The campaign that ended at Griessie began with a merchant convoy and a French miscalculation. In 1804, a powerful French squadron operating from Batavia attacked British traders near the Straits of Malacca in the Battle of Pulo Aura. The attack failed, but it proved that warships based in Java could threaten the critical trade route between Britain and China. Rear-Admiral Pellew, commanding Royal Navy forces across the Indian Ocean, resolved to eliminate the threat entirely. He dispatched frigates to reconnoitre Dutch harbours throughout the East Indies beginning in mid-1806. The Dutch squadron under Vice-Admiral Pieter Hartsinck was modest -- three 68-gun ships of the line, three frigates, and several smaller vessels -- but even obsolete warships could prey on unescorted merchantmen. Pellew's frigates began picking them off. At the action of 26 July 1806, a Dutch convoy off Celebes lost the frigate Pallas. Three months later, the frigate Maria Riggersbergen was seized inside Batavia harbour itself.

Emboldened by these captures, Pellew launched a major raid on Batavia harbour on 27 November 1806. His squadron sailed directly into the bay. The surviving Dutch ships were driven ashore to avoid capture, and boarding parties under Pellew's son, Captain Fleetwood Pellew, set the wrecks ablaze. But the three ships of the line -- Kortenaer, Pluto, and Revolutie -- had escaped. Hartsinck had ordered them eastward before the attack, and Cowell took them 570 miles along the Javan coast to the protected anchorage at Griessie. Pellew could not pursue immediately. His ships were scattered across the Indian Ocean on separate operations, some as far west as the Red Sea. It took months to reassemble a striking force, during which time Pellew's son Fleetwood and Captain Peter Rainier scouted Javan waters in their frigates, locating the Dutch ships and raiding merchant shipping at Semarang.

Pellew sailed from Malacca on 20 November 1807 with a mixed force: his flagship, a ship of the line under Fleetwood, frigates, sloops, and an East Indiaman carrying 500 soldiers of the 30th Regiment of Foot. After fifteen days coasting along Java, they reached Griessie on 5 December. When Cowell arrested the truce party, Pellew prepared for battle, ordering his larger vessels lightened to navigate the shallow straits. He exchanged fire with a Dutch gun battery on Madura Island. But the governor in Surabaya overruled Cowell, released the prisoners, and agreed to formal surrender terms on 7 December. The terms covered the Revolutie, Pluto, Kortenaer, and the Dutch East Indiaman Rustloff. When British boats finally entered the harbour, they found every ship scuttled, their hulks protruding from the shallows. Cowell had given the order even as surrender was being negotiated. Pellew could only burn what remained.

British landing parties went through Griessie systematically, burning military stores and demolishing the gun battery on Madura. Casualties on both sides were minimal -- the campaign's final act was fought with torches and crowbars rather than broadsides. But the strategic consequence was absolute. With the destruction of Cowell's scuttled squadron, no Dutch warship remained operational anywhere east of Africa. Pellew's Java campaign, conducted across two years with a dispersed force thousands of miles from home, had achieved its objective without a single fleet engagement. British forces returned to the East Indies in 1810, and an expeditionary force invaded and captured Java in 1811. The colony was returned to the Netherlands only after Napoleon's final defeat at Waterloo in 1815, under the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1814. By then, Pellew had moved on to the Mediterranean. The Indian Ocean was a British lake.