On This Day 24 October

[Coog]

The Action of 24 October 1793 was a minor naval engagement during the first year of the French Revolutionary Wars. While cruising in the Northern Bay of Biscay, the British Royal Navy frigate HMS Thames, under Captain James Cotes, encountered the much larger French frigate Uranie, under Captain Jean-François Tartu. The ships engaged, with each suffering severe damage until both separated after nearly four hours of continual combat. Cotes ordered his crew to make hasty repairs, intending to resume the battle, but Uraine's crew, with their captain dead, slipped away while Thames was unable to manoeuvre. At 16:00, while repairs on Thames were ongoing, a French squadron of three frigates and a brig, under Captain Zacharie Allemand, arrived, firing on Thames as they approached. Outnumbered, Cotes surrendered his ship to Allemand, who commended Cotes on his resistance to the far larger Uranie.

The French brought Thames into Brest, where sailors from Allemand's squadron looted it. The British officers were imprisoned for the next two years. The frigate was commissioned into the French Navy as Tamise, and Uranie was renamed Tartu in honour of her deceased captain. Both vessels then served with the French Atlantic Fleet, Tamise until 8 June 1796, when the British recaptured her off the Scilly Isles, and Tartu until 30 December 1796 when the British captured her during the Expédition d'Irlande.

In February 1793, amid rising tension between the countries, the French Republic declared war on Great Britain, drawing Britain into the French Revolutionary Wars. At sea, the Bay of Biscay, the Western Approaches and the English Channel all became areas of significant naval activity as French privateers sailed on raiding cruises against British merchant shipping. To augment these attacks, the French naval authorities despatched squadrons of frigates to attack British trade routes. To counter these operations, the Royal Navy sent their own frigates to sea, sometimes in squadrons and sometimes on single patrols.

A French frigate squadron sent to on a cruise in the Northern Bay of Biscay in the early autumn of 1793 was commanded by Captain Zacharie Allemand and consisted of the frigates Carmagnole, Résolue, Sémillante and Uranie with the brig-corvette Espiègle. On 22 October, the squadron sighted the 16-gun Spanish brig Alcoudia and Allemand ordered Uranie under Captain Jean-François Tartu to separate from the squadron and pursue the Spaniard. Uranie was easily able to capture Alcoudia, taking the prisoners on board the frigate and establishing a prize crew on the brig. Two days later, Uranie was sailing southwards in company with the prize with the wind at the southwest, when a sail appeared to the north at 09:30.

The new arrival was a British ship sent from the Channel Fleet on a lone patrol: the frigate HMS Thames under Captain James Cotes. Thames was an old frigate, built in 1758 and carrying 32 12-pounder guns. The ship was below its standard complement of 215 men, sailing with only 184, which meant that the 6-pounder guns that augmented the main battery could not be manned. By comparison, Uranie was five years old and carried 40 18-pounder guns with a full complement of 260 men aboard and weighing almost double the weight of the British ship. At first unsure of the identity of the ship to the north, Tartu hoisted a blue flag as an identification signal and sent the Alcoudia away in case the ship should be revealed to be hostile. Cotes did not respond to the signal, and the two ships were soon hidden from one another by a rain squall.

At 10:15 the weather cleared, leaving both frigates well in sight of one another, both Tartu and Cotes identifying the opposing ship as an enemy and clearing for action, Tartu hoisting the French tricolour. With both captains determined on battle, the frigates approached one another rapidly on opposing tacks. Uranie was the first to fire, discharging a full broadside at Thames and then wearing around to pull alongside Thames on the same tack. The manoeuvre placed the two frigates directly alongside one another and a close engagement began, each discharging broadside after broadside at the another. The fight continued in this manner for several hours, until 14:20, when Uranie was able to pull ahead of Thames and fire several broadsides into the bows of the British ship, raking her. The crew of Uranie then attempted to board via the starboard bow of Thames, but were driven off by fire from Cotes' bow guns, which had been double–shotted for this reason.

With the boarding attempt thwarted Uranie pulled back, turning southwards to put distance between the vessels. Tartu had been mortally wounded during the battle and it was assumed on Thames that the French ship was retreating, the British crew cheering as the firing ceased. Cotes however anticipated a resumption of the action and ordered his men to begin making repairs immediately: Thames was so badly damaged that pursuit was out of the question. All three of Thames' masts had been shot through, most of the rigging had been torn away, the hull and decks were badly damaged and 34 men were killed or wounded. Uranie was in a similar state, and hauled up approximately 2 nautical miles (3.7 km) away, the masts intact but damaged with most of the rigging shot through and numerous holes smashed through the hull. It was also evident on Thames that the crew of the French ship were pumping water over the side, an indication that the ship had been damaged below the waterline.

