Battle of Quiberon Bay
A British fleet chased a French one into a rocky bay in a November gale in 1759 and destroyed it. The French had spent the year preparing an invasion of Britain: flat-bottomed boats at Le Havre, 20,000 troops in the Morbihan, and a plan requiring the Brest fleet to escort them across. Hawke had blockaded Brest for six months, which is itself the more remarkable achievement — a fleet kept on station off a lee shore through a summer and autumn, supplied with fresh food and water at sea, with a rotation of ships and a systematic attack on scurvy. A gale in November blew him off station and Conflans got out with twenty-one ships of the line. Hawke came back, found the French, and chased them south-east. Conflans ran for Quiberon Bay, a stretch of water full of shoals and reefs that he knew and the British did not, in a rising gale and a falling light, on the reasonable assumption that no admiral would follow him in. Hawke told his master that he was to lay him alongside the French admiral and that he would take responsibility for the navigation. Six French ships were destroyed or taken, several more were wrecked or driven aground, and two British ships hit rocks. The invasion was abandoned, the French navy did not put to sea in force again for the rest of the war, and the colonies were left unsupported. The blockade that produced it is the more important achievement and the harder to dramatise. Hawke's fleet stayed at sea for six months on a hostile coast in all weathers, which no navy had managed before, and the practice became standard for the next sixty years.
- Year: 1759 CE
- Category: Military
