This led to a new wave of Dutch pamphlets and poems linking these events, often showing two engravings, the Destruction of ter Schelling at the left mirrored by that of London on the right.

Also most churches in the province of Holland held special collections of donations; as the rivalling denominations tried to outdo each other in the amount of money given, soon enough funds were available to shelter the poor for the coming winter and make a start with rebuilding the town.

The Great Fire of London brought most to the conclusion that God had already avenged the destruction of ter Schelling, so no special retaliation on English coastal towns was necessary.

However, when the following year Charles deliberately procrastinated the peace talks held in Breda, De Witt used the lingering resentment caused by Holmes's Bonfire to convince the States of Holland that it was justified to end the war by a devastating raid on Chatham Dockyard where the larger vessels of the English fleet were laid up.

That at least some of the English understood this, is shown by Samuel Pepys' diary entry of 30 June 1667: "It seems very remarkable to me, and of great honour to the Dutch, that those of them that did go on shore to Gillingham, though they went in fear of their lives, and were some of them killed; and, notwithstanding their provocation at Schelling, yet killed none of our people nor plundered their houses, but did take some things of easy carriage, and left the rest, and not a house burned; and, which is to our eternal disgrace, that what my Lord Douglas's men, who come after them, found there, they plundered and took all away".

According to the, probably apocryphal, story, those people having escaped massacre by fleeing to the east side of the island were saved from the encroaching English troops by an old crone near the hamlet of Stryp, where an ancient abandoned graveyard lay on a dune.

She answered, in some versions of the legend in order to deceive, in others through a misunderstanding of the question: "Hundreds of them are standing, but thousands are lying"—referring to the buried corpses—after which the English would have become so frightened that they abandoned their approach.

Today, the legend of the Stryper Wyfke is commemorated by a bronze statue west of Midsland that shows her pointing to the graveyard, facing an easterly breeze.