ships were sunk by the English; six of these were burnt in two separate incidents when they got entangled while fleeing and each group was set ablaze by a fire ship: this happened to the Tergoes entangling with the company ship Maarseveen and the merchantman Swanenburg; also to the Koevorden, the Stad Utrecht and the Prinse Maurits. The earlier mentioned company ship Oranje was set on fire after being reduced to a wreck when fighting off several English ships. The first to attack was one of the Duke of York's squadron, the Mary under captain Jeremiah Smith, which lost 99 men of its crew in this action, followed later by the , the and the . According to some accounts, the Oranje lost half of its crew of 400 before succumbing, a severely wounded Senten (rumoured to be an expatriate Scotsman) was picked up by an English vessel and shortly after he also died. During the Dutch flight, the English captured nine more ships: Hilversum, Delft, Zeelandia, Wapen van Edam and Jonge Prins; the VOC-ship Nagelboom and the merchants Carolus Quintus, Mars and Geldersche Ruyter. Tromp was captured but escaped. Eight older ships had to be written off later, as the costs of repairing them would have exceeded their value. The English fleet had lost one flag officer, Rear-Admiral Robert Samsun during the battle, while Vice-Admiral Lawson was mortally wounded and died three weeks after the battle. Notable English admirals and captains present at the battle included William Penn in the , Christopher Myngs and George Ayscue. The escape of most of the Dutch fleet was more significant than its losses, as only its destruction as a fighting force would have given England the early victory it needed. That possibility became more remote as senior Dutch sea officers and politicians began to consider the reasons for the disaster at Lowestoft and identified three principal causes. The first was the lack of discipline that was dealt with by severely punishing the worst offenders while rewarding success. The second was tactical, as the favoured Dutch tactic of the undisciplined mêlée, with individual ships boarding and capturing their opponent and, in many cases, leaving the battle with their prize, was ineffective against English gunnery on ships fighting in line. Although de Ruyter did partially revert to mêlée tactics in the last day of the Four Days Battle., fighting in line became the standard