Cotes' ship was fit only to sail with the wind, and the captain urged his men to make greater efforts to repair their ship before Uranie could come up with them again. So engrossed was the British crew with their repairs that it was not until 16:00 that it was realised that the French frigate was no longer holding station within sight, and had completely disappeared. This led some on the British ship to assume that Uranie had sunk, although in fact the ship had simply turned away in an effort to make it back to Rochefort to repair the damage suffered in the engagement. Also apparent were a number of sails in the distance. These rapidly approached and were revealed to be a frigate squadron flying the Union Flag. Cotes was unable to manoeuvre his ship or respond to the new arrivals, which were soon identified as French vessels wearing false flags. The leading frigate pulled up close to Thames and fired a broadside at the British frigate. Cotes immediately hailed the French, announcing that he was in no position to fight them due to the damage his ship had suffered and that he was striking his flag.

Allemand requested that Cotes come aboard Carmagnole, but Cotes responded that he was unable to do so as his ship's boats had all been destroyed. Allemand sent a boat from his own ship to Thames and brought Cotes to Carmagnole as a prisoner of war; Cotes used the delay to destroy his ship's documents. Allemand questioned Cotes intently about the nature of his recent combat and, on identifying Uranie as one of his own squadron, commented that Tartu should have defeated Thames in half the time the action had taken.

Thames subsequently returned to Brest with Allemand's squadron on 25 October, although the British ship was thoroughly looted during the journey by the French sailors, whose officers were unable to exert any control over them. The ship's officers had been removed, including the surgeon, and therefore the British wounded did not receive medical treatment until the squadron arrived at Brest on 25 October; two subsequently died, making the total British deaths 13, with 21 wounded. Cotes wrote a report on the engagement, which he sent to the Admiralty from captivity in Gisors, which the French authorities intercepted and delayed, with the result that the first news of Thames' fate did not arrive in Britain until 7 May 1794. Cotes was soon afterwards exchanged and returned to Britain, where a court-martial investigating the loss of Thames exonerated him. Several of his officers were not repatriated however, remaining in French captivity for the next two years.

Losses on Uranie were not reported, other than the death of Captain Tartu, and the frigate arrived at Rochefort soon afterwards, where in honour of his death in the battle, she was renamed Tartu. It was later incorrectly reported in Britain that the ship's name was changed to Tortue (tortoise) to disguise its identity after being defeated by Thames. Thames was taken into French service as Tamise, and she participated in the Atlantic campaign of May 1794 the following year. The French lost both frigates in 1796. HMS Santa Margarita recaptured Tamise in an engagement near the Scilly Isles between British and French frigate squadrons at the Action of 8 June 1796. Some six months later, the ship of the line HMS Polyphemus captured Tartu on 30 December in the aftermath of the disastrous, for the French, Expédition d'Irlande.

[Coog]

The Action of 24 October 1798 was a minor naval engagement of the French Revolutionary Wars, fought between a British Royal Navy frigate and two ships of the Batavian Republic. The Dutch ships were intercepted in the North Sea within hours of leaving port, 30 nautical miles (56 km) northwest of the Texel, by the British ship HMS Sirius. Both Dutch vessels were carrying large quantities of military supplies and French soldiers, reinforcements for the French and Irish forces participating in the Irish Rebellion of 1798. Although the rebellion had been defeated a month earlier, word of the British victory had not yet reached the European continent, and the Dutch force was intended to supplement a larger French squadron sent earlier in October. The French had already been defeated at the Battle of Tory Island and the Dutch suffered a similar outcome, both ships defeated in turn by the larger and better armed British vessel.

Captain Richard King on Sirius discovered the Dutch ships early on 24 October, when they were separated by 2 nautical miles (3.7 km) and thus unable to mutually support one another. Targeting the smaller ship, Waakzaamheid, King was able to outrun her in an hour and force her to surrender without a fight. Turning his attention on the larger vessel, Furie, King rapidly overhauled her as well and opened a heavy fire, to which Furie was only able to ineffectively reply. Within half an hour she too had surrendered. Both ships were taken to Britain, repaired and commissioned in the Royal Navy. The defeat ended the last effort by the continental nations to land soldiers in Ireland, and signified the last action of the Irish Rebellion.

