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The Action of 3 July 1810 was a minor naval engagement of the Napoleonic Wars, in which a French frigate squadron under Guy-Victor Duperré attacked and defeated a convoy of Honourable East India Company East Indiamen near the Comoros Islands. During the engagement the British convoy resisted strongly and suffered heavy casualties but two ships were eventually forced to surrender. These were the British flagship, the ''Windham'', which held off the French squadron to allow the surviving ship ''Astell'' to escape, and the ''Ceylon''. The engagement was the third successful French attack on an Indian Ocean convoy in just over a year, the French frigates being part of a squadron operating from the Île de France under Commodore Jacques Hamelin. Although a British frigate squadron under Josias Rowley was under orders to eliminate the French raiders, Rowley was distracted by the planned invasion of Île Bonaparte, which began the following week. Combined with limited British resources in the region, this allowed the French frigates significant freedom to attack British interests across the Ocean. The attack on Île Bonaparte was however part of a wider British strategy to seize and capture French raiding bases, and the success of the operation severely limited future French operations as Hamelin's squadron was required for the defence of Île de France. As a result, this was the last successful attack on a British merchant convoy in the Indian Ocean during the Napoleonic Wars. ==Background== Since the beginning of the Napoleonic Wars in 1803, French privateers and naval frigates operating from the fortified island bases of Île de France and Île Bonaparte had attacked British shipping in the Indian Ocean.〔Gardiner, p. 92〕 The huge distances involved, restrictions on supplies and the presence of Royal Navy warships and heavily armed East Indiamen had prevented these relatively weak French ships from attacking the convoys that transported millions of pounds worth of goods from British India and the Far East to the United Kingdom. When one French squadron under Admiral Linois had tried to seize a convoy in 1805, it had been driven off by the aggressive tactics of the merchant captains.〔Adkins, p. 185〕 In late 1808, the French Navy despatched five frigates to the Indian Ocean to rendezvous at Île de France under the command of Commodore Jacques Hamelin. Although only four frigates eventually reached the French island, these were new vessels carrying 40 heavy guns each under orders to attack British shipping in the Bay of Bengal, in particular the large East Indiamen of the Honourable East India Company (HEIC).〔James, p. 192〕 The first frigate to discover a convoys was ''Caroline'', which attacked a Europe-bound convoy in the Action of 31 May 1809. Capturing two East Indiamen carrying over £500,000 worth of silk, ''Caroline'' brought her prizes back to the fortified port of Saint Paul on Île Bonaparte.〔Woodman, p. 283〕 The British commander at the Cape of Good Hope, Albemarle Bertie, had also been planning an operation in the Indian Ocean during 1809 and assembled a squadron under Commodore Josias Rowley with orders to blockade the French islands, probe their defences and capture them if practical.〔 Rowley found that his small squadron was unable to engage the French frigates and that the nearest British military base, Madras in British India, was much too far to be practical for staging amphibious operations. To remedy the latter problem, Rowley seized the small French island of Rodriguez with a force of British and Indian soldiers and garrisoned it as a supply base for his ships and as a military reserve to use in landings on the French islands. The first such operation was the Raid on Saint Paul in September 1809, in which the town of Saint Paul was captured, ''Caroline'' and her prizes seized and Île Bourbon's commander Nicolas Des Bruslys driven to suicide.〔James, p. 197〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Action of 3 July 1810」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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