The Battle of Pulo Aura was fought on 14 February 1804. A large convoy of Honourable East India Company East Indiamen, intimidated, drove off and chased away a powerful French naval squadron. Commodore Nathaniel Dance’s aggressive tactics persuaded Contre-Admiral Charles-Alexandre Durand Linois to retire.
About Battle of Pulo Aura in brief
The Battle of Pulo Aura was fought on 14 February 1804. A large convoy of Honourable East India Company East Indiamen, well-armed merchant ships, intimidated, drove off and chased away a powerful French naval squadron. Commodore Nathaniel Dance’s aggressive tactics persuaded Contre-Admiral Charles-Alexandre Durand Linois to retire after only a brief exchange of shot. Dance then chased the French warships until his convoy was out of danger, whereupon he resumed his passage toward British India. The battle occurred during an extended commerce raiding operation by a French squadron led by Linois in the ship of the line Marengo. Linois had sailed to the Indian Ocean in 1803 before the declaration of war, under orders to install garrisons in the French and Dutch colonies in the region and to prey on lightly defended British merchant shipping. King George III knighted Dance for his courage and various mercantile and patriotic organisations awarded him large sums of money. Both the Emperor Napoleon and Linois’s own officers personally castigated the French admiral for his failure to press the attack against a weaker and extremely valuable enemy. Ironically, Linois was captured at the Action of 13 March 1806 by a numerically superior British battle squadron which he had mistaken for a merchant convoy. He remained in command of the squadron for another two years and had some minor success against undefended merchant ships but he suffered a string of defeats and inconclusive engagements against weaker British naval forces. The East Indian Company operated a fleet of large, well armed merchant vessels known as EastIndiamen.
These ships were of between 500 and 1200 nominal tons burthen and could carry up to 36 guns for defence against pirates, privateers and small warships. Their guns were usually of inferior design, and their crew smaller and less well trained than those on a naval ship. They were not, however, capable under normal circumstances of fighting off an enemy frigate or ship of a line. Despite these disadvantages, the size of Eastindiamen meant that from a distance they appeared quite similar to a small ship of an line, a deception usually augmented by paintwork and dummy cannon. Although no warships protected the convoy, Commodore Dance knew that lookouts could, from adistance, mistake a large Eastindian for a ship of. the line. He raised flags that indicated his fleet included part of the Royal Navy squadron operating at the time and formed into a line of battle. He quickly broke off combat and continued his ruse until the body of the convoy was safe. In February 1799 an attack by a combined French-Spanish squadron on Macau was driven off without combat by the small Royal Navy escort by the HMCS Macau. The HEIC would often join the Far East ports in India and set out in large convoys for Britain, often carrying millions of pounds worth of trade goods. The journey would usually take six months and the ships would return carrying troops and passengers. In the early 1800s, the HEIC also operated its own combination of armed vessels, sometimes independently of the British navy.
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