Battle
Around six o'clock in the morning on May 25, the two fleets were in sight of each other and Creutz, knowing that he had a numerically superior force, attacked. Juel first sailed towards the northwest in the direction of Öresund, but then turned south towards Jasmund, the western part of Rügen. The weather was calm throughout the day and the two fleets made little progress. At nightfall, the distance between them had closed and Juel decided to accept battle. The Swedish fleet had difficulties in keeping its formation, and during a maneuver the Danish line managed to cut the Swedish line of battle, capturing the fireship Didric while the fireship Leoparden was driven into a Brandenburg squadron heading for Copenhagen and taken.
Around midnight little had been achieved and the fleets disengaged, but stayed within sight of one another. Around 