Battle of Málaga, 1704: the great sea fight after Gibraltar

By ten o'clock on the morning of 24 August 1704 more than a hundred ships of the line lay in two long rows on the sea south of the Spanish coast, barely a musket shot apart. When the guns opened, they would not fall silent until nightfall. It was the only fleet battle of the whole War of the Spanish Succession, and it was fought over a rock that one side had just seized and the other had come to take back.²

Background: a war for the Spanish crown

When Charles II of Spain died without children in November 1700, his will left the throne to Philip of Bourbon, Duke of Anjou, a grandson of Louis XIV. Fear of a union of France and Spain drove much of Europe to back the Habsburg Archduke Charles instead. By 1704 two kings claimed the same crown: Philip V in Madrid and Charles, supported by England and the Dutch Republic.³

In the summer of 1704 the allied fleet under Admiral Sir George Rooke was cruising off southern Spain without a clear task. Rooke decided to attack Gibraltar, which was weakly garrisoned and would give the allies a port inside the Strait. The fortress was bombarded and then stormed by landing parties in boats, and it surrendered on 4 August 1704 in the Western calendar, 24 July in the Old Style calendar still used in England.⁴

Clowes, the Victorian historian of the Royal Navy, notes that the Spanish garrison was tiny, about eighty men by the best accounts, against a fortress of immense natural strength. The Bourbon king of Spain at once resolved to retake the place, and called on the French fleet at Toulon to help.⁵ › Battle of Blenheim, 1704

Fleets and commanders

Rooke commanded a combined English and Dutch fleet. Sir Cloudesley Shovell led the van, Rooke himself the center, and the Dutch, about twelve ships under Lieutenant Admiral Gerard Callenburgh, formed the rear.⁶

The French fleet was led by Louis-Alexandre de Bourbon, Count of Toulouse, a natural son of Louis XIV, with Villette-Mursay commanding his van. Toulouse flew his flag in the Foudroyant, of 104 guns.⁷

How big the fleets were depends on who is counting. The Royal Museums Greenwich and Clowes give each side 51 ships of the line, with Clowes counting 3,636 allied guns against 3,596 French. The Municipal Archive of Málaga counts 53 allied ships of the line against 51 French. Mahan wrote that the French had 52 and the allies probably half a dozen more.⁸

What the French had in plenty was galleys, oared warships that could tow sailing ships in a calm. The Málaga archive counts 12 French and 7 Spanish galleys, the French naval historian Troude 24, and Clowes 22. Clowes adds that, for all their numbers, they seem to have been little used.⁹

The battle, phase one: the search

After taking Gibraltar the allied fleet crossed to the African coast near Ceuta to water. When word came that the French were at sea, Rooke turned back to cover Gibraltar. The French had put into Málaga, to water according to Troude and to pick up their galleys according to Clowes, and for several days the two fleets groped for each other along the coast.¹⁰

The fleets came in sight of each other a day or two before the battle; Troude and Clowes differ on the day. By the morning of 24 August the French had formed their line, heading south, and lay waiting about nine miles to leeward of the allies, who held the wind.¹¹

Phase two: the lines close

The allied ships bore down together, each toward its opposite number. Mahan saw no tactical plan in it at all: the two lines simply met front to front. Rooke wrote in his journal that he began the battle at about half past ten, at little more than musket shot. Troude puts the first shots at ten.¹²

As the lines closed, the French van crowded on sail to get ahead of the allied van. Shovell's efforts to stop it opened a gap between his squadron and Rooke's center, and the French tried to force their way into it and cut the van off. It was the only real tactical move of the day, Mahan wrote, and it failed.¹³

The two sides remember the fight in the van differently. Clowes credits the heavy fire of Shovell's squadron with foiling the French attempt. Troude writes that Shovell's flagship was forced out of the fight by the Intrépide of Captain Ducasse.¹⁴

Phase three: the battle of the centers

In the center the flagships fought at close range. Rooke's Royal Katherine, of 90 guns, engaged Toulouse's Foudroyant. On the French side the Bailli de Lorraine, commanding a squadron, was killed.¹⁵

The allies began to run short of shot. Many of their ships had fired away most of their ammunition at Gibraltar, and several were forced out of the line with empty magazines, some towed away. Rooke recorded that this left the weight of the French center falling on his own ship and her neighbors. He still called it "the sharpest day's service that ever I saw".¹⁶

The firing died away in the van in the late afternoon and in the center at about seven in the evening, Troude writes; Rooke's journal also gives seven, Mahan five. The Málaga archive speaks of eleven hours of battle.¹⁷

Turning point: the morning after

The decision came not in the fighting but on the following day. On 25 August the wind shifted and gave the French the weather gauge, the chance to attack on their own terms. They did not use it. Mahan believed that nearly half the allied fleet, twenty-five ships it was said, had no ammunition left, and that Rooke could not have fought.¹⁸

For two days the fleets watched each other, Troude writes, and the French never renewed the fight. Rooke's own journal shows him sharing out his last shot, waiting for them, and then losing sight of them.¹⁹

Aftermath

Losses were heavy on both sides. The Málaga archive puts the French loss at 1,500 men and the Anglo-Dutch loss at 2,719 killed and wounded. Clowes counts about 1,500 French and Spanish killed and as many again wounded. Among the French dead were the Bailli de Lorraine and the squadron commander Belle-Isle, and the squadron commander Relingue was mortally wounded.²⁰

No ship was taken on either side, and the allies lost none in the battle. Clowes believed the French lost one ship of the line and two galleys during the action, but the Greenwich museum and the Málaga archive both say that neither side lost a ship. Three days after the battle the Dutch ship Albemarle, which Callenburgh had left when she was too badly damaged to carry his flag, blew up from her own powder; only nine or ten of her crew survived.²¹

Both sides claimed the victory. The French returned to Toulon and proclaimed a victory, and so did the allies. The allied fleet went into Gibraltar to refit and left the garrison all the men, food and ammunition it could spare.²²

That decided the fate of the Rock. Toulouse took the main fleet back to Toulon and sent only a squadron to support the Spanish siege of Gibraltar that followed. The attack was pressed half-heartedly, the supporting French squadron was destroyed by an English relief force, and the siege turned into a blockade.²³ › Battle of Almansa, 1707

Legacy and memory

The Royal Museums Greenwich calls Málaga the only fleet action fought at sea in the whole war, and it was the last time Louis XIV's grand fleet risked a general battle. Clowes notes that the French never again did so before the war ended, and Mahan quotes an English writer of the time who saw the end of the French navy's great fleets in this battle.²⁴

Naval historians have been harsh about the fighting itself. Mahan, writing in 1890, saw in it no tactical skill on either side, only two lines firing into each other until dark, and called it the first battle of a "wholly unscientific method of attack" that the English would use for the rest of the century. The Málaga archive takes the opposite view of the same facts and calls it a textbook example of the classic line battle of the eighteenth century.²⁵

The strategic result outlasted the war. When peace was made at Utrecht, Britain recognized Philip V as king of Spain and kept Gibraltar. Gibraltar has remained British ever since.²⁶

The battle lives on mostly in pictures. Isaac Sailmaker's painting at the top of this page shows the Foudroyant and the Royal Katherine at close quarters, with French galleys towing ships in and out of the fighting; it belongs to the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, and the Municipal Archive of Málaga keeps a colored Augsburg engraving of the battle made the same year.²⁷ › The 15 Greatest Naval Battles in History