The De With family were Mennonites and strict pacifists; in 1610, Witte, as an anabaptist not yet baptised, obtained a baptism by a Calvinist preacher so that he would no longer feel constrained in using violence, as he was by nature not a peace-seeking boy.

From December 1620, the Gelderland participated in an expedition by Admiral Willem Haultain de Zoete against the Barbary Corsairs, returning in August 1621.

On his first voyage as a captain, De With already showed he was the strict disciplinarian of later legend: on 13 April, six of his men deserted his ship and the constant beatings and floggings to flee to the uninhabited island of Juan Fernández.

He departed for the Republic on 6 February 1626, after the death of Schapenham, as Vice-Admiral (in service of the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie) of a Spice Fleet of four ships, then worth five million guilders.

The same year, De With, entering the service of the WIC, became flag captain on the Amsterdam to Admiral Piet Heyn during an expedition from 20 May to capture the Spanish treasure fleet.

De With now hoped to be appointed flag captain on the Vlieghende Groene Draeck, but Admiral Maerten Tromp was chosen instead.

Early in 1634, De With rejoined the navy for four months when Lieutenant-Admiral Philips van Dorp used the Prins Hendrik as his flagship for an expedition in the Gulf of Biscay.

Overworked by the many difficulties and political strife brought by the reorganisation, they feared being replaced by the younger and more competent Tromp and De With.

In the summer of 1637 the fleet supply system collapsed, bringing the hungry and thirsty sailors to the brink of a general mutiny.

Charles I of England exploited the crisis to force Dutch North Sea herring fishers to pay for fishing permits.

Both in Battle of Fehmarn (1644) and 1645, De With, along with an enormous convoy of merchantmen (702 on the return voyage of the latter year) forced the Sound against the Danes, who had tried to impose higher toll rates.

The end of the Swedish-Danish war and the Dutch naval dominance under De With in the Baltic Sea rested on the power of Andries Bicker, burgomaster of Amsterdam and member of the States General and not on that of the Stadtholder Frederik Hendrik of Orange.

He refused to cooperate with the Council of Brazil and, after many months of conflict during which his fleet deteriorated through lack of supplies, he returned against orders with the two remaining seaworthy ships to the Netherlands in November 1649.

On his return, he went to the States-General to complain about the policy of the colony of Brazil but was himself arrested, charged of insubordination and desertion on 259 points and nearly condemned to decapitation.

In the First Anglo-Dutch War against the Commonwealth of England, when Lieutenant-Admiral Maarten Tromp in the autumn of 1652 fell in disgrace with the States-General, De With commanded the Dutch fleet at the Battle of the Kentish Knock but failed in his mission.

[2] De With met his end in November 1658 at the Battle of the Sound, during the Northern Wars, commanding the vanguard of the Dutch fleet relieving Copenhagen from the Swedish.

His body was embalmed on orders of Charles X of Sweden and displayed as a war trophy in the town hall of Elsinore by the Swedes, who, in January 1659, delivered his body to the Danish court in Copenhagen; after the Danes had paid their homage, it was transported to the Netherlands and buried with great pomp in Rotterdam on 7 October, in the church of St Lawrence, where the marble grave memorial, restored after being damaged by the German bombardment of 14 May 1940, can still be seen.

As Dutch naval historian Johan Carel Marinus Warnsinck put it: "He was feared and hated by his inferiors (on several occasions, crews refused to let him on board to use their ship as flagship), shunned by his equals and always full of insubordination against his superiors".

One of the more remarkable aspects of De With's personality was his being a notorious pamphleteer, publishing many booklets, anonymously or under the name of friends, in which he sometimes praised but more often ridiculed or even insulted his fellow officers.