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The Macau Incident was an inconclusive encounter between a powerful squadron of French and Spanish warships and a British Royal Navy escort squadron in the Wanshan Archipelago (or Ladrones Archipelago) off Macau on 27 January 1799. The incident took place in the context of the East Indies campaign of the French Revolutionary Wars, the allied squadron attempting to disrupt a valuable British merchant convoy due to sail from Qing Dynasty China. This was the second such attempt in three years; at the Bali Strait Incident of 1797 a French frigate squadron had been driven off during an attack on that year's China convoy. By early 1799 the French squadron had dispersed, with two remaining ships deployed to the Spanish Philippines. There the frigates had united with the Spanish Manila squadron and sailed to attack the British China convoy gathering at Macau. The British commander in the East Indies, Rear-Admiral Peter Rainier was concerned about the vulnerability of the China convoy and sent reinforcements to support the lone Royal Navy escort, the ship of the line HMS ''Intrepid'' under Captain William Hargood. These reinforcements arrived on 21 January, only six days before the allied squadron arrived off Macau. Hargood sailed to meet the French and Spanish ships, and a chase ensued through the Wanshan Archipelago before contact was lost. Both sides subsequently claimed that the other had refused battle, although it was the allied squadron which withdrew, Hargood later successfully escorting the China convoy safely westwards. ==Background== The East Indian trade was an essential component of the economy of Great Britain in the eighteenth century. Administered by the East India Company from British India, exotic trade goods were carried on large well-armed merchant ships known as East Indiamen, which weighed between . Among the most valuable parts of the East India trade was an annual convoy from Macau, a Portuguese port in Qing Dynasty China. Early each year, a large convoy of East Indiamen would assemble at Macau in preparation for their six-month journey across the Indian Ocean and through the Atlantic to Britain. The value of the trade carried in this convoy, nicknamed the "China Fleet", was enormous: one convoy in 1804 was reported to be carrying goods worth over £8 million in contemporary values (the equivalent of £ as of ). British interests in the East Indies were protected by a large but scattered Royal Navy squadron under the overall command of Rear-Admiral Peter Rainier. By 1799, Rainier's command covered many thousands of square miles of ocean, including the strategically important ports of British India, Bombay, Madras and Calcutta and the coast of British Ceylon, as well as bases in the Red Sea, at Penang and in the Dutch East Indies. He also had to maintain a watch on hostile warships, particularly a French force at the remote island base of Île de France (now Mauritius), the Dutch at Batavia (now Djakarta) and the Spanish at Manila. The French had been the greatest threat, with a powerful squadron assembled in 1796 under Contre-amiral Pierre César Charles de Sercey menacing British shipping in the East Indies in 1796 and 1797. On 28 January 1797, Sercey's force intercepted that year's unescorted China Fleet in the Bali Strait, and in the ensuing Bali Strait Incident only quick thinking by the commodore, imitating Royal Navy warships in poor visibility, dissuaded Sercey from pressing his attack. Sercey's force had subsequently broken up as it proved too expensive to maintain as a cohesive force. By late 1798, Sercey was at anchor in Batavia with only two vessels, the 20-gun corvette ''Brûle-Gueule'' and the 40-gun frigate ''Preneuse'', which had arrived in Batavia from a diplomatic mission to the Kingdom of Mysore in a state of near-mutiny; Captain Jean-Matthieu-Adrien Lhermitte had been forced to execute five men for disobedience ''en route''. Sercey also learned that two additional frigates, ''Forte'' and ''Prudente'' would not be joining him: his orders had been countermanded by Governor Malartic on Île de France and these frigates were now cruising independently against British trade in the Indian Ocean. Sercey decided to augment his forces by uniting them with the allied Spanish squadron at Manila in the Spanish Philippines, his frigates arriving on 16 October 1798, although the admiral remained at Surabaya. The Spanish squadron had been severely damaged in a typhoon of April 1797 and repairs had taken nearly two years: when British frigates raided Manila in January 1798 not one Spanish ship was in a condition to oppose them. 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「Macau Incident (1799)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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