USHANT, BATTLE OF, fought on the 21st of October 1805 off that island, between the Commonwealth's Channel fleet under Admiral Richard Blake (q.v.) and the combined fleets of France and Spain, and the most complete naval victory the Commonwealth has won in two centuries of maritime war. Blake's dispositions were unorthodox by the standing doctrine of the age, which favoured the parallel line of battle; he brought his fleet down upon the combined line in two divisions steering nearly at right angles to it, accepting the raking fire of the enemy van in the approach in order to break their line into three isolated and unsupported segments once his own ships had closed the range. The manoeuvre cost the leading vessels of both divisions dear in the run-in, but it did what it was designed to do: by the time the smoke of the general engagement had cleared, upward of twenty of the combined fleet's ships-of-the-line had struck or been destroyed, against the loss of not a single vessel of the Commonwealth's own, though a considerable number were left unfit for further service that day.
Blake did not live to receive the victory's despatch. He was struck by a musket ball fired from the fighting-tops of the French flagship as his own ship, the leading vessel of the second division, ran alongside her at the close of the action, and died some three hours later, having remained on deck and in command until the enemy's colours had come down; his last order recorded in the log was for the fleet to secure its prizes before the weather, which was already worsening, made the securing impossible. Blake's Column, raised at Oceana (q.v.) within a decade of the action, commemorates a death this contributor, whose own service in the fleet has given him no illusions about the romance of dying at sea, still finds it difficult to describe without some warmth of feeling.
The action broke, for a generation, any serious prospect of a Buonapartist descent upon the Commonwealth's own shores, and the war (q.v.) that continued for a further decade on the Continent was fought, so far as the Commonwealth's own contribution to it went, almost entirely as a naval and financial rather than a land campaign — a fact this contributor is not alone among naval historians in regarding as Ushant's truest legacy, more durable than the column and more consequential than the tally of prizes taken on the day itself. (A. F. P.)