"A Ruse to Escape Annihilation: 1795 " Topic

"The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars saw very large numbers of battles at sea between small numbers of ships, but few in which entire squadrons engaged and yet fewer fleet actions on the scale of the Nile, Camperdown or Trafalgar. On one occasion however a medium-sized Royal Navy squadron escaped from a confrontation which, due to the disparity of forces, could have ended in annihilation. That it did not reflected the cool head and tactical mastery of the British commander, Admiral Lord William Cornwallis (1744 – 1819).

Cornwallis had come to prominence in 1782, in the four-day Battle of the Saintes, as captain of the "74" ship-of-the-line Canada. He had already engaged, and defeated, a similarly sized French ship, the Hector, when he saw the opportunity to close with the enemy flagship, the massive 104-gun Ville de Paris. Despite the disparity in size, Cornwallis continued his attack for two hours and though the larger vessel's position proved to be hopeless, the French Admiral de Grasse (1723 –1788) saw it as a point of honour not to strike his flag to anybody but an enemy admiral. He only surrendered when Admiral Sir Samuel Hood (1724-1816) came up in the Barfleur, by which stage only de Grasse himself and two other men were alive and unwounded on the upper deck. He stated after the battle that Cornwallis's Canada had done him more harm than all the rest of the Royal Navy force together…"
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