Pescadores Campaign (1885) - French and Chinese Forces

French and Chinese Forces

Courbet's flotilla consisted of the ironclads Bayard and Triomphante, the cruisers d'Estaing and Duchaffaut, the gunboat Vipère and the troopship Annamite. His landing force consisted of an understrength battalion of marine infantry (400 men as opposed to the usual complement of 600 men) under the command of chef de bataillon Lange and a marine artillery section of two 80-millimetre mountain guns (Lieutenant Lubert).

The Chinese garrison of the Pescadores, which had been substantially reinforced at the beginning of 1885, was commanded by the generals Chou Shan-ch'u (周善初) and Cheng Ying-chieh (鄭膺杰), and numbered around 2,400 men. A number of foreign officers served with the Chinese garrison, including an American officer named Nelson, responsible for the defence of one of the Makung forts, whose diary of events was later recovered by the French. Initially optimistic, by March 1885 Nelson had despaired of training up the Chinese gunners to the standard necessary to meet the French in battle.

The fortifications of the Pescadores were designed primarily to protect Makung and deny entrance to Makung Bay, and also if possible to cover the southern entrance to P'eng-hu Bay, which would have to be traversed first by an attacking squadron. The most formidable obstacles were the two Makung forts, placed on either side of the entrance to Makung Bay. The Northern Fort, just to the southwest of Makung, deployed three Armstrong cannons, and was flanked by a number of subsidiary positions in which the Chinese had deployed a dozen rifled French Voruz cannon of various calibres. The Southern Fort, or Dutch Fort (it had been built by the Dutch in the seventeenth century), was armed with two 22-centimetre and two 14-centimetre smoothbore cannon. A third battery, sited on Observatory Island just inside Makung Bay, also covered the entrance to the bay, which had also been blocked by a barrier of chains. The Observatory Island battery was armed with two Armstrong cannon and a Chinese 20-centimetre cannon. The Chinese had also built a battery armed with smoothbore cannon to sweep the plain to the east of Makung and a large entrenched camp to the north of the town to house the regular troops of the island’s garrison.

The outer Chinese defences were much weaker. The southern entrance to P'eng-hu Bay was covered on the west by the Hsiaochi battery on Fisher Island (modern Hsi-yu, 西嶼), and on the east by a battery on Plate Island. The Hsiaochi battery was replaced in the late 1880s by the Hsi Tai battery, whose ruins can still be seen today. The Plate Island battery was quite close to the Southern Fort, and could also cover the approach to Makung Bay. Unfortunately for the Chinese, both these batteries were armed only with a mixture of antiquated smoothbore pieces that offered little threat to the French squadron.