The battle was the culmination of months of maneuvering across the Lesser Antilles. France had entered the American War of Independence as an American ally in 1778, and Admiral Estaing arrived in the West Indies that December with twelve ships of the line. The British countered with reinforcements of their own, including Byron's squadron of ten warships in January 1779. For months, the two fleets circled each other like prizefighters, the British watching from St. Lucia while the French operated from Martinique. When Byron left St. Lucia in June to escort a merchant convoy to St. Kitts, Estaing seized the opening. Saint Vincent fell on 18 June. Grenada was next, its main defenses stormed on the night of 3 July. By the time Byron changed course to intercept, the island was already in French hands.

What Byron could not know, approaching Grenada from the northeast on the morning of 6 July, was that Estaing had been reinforced by a European squadron under Picquet de la Motte. The French ships sat clustered at anchor, their true numbers hidden by the overlapping masts and rigging. Byron counted what he could see, liked the odds, and signaled a general chase - the most aggressive order an admiral could give, authorizing each captain to engage at will rather than forming a disciplined battle line. It was a gamble that assumed superiority. When the French ships began filing out of the anchorage and Byron finally grasped the scale of what he faced, he tried to reform his line. Too late. His fleet was already scattered, individual ships converging on a force that outnumbered them, the disorder of the chase now a tactical disaster.

The peculiar outcome of the Battle of Grenada is that no ships were lost on either side, despite ferocious fighting. The British suffered 183 killed and 346 wounded; the French lost 190 killed and 759 wounded. Several British ships were badly mauled in the disorganized attack - HMS Lion was so damaged she had to run downwind all the way to Jamaica to avoid capture. Yet Estaing, holding the superior position, chose not to pursue. He hauled off and returned to Grenada to repair his own vessels while Byron limped to St. Kitts. It was a French victory by every measure, but an incomplete one. Estaing had the strength to dominate the Caribbean that summer and chose not to use it.

Byron sailed home to England in August 1779, his reputation diminished but his career not destroyed - the gentlemanly conventions of Georgian naval warfare allowed for honorable misjudgment. Estaing fared worse despite winning. He sailed north to cooperate with the Americans in an unsuccessful siege of Savannah that September, then returned to France. His victory at Grenada made him immensely popular - the playwright Pierre-Germain Parisau staged a theatrical reenactment that John Paul Jones himself attended in Paris - but the admiral's failure to exploit his advantage haunted strategic assessments for years. Under the 1783 Treaty of Paris, France returned Grenada to British control, rendering the entire bloody exchange a temporary rearrangement. The waters off St. George's harbor, where the fleets clashed, returned to the business of trade and fishing, the cannonball scars long since dissolved into Caribbean blue.