Battle of Groix
The Battle of Groix took place on 23 June 1795 off the island of Groix in the Bay of Biscay during the War of the First Coalition. It was fought between elements of the British Channel Fleet and the French Atlantic Fleet, which were cruising in the region on separate missions. The British fleet, commanded by Admiral Lord Bridport, was covering an invasion convoy carrying a French Royalist army tasked with invading Quiberon, while the French fleet under Vice-admiral Villaret de Joyeuse had sailed a week earlier to rescue a convoy from being attacked by a British squadron. The French fleet had driven off the British squadron in a battle on 17 June known as Cornwallis's Retreat, and were attempting to return to their base at Brest when Bridport's force of 14 ships of the line appeared on 22 June.
Villaret, believing that the stronger British fleet would destroy his own 12 ships of the line, ordered his force to fall back to the inshore anchorage off Groix, hoping to take shelter in protected coastal waters. Several of his ships were too slow, falling behind so that early in the morning of 23 June the rearmost ships of his fleet were caught by the British vanguard, overhauled one by one and brought to battle. Although Villaret fought a determined rearguard action, three French ships were captured, all with very heavy casualties, and the remainder of the French fleet was left scattered along the coastline. In this position they were highly vulnerable to continued British attack, but after only a few hours' engagement, concerned that his ships might be wrecked on the rocky coastline, Bridport called off the action and allowed Villaret to regroup inshore and retreat to Lorient.
Although the battle was a British victory, there was criticism of Bridport's rapid withdrawal. British historians have subsequently considered that a unique opportunity to destroy the French Atlantic fleet had been lost. The invasion at Quiberon ended in disaster a month later, although Bridport remained at sea in the region until September. The French fleet by contrast was trapped in the port of Lorient where food supplies ran out, forcing Villaret to discharge many of his ships' crews. As a result, most ships did not return to Brest until the winter and were consequently unable to threaten British control of the French coastline for the remainder of the year. Several French captains were court-martialled following the battle, with two dismissed for ignoring orders.
Background
The first two years of the French Revolutionary Wars had seen the French Atlantic Fleet, based principally at the Breton harbour of Brest, suffer a series of setbacks. The tense atmosphere in France following the French Revolution was reflected in the fleet, which suffered a mutiny in September 1793 followed by a purge of suspected anti-republicans which resulted in the death or imprisonment of a number of experienced commanders. In May 1794, the French fleet sallied into the Atlantic to protect an incoming grain convoy from the United States and was attacked by the British Channel Fleet at the battle of the Glorious First of June, losing seven ships, although the convoy was saved. In the winter of 1794–1795, five more French ships were lost in a disastrous sortie in the middle of the Atlantic winter storm season known as the Croisière du Grand Hiver. By the spring of 1795, the British Channel Fleet was in the ascendancy, enforcing a distant blockade of the French fleet in Brest.In May 1795, with much of the winter's damage repaired, the French commander Vice-amiral Villaret de Joyeuse sent a squadron of three ships of the line and several frigates under Contre-amiral Jean Gaspard Vence to Bordeaux with orders to escort a convoy of merchant ships carrying wine and brandy to Brest. On 8 June, as Vence's convoy passed the fortified island of Belle Île on the southern Breton coast they were discovered by a British battle squadron of five ships of the line and two frigates under Vice-admiral William Cornwallis. Vence ordered his outnumbered ships to shelter under the batteries of Belle Île, and after a brief skirmish Cornwallis withdrew his forces with eight captured merchant ships. While Cornwallis was escorting his prizes to the mouth of the Channel, Vence sailed out of the Belle Île anchorage and discovered on 15 June that the main force of the Atlantic fleet had sailed to rescue him, a mission ordered by government over the objections of the fleet's officers that Vence would be able to easily extricate himself from the anchorage due to the proximity of the port of Lorient.
On the morning of 16 June Cornwallis returned to the region, hunting for Vence, and instead discovered Villaret de Joyeuse with an overwhelming force. This time Cornwallis was forced to retreat, heading into open water with the French fleet in pursuit. Cornwallis was hampered by the poor sailing of two of his squadron, and on the morning of 17 June the leading French ships were close enough to open fire on his rearguard. Throughout the day the French vanguard kept up a distant but continual fire on the rearmost British ship HMS Mars, until eventually the ship began to fall behind. In an effort to protect Mars, Cornwallis interposed his 100-gun flagship HMS Royal Sovereign between the British squadron and the French force, its massive broadsides driving the French back. At the same time, Cornwallis had ordered the frigate HMS Phaeton to range ahead of his squadron making false signals announcing the imminent arrival of a British fleet. These signals, in combination with the coincidental appearance of unidentified sails to the north, caused Villaret to become so concerned that at 18:40 he called off pursuit and returned to the French coast, allowing Cornwallis to return to Britain without further incident. The engagement was subsequently known as Cornwallis's Retreat.
