In the third week of June 1651, a violent Levante wind pinned two enemies to the same patch of sea. Off Formentera, just south of Ibiza, a French galleon rode out the gale in the lee of the islands. A few miles off, tucked behind a headland, eleven Spanish war galleys sheltered from the same wind — and from the high ground their commander could see the Frenchman plainly. Don Juan of Austria the Younger, viceroy of Sicily and a king's illegitimate son, made his decision: he would wait for the sea to calm, and then he would take that ship.
The galleon was a small piece of a large war. Since 1635 France and Spain had been locked in a grinding conflict, and in Catalonia the two found common cause: Catalan rebels, in revolt against Madrid, had taken France as their ally. To break them, the Spanish crown resolved to retake Barcelona, and it handed the campaign to Don Juan, then viceroy of Sicily. He sailed from Palermo on 28 May with eleven galleys and four transports carrying forty thousand bushels of wheat — six galleys from Naples under Álvaro de Meló, five from Sicily under the Marquis of Bayonne. His course carried him past Trapani, Cagliari and Mallorca before he reached Ibiza.
At Ibiza the Levante caught him, and he put in to wait it out. From the heights the Spaniards spotted their quarry: off Formentera lay a French galleon, the Lion Couronné under Captain La Chesnaye, sheltering from the same wind alongside a captured saetía. Don Juan gathered his galley commanders and settled on a plan. Rather than fight in the gale, he hid all eleven galleys behind a point of the islands and waited for the Frenchman to move. On 17 June the French ships weighed anchor and stood out to sea — and the galleys slipped from their hiding place to close the distance.
La Chesnaye saw them coming and made hard choices fast. He scuttled the saetía, moving its crew across to help defend the galleon, and opened fire as the galleys bore down. The Lion Couronné was a formidable target — high-sided and well-gunned — and its cannon tore into the low galleys on the approach, doing serious damage. Yet the Spaniards pressed on and reached the hull, clinging to its sides and crowding the bow, where the fight for the deck began. For an hour and a half or more the two crews grappled at close quarters. The galleon's height and guns had given the French the early advantage, but the sheer number of Spanish boarders slowly overwhelmed it, and at last the deck was theirs.
The victory was expensive, and the accounts of it are honestly uncertain — French and Spanish sources disagree on the toll, a reminder that the men who died were counted by the very sides that killed them. The French lost somewhere between 103 and 200 killed and a comparable number taken prisoner, dozens of them wounded; among the dead were the galleon's commander and four knights of Malta. The Spanish counted 99 killed and 227 wounded. Several galleys were battered during the approach, and the one commanded by Fernando Carrillo was so nearly wrecked that the whole squadron limped back to Ibiza to make repairs and set its wounded ashore.
Don Juan pressed on to Catalonia in July and took up the position assigned to him. At Mataró he captured a thirty-gun Catalan ship, the Nuestra Señora de la Estrella, sheltering under a shore battery. That same month the siege of Barcelona began. It would grind on until October 1652, when the city fell and the Catalan Revolt collapsed, and Don Juan's growing fleet proved decisive in sealing the port. Among the ships that helped choke Barcelona was the Lion Couronné itself — the prize taken off Formentera, now flying Spanish colours against the very cause it had once come to serve.
The engagement was fought at roughly 38.78°N, 1.38°E, in the open water between Ibiza and Formentera. There is no landmark on the surface, but the setting is unmistakable from the air: the strait of Es Freus, with the low sandy tail of Formentera to the south and the higher green coast of Ibiza to the north and west. Fly the channel at 4,000–6,000 ft in clear air to take in both islands at once. Ibiza Airport (LEIB) lies about 20 km northwest on the southern plain of Ibiza; Alicante-Elche (LEAL) is the nearest mainland field, well to the west across the sea.