Consolidation and growth during the eighteenth century

Whitby and its fleet grew and thrived during the wars against France and Holland, the Civil War and the so-called ‘glorious revolution’. The accession of William and Mary led not to peace but to involvement in the grand alliance with Austria, the Netherlands and Spain against the invasion of the Palatinates by Louis XIV of France, and thus to the war known in England as King William's War, which in itself led at the start of the next century into the War of the Spanish Succession. Little is known about Whitby's direct involvement in these new external upheavals except that the indexes of Wills in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury contain the names of men who died at sea in naval ships and include a considerable number of Whitby seamen. Whether any Whitby shipping was hired to be used as naval transports is not clear. The Navy had at this stage by no means solved the problems of victualling at sea, as Rodger explains in his Command of the Ocean. It is not until well after the accession of William and Mary, and King William's War, that Whitby's long, but arm's-length, association with the Navy can be understood in detail. From 1747 onwards, there is ample evidence of the hire of Whitby vessels as ‘Armed Ships’ or as transports, whenever there was a European or Atlantic war.

Such involvement as there was with the Navy early in the eighteenth century could have been as a result of impressment. However, in some cases the names and designation of the vessels named in the early eighteenth-century wills are ambiguous, and some may well have been vessels hired from Whitby. In any case, the number who served would have been far in excess of those who died, and even among the dead, not all would have left wills, or indeed possessed anything other than the clothes they wore. Whatever the exact nature of this naval connection, the presence of Whitby men in the Navy would have enlarged Whitby's horizons and extended the town's contacts with other ports.