Unbeknownst to either Villaret or Cornwallis, the British Channel Fleet was also at sea, having sailed from Spithead on 12 June with 14 ships of the line and 11 smaller vessels under the command of Admiral Alexander Hood, 1st Viscount Bridport. Bridport had been tasked with ensuring the safety of a convoy of transports, commanded by Commodore Sir John Borlase Warren, which carried a French Royalist army to Quiberon with the intention of triggering a counter-revolution in Brittany. This force consisted of an additional three ships of the line, six frigates and more than 50 transports containing 2,500 French Royalists. The voyage across the English Channel and around the Ushant headland took seven days, the combined fleet and expeditionary force arriving off Belle Île on 19 June. Bridport had ordered Warren to take his convoy on to Quiberon while the main body of the Channel Fleet stood further out to sea to intercept any attack by the French Atlantic Fleet, which Bridport assumed would advance southwards from Brest. What the British admiral did not know was that not only had the French fleet sailed a week earlier, they were still at sea – Villaret's ships having been blown southwards by a severe gale on 18 June and forced to take shelter in the anchorage off Belle Île.
Engagement off Groix
Villaret's retreat
It was one of Warren's ships, the frigate HMS Arethusa, which first discovered the French as Villaret led his fleet out from the sheltered anchorage. Lookouts on Arethusa miscounted the French fleet, identifying 16 ships of the line and ten frigates; Warren immediately sent word to Bridport while ordering his convoy to turn away from the French. Villaret did not pursue Warren's force: he may not have gauged its true strength correctly, and his ships were running low on provisions having taken aboard only enough for 15 days in their haste to leave Brest a week earlier. On the morning of 20 June, Warren's force sighted Bridport's fleet to the south-east, the admiral sending orders to Warren to detach his three ships of the line to bolster Bridport's fleet in the face of the supposedly more numerous French force. Without waiting for these reinforcements, Bridport sailed back towards the coast against the wind, seeking to place his fleet between the Quiberon expedition and Villaret's ships.The adverse southeasterly winds frustrated both fleets, and it was not until 03:30 on 22 June that lookouts on Bridport's scouting frigates HMS Nymphe and HMS Astrea finally discovered the French in the distance to the southeast, the British approximately from the French coast. On seeing the larger British fleet, to which Warren's detached ships had still not joined, Villaret ordered his fleet to turn back towards the land and Bridport followed, seeing that the French admiral did not intend to offer battle. To maximise his chances of catching the French, Bridport specifically ordered his "best-sailing" ships HMS Sans Pareil, HMS Orion, HMS Colossus, HMS Irresistible, HMS Valiant and HMS Russell, to break from the formation and lead the pursuit at 06:30. Bridport followed in his 100-gun first rate flagship HMS Royal George, accompanied by the remainder of the fleet, which included another 100-gun ship HMS Queen Charlotte and seven 98-gun second rate ships.
All day the chase continued: at 12:00 the French fleet were approximately distant, and all through the afternoon the British ships slowly gained on their opponents, both sides hampered by long periods of calm weather. To ensure that his fleet was in a position to intercept the French whichever tack they took, Bridport split his fleet across a wide front, clustered in two trailing groups. At 19:00, Bridport signaled for his ships to attack the rearmost French vessels, and at 19:25 to attack French ships as and when they overhauled them, taking up mutually supportive positions. At 22:30 a calm fell, arresting both fleets until 03:00 on 23 June, when a light breeze from the south-west was enough to allow Bridport's fleet to push onwards so that as dawn rose the French were dead ahead. The main body of the French fleet was sailing in a loose cluster with three or four ships trailing behind and one ship, Alexandre under Captain François Charles Guillemet far to the rear and only from the British vanguard. Alexandre had been a British ship until November 1794, when she had been captured in a sharp engagement with a French squadron in which the ship had been badly damaged. The ship was a poor sailer, and its position was worsened by poor handling by Guillemet who did not follow Villaret's orders to form a line of battle rapidly enough.
Against expectation, Bridport's leading ship was Queen Charlotte, which had attained an unusually fast speed for a first rate through the carefully planned sailing of Captain Sir Andrew Snape Douglas. Immediately behind Douglas was Captain Richard Grindall in Irresistible, with Orion, Colossus, Sans Pareil and Russell a short distance behind the leaders and the rest of the fleet substantially to the rear. At 04:00, the island of Groix lay approximately to the east of Queen Charlotte, the French coastline behind it. It was to this region that Villaret was retreating, hoping Bridport would be reluctant to follow him into the confined waters around the well-fortified island, which lies on the entrance to the port of Lorient. The southern Breton coast was a notoriously dangerous region, where Atlantic gales could push ships towards poorly charted reefs and rocky outcrops.