From 1633 until 1637, Collaart served as Vice Admiral with the Royal Squadron operating out of Dunkirk and, in 1635, his attacks against Dutch herring redders would cost the city of
Flushing (Vlissingen) over two million guilders in income. Although the city of Dunkirk was under a Dutch blockade during early 1635, the blockade was temporarily weakened as several warships under Lieutenant-Admiral
Philips van Dorp were supporting French naval forces in the
Gulf of Biscay and, on 14 August, Collaert sailing out of Dunkirk successfully broke through the Dutch blockade with a fleet of twenty-one vessels. Within three days, Collaart's fleet located a herring fleet numbering 160 under the guard of a single
man-of-war, armed with 39 guns and an 85-men crew. Easily disabling the escort, 74 vessels were either sunk or set afire with the surviving vessels escaping to the
Vlie. On 19 August, after chasing off the six men-of-war escorts, Collaart's forces destroyed around 50 herring boats near
Dogger Bank. Of the surviving fishermen, 150 sailors including wounded as well as the young and the elderly were put on a merchant vessel from
Hamburg and returned to the
Dutch Republic while the remaining 775 were held captive for ransom. After this latest attack, a Dutch fleet was soon raised by the
States General of the Netherlands who ordered all available vessels to set out after the Collaart's fleet. Sailing from
Rotterdam, its commander
Willem Codde van der Burch was ordered to rendez-vous at the
Texel with
Philips van Dorp, recently returning from
La Rochelle, and Vice Admiral Quast. Collaart soon encountered the Dutch fleet of Van der Burch and Van Dorp, consisting of a combined twenty warships, and managed to damage four before the arrival of Quast's fleet forced Collaart to abandon the fight. In part due to bad weather, Collaart was able to escape to Dunkirk, arriving with 975 captive fishermen on 8 September 1635. The following year, while sailing with two other privateers, Collaart and
Mathieu Romboutsen were captured (the third captain managing to escape to an
English port) near
Dieppe after a five-hour battle against Captain
Johan Evertsen on 29 February 1636. Collaart died of an illness at
A Coruña in August 1637. He had a son who was also a privateer,
Jacques Collaert the Younger, and was the father-in-law of the later English Vice-Admiral
Edward Spragge. ==References==