it’s time for another naval history thread, friends
today we are talking about this guy, Charles-Alexandre Léon Durand Linois, or just the Comte de Linois if you’re nasty 
in 1803 Napoleon puts Linois in charge of the French Navy in the Indian Ocean - his job is to take the huge warship Marengo and a powerful squadron and just generally make like difficult for the British
put garrisons ashore in inconvenient places, but most of all try and destroy or capture the British merchant ships going between India and Britain
(Marengo is the big ship of the line on the left, for an idea of size. 74 cannon, maybe 700 men)
so Linois sails to Batavia and shakes down the Dutch for information, who tell him, oh hey there’s a whole convoy of East India Company ships you could attack easily if you wanted
On the way to Batavia he has generally been very successful at making a nuisance of himself, burning a British trade post, sinking ships, reinforcing the French possession of Réunion, etc. All going well, and now he has a tip-off
This convoy is the middle leg of the journey from China to Britain and it gets bigger as it goes because it accumulates ships going in the same direction. It’s carrying tea, silk, porcelain, a special climate-controlled room of rare plants ordered for the royal gardens, etc
The one thing it doesn’t have is any escort from the Royal Navy, because British people of the early 19th century were all constantly drunk on gin or port and never got around to telling anyone in India that the Napoleonic wars were on
Again, the cargo alone is worth EIGHT MILLION POUNDS. IN 1804 MONEY
the merchant ships have to be big to carry all this, and they’re pretty well armed because of pirates, but they’re absolutely no match for Linois
their secret weapon is this old dude, Nathaniel Dance, who has worked for the company for like 30 years and is nearing retirement and is also wily af
so Linois rolls up on the convoy, and Dance just kind of bluffs him. He gets the handful of largest merchant ships into a battle line, raises Royal Navy flags, and just kind of hopes the French don’t look too closely and ruin their day
And it works! There is a brief exchange of shot, and then these overladen merchantmen filled with rare plants and the like scare them off
But this isn’t the good bit
Dance doesn’t know how to stop acting. So he and his incredibly valuable cargo chase Linois for another *two hours* until it starts getting dark and he rejoins the convoy
Convoy makes it safely to England, Dance gets knighted and feted and such, Linois writes his report, in which he says ‘wait what, there were eight English ships of the line there’ and is thoroughly disgraced
but there’s one more thing
They don’t actually fire Linois, he’s still an admiral, so they kind of give him the less important jobs for a while
So the really funny epilogue is that in 1806 he runs into another apparently well-protected British convoy and thinks: fool me once. And orders an attack
You already know what happens: this time it isn’t a bluff, and he gets shot, and then captured, and for some reason Napoleon declines to ransom this fucking guy
And that’s the story of how a French admiral was wrong about everything