Following the French Revolution in 1789, a political organisation was formed in Ireland named the Society of United Irishmen. Crossing social and religious boundaries, this organisation embraced republican principles with the stated goal of removing British government control from Ireland. When Britain went to war with the French Republic in 1793, the organisation was declared illegal and driven under cover, many of its senior members going into exile in Europe or America. These men continued to call for armed resistance to the British government, and in 1796 persuaded the French Directory to launch the Expédition d'Irlande, a large scale invasion of Ireland. The expedition was a disaster, with thousands of French soldiers drowned without a single man successfully landed. Subsequently the French-controlled government of the Batavian Republic, formerly the Dutch Republic, was persuaded to make an attempt on Ireland in October 1797, but their fleet was intercepted and defeated by Admiral Adam Duncan at the Battle of Camperdown.

In May 1798, the arrest of a number of the leaders of the United Irishmen provoked the Irish Rebellion of 1798, a widespread uprising across Ireland. The Rebellion took the British authorities by surprise, but the introduction of regular British Army troops rapidly defeated the Irish armies and the last resistance was brought to an end in September with the surrender of a small French force at the Battle of Ballinamuck. The French authorities had also been taken by surprise by the uprising, and were consequently unprepared: the forces they deployed were inadequate to face the much larger British armies operating in Ireland at the time. News of this defeat had still not reach the continent by October, when a second French invasion force set out. Closely watched by the Royal Navy as soon as it left Brest, the squadron was defeated on 12 October 1798 at the Battle of Tory Island: fewer than a third of the French ships returned to France.

The Dutch had also been persuaded to send reinforcements to the United Irishmen during the rebellion, but like the French they were unprepared for the sudden uprising and their contributions were not ready until 24 October. Two Dutch ships had been ordered to take on troops and supplies: the 36-gun frigate Furie under Captain Bartholomeus Pletz and the 24-gun corvette Waakzaamheid under Captain Meindert van Neirop, who assumed command of the expedition. Although both ships were small and poorly armed, each carried a number of French soldiers for service in Ireland, Furie embarking 165 and Waakzaamheid 122. In addition, the ships carried over 6,000 stands of arms and large quantities of other military stores with which to arm the Irish irregular forces that they expected to meet.

Departing on the night of 23/24 October, the Dutch ships made rapid progress and at 08:00 were 30 nautical miles (56 km) northwest of the Texel, sailing westwards towards the English Channel. Within sight of the Dutch ships however was the British frigate HMS Sirius, a new ship of 1,049 long tons (1,066 t), rated as 38-guns but actually carrying 44. She was commanded by Captain Richard King, who had participated in the campaign against the Expédition d'Irlande two years earlier. Sirius had been stationed off the Texel to watch for Dutch movements and intercept any ships of smaller or equal size entering or leaving the waterway. Although van Neirop's squadron outnumbered King's ship, the British vessel was much larger and faster, and the Dutch were also hampered by their position: the two ships were more than 2 nautical miles (3.7 km) apart, too far to offer mutual support against their opponent.

King's first target was the smaller and slower Waakzaamheid, which was windward of Furie and thus would have to sail into the wind to link with Pletz's ship. King rapidly closed with the corvette, avoiding contact with the larger Furie as he did so. At 09:00 Sirius came alongside Waakzaamheid and fired a gun at her, prompting van Neirop to immediately surrender. Furie had not attempted to come to the flagship's aid and resistance against the much larger Sirius would have been futile. King despatched boats containing a prize crew and removed most of the prisoners from Waakzaamheid, placing them below decks on Sirius. Once the prize was secure, King immediately set off in pursuit of Furie, which was attempting to flee to the west and had nearly disappeared over the horizon. For the rest of the day the pursuit continued, Furie unable to escape the faster British ship, which steadily gained during the afternoon until at 17:00 was within range of the Dutch frigate.

King's fire was heavy, but Pletz resisted, responding with his own cannon and continuing his attempts to escape. For half an hour the engagement continued, the distance between the ships varying as Pletz attempted to manouvere out of King's range. The British crew were better gunners than the Dutch, and the musketry of the French soldiers aboard had little effect on Sirius as the range between the ships was too great for muskets to be effective. As a result, damage and casualties mounted aboard Furie although Sirius was barely touched, only one shot striking the bowsprit and one man wounded. At approximately 17:30, Pletz surrendered, having lost eight dead and 14 wounded and with his ship badly damaged. King transferred the prisoners and placed a prize crew on Furie before returning to his base at the Nore with his prizes.

The capture of the Dutch ships was the end of the final attempt by a continental nation to land troops in Ireland during the French Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars that followed them. Furie and Waakzaamheid were both purchased for the Royal Navy, Furie returned to her pre-war name of Wilhelmina and Waakzaamheid under the same name. The corvette was regraded and the number of guns aboard were reduced to 20 as her frame was not deemed strong enough to carry 24. Richard King remained in Sirius until 1802, and subsequently commanded the ship of the line HMS Achille, participating at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805.

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