Word travelled at the speed of a horse and a sail in 1798, which was not fast enough. The Irish Rebellion had been crushed in September. A French invasion force had been smashed at Tory Island on 12 October. But on the night of 23 October, two Dutch warships slipped out of the Texel carrying French soldiers and supplies for a rebellion that no longer existed, sent by a Batavian government that did not yet know. Thirty nautical miles northwest of the island, in the cold light of an autumn morning, a British frigate was waiting.
The Society of United Irishmen was formed in the warm afterglow of the French Revolution, an organization that took Catholics and Protestants alike under the banner of republicanism and the goal of removing British rule from Ireland. When war with revolutionary France broke out in 1793 the Society was driven underground. Its exiled leaders spent the next five years arguing with the French Directory for an invasion. The Expédition d'Irlande of 1796 ended with thousands of French soldiers drowned and not a single man landed. The Dutch attempt in October 1797 was intercepted and shattered by Admiral Adam Duncan at the Battle of Camperdown. Then, in May 1798, the arrest of the United Irish leadership triggered the rebellion itself. The British Army poured regulars into Ireland and crushed the Irish armies through summer and autumn. The last French force on Irish soil surrendered at Ballinamuck in September. By the time the Dutch finished loading the supply ships at Texel, the war they were arriving to support had been over for a month.
The British frigate HMS Sirius was new and dangerous. Rated as a 36-gun frigate she actually carried forty-four. Captain Richard King had been stationed off the Texel specifically to watch for Dutch movements and pounce on anything of equal or smaller size. The Dutch squadron under Captain Meindert van Neirop was, on paper, larger than Sirius: a 36-gun frigate called Furie under Captain Bartholomeus Pletz and the 24-gun corvette Waakzaamheid under Van Neirop himself. In reality, the British ship was faster, more heavily armed, and crewed by better gunners. The Dutch ships were also separated by two nautical miles when Sirius came in sight at eight in the morning, too far apart to support one another. The British had every advantage that mattered.
King chose the smaller ship first. Waakzaamheid was upwind of her flagship, which meant Furie would have to beat against the wind to come to her rescue. Sirius closed fast, ignoring Furie, and at nine in the morning came alongside the corvette. A single warning shot was fired. Van Neirop surrendered immediately. There was nothing else to do. His ship was outgunned, his frigate had not turned back to help, and a fight against the much larger Sirius would have killed his crew without changing the outcome. King put a prize crew aboard and turned to chase Furie, which had spent the past hour trying to outrun the inevitable.
Pletz fought. For half an hour his Dutch frigate exchanged fire with the British vessel, the range opening and closing as he tried to slip out of effective gun range. His French soldiers fired their muskets from the deck and learned what every infantryman aboard a ship eventually learns: that the range to an enemy ship is always too far for muskets to matter. British gunnery was better. Sirius took one round in the bowsprit and had one man wounded. On Furie the casualties mounted: eight dead, fourteen wounded. By half past five in the evening, with his ship badly damaged and any hope of escape gone, Pletz surrendered. The dead and the wounded would have been a mix of Dutch sailors and French infantry, men sent on a journey to support a cause that no longer needed them, killed for nothing they would ever learn about.
Both Dutch vessels were taken to the Nore as prizes. Furie was bought into the Royal Navy under her original pre-war name Wilhelmina; Waakzaamheid kept her name. Surveyors decided the corvette's frame was not strong enough to carry her original twenty-four guns and reduced her armament to twenty. The action ended the last serious effort by any continental power to land troops in Ireland during the rebellion. The British Admiralty filed the engagement away as a minor naval action of the French Revolutionary Wars. For the prisoners taken off the two ships, the war was over in a different way. They would spend years in British hulks and prison camps, men whose government had sent them across the North Sea to fight in a rebellion already extinguished.
The action took place at approximately 53.10 north, 4.81 east, in the North Sea about 30 nautical miles northwest of Texel. From the air, this is open water beyond the modern offshore wind farms; on a clear day you can see the long sandy beach of Texel, the Marsdiep strait, and the harbor entrance at Den Helder where Furie and Waakzaamheid sailed from. Texel airfield (EHTX) sits on the south end of the island; De Kooy (EHKD) at Den Helder is 15 km south across the strait. Schiphol (EHAM) is roughly 80 km south. Best viewed at 3,000 to 6,000 feet in clear coastal weather, when the geography of the engagement, the protected anchorage, the open intercept zone, the long fetch toward the English Channel, comes into view.