A French commodore named Jacques-Mélanie Rondeau had sworn an oath: he would never strike his colors, never lower his flag in surrender. On 17 June 1794, with a British ship of war bearing down on his frigate in the harbor of Mykonos, that oath stopped being a point of honor and became a death sentence for dozens of his men. This was a minor engagement in the sprawling French Revolutionary Wars, a footnote in the careers of the admirals who never even heard of it. But for a little over an hour, in a sheltered Aegean bay, it was the only war in the world.
The road to that morning began at Toulon. In late 1793 the Royal Navy had seized France's great southern naval base, only to lose it again to the armies of the Republic, who recaptured the city and watched much of their own fleet burn. Some French frigates had been at sea during the siege and escaped to prey on enemy commerce. One such ship, the 40-gun Sibylle, was carrying merchant vessels through the Aegean toward Smyrna. So was a British force, built around the 50-gun HMS Romney under Captain William Paget. On 16 June, off Kimolos, word reached Paget that a French frigate lurked among the islands. The next day, passing through the straits between Tinos and Mykonos, his lookouts saw her: a large warship at anchor in Mykonos harbor.
Paget did not open fire first. He sent a junior officer across the water in a ship's boat with a request, not a threat, asking Rondeau to surrender and spare the bloodshed that a fight with the larger Romney would surely bring. Rondeau sent back his answer. He knew exactly how big his opponent was, and he was not afraid; he had sworn never to strike his colors and he intended to keep his word. He had reason for confidence. Word had reached him that Romney was short-handed, carrying only 266 men of the 341 she should have had, while Sibylle was fully crewed with 380. To ensure the town behind him stayed out of his firing arc, Paget maneuvered carefully into position. Then both captains waited for the first gun.
When the firing began it did not stop for an hour and ten minutes. The two ships lay anchored and immobile, unable to maneuver, unable to dodge, simply pouring iron into each other at close range. On paper Romney carried ten more guns, but the match was closer than that suggests; the heavier weight of her two gun-decks proved the decisive edge. Sibylle absorbed terrible punishment. As casualties climbed and some of his men slipped from their stations and swam for shore, Rondeau finally understood that defeat was certain. Despite his oath, he surrendered to stop the killing. The cost was brutal and lopsided: aboard Sibylle, two officers and fifty-three sailors dead, with 103 wounded. Romney lost ten men. Behind those numbers were ordinary sailors who died at anchor in a foreign harbor, unable to run, unable to fight back against a ship they could not move away from.
The Sibylle did not vanish into the wreckage of a lost cause. The British purchased her into their own navy as HMS Sybille, and one historian called her one of the finest frigates in the fleet. In 1799, under Captain Edward Cooke, she fought a celebrated action in the Indian Ocean against the French frigate Forte. By the battle's end Forte was captured and Cooke mortally wounded. As for the duel in Mykonos harbor, more than fifty years passed before Britain formally honored it, attaching the clasp ROMNEY 17 JUNE 1794 to the Naval General Service Medal, awarded in 1847 to the few surviving participants who lived to apply. By then the men who had crowded those gun-decks were old, and the harbor where they had fought had long since gone quiet.
The battle was fought in the harbor of Mykonos town, at roughly 37.45°N, 25.32°E, in the straits among the Cyclades near Tinos and Delos. From the air, Mykonos is a low, treeless island crowded with white buildings and famous for its waterfront windmills; the old harbor sits on the sheltered western side of town. Mykonos Airport (LGMK) lies just south; Tinos is the large island immediately to the north, with Naxos (LGNX) and Santorini (LGSR) within short reach to the south.