![]() ![]() There are other smart reasons the battle didn't happen. “But for this timely ceasefire there might have been an epochal fight between a land army and a fleet,” he writes. But then around midnight, news arrived that the revolutionaries had taken over the government and wanted to pause the fighting. “Seeing their campfires, Captain Reyntjes, oldest and most senior officer in the Dutch fleet and in temporary command of it, prepared to spike all guns and scuttle the ships,” Blackmore writes. De Winter sent out infantry, calvary and horse-artillery the troops arrived on January 22 and camped out for the night. News of the stuck ships reached French general Jean-Charles Pichegru, who told Johan Williem de Winter, a Dutch admiral who worked for the French, to deal with it. At the time, the French were fighting against the Dutch Republic as well as alongside revolutionaries within the Netherlands who supported the ideas of the French Revolution. The winter of 1794-1795 was extremely cold in Holland, and when a storm rolled in, a Dutch fleet anchored in the strait of Marsdiep tried to shelter by Texel Island until the storm blew over, but then found themselves iced in, writes author David Blackmore. It happened on this day in 1795, though it wasn't exactly a battle. The Battle of Texel remains the only instance in history where a cavalry troop - horse-riding soldiers - captured a fleet of ships. ![]() The French Revolutionary Wars lasted a decade, but their strangest moment may have lasted just a few days.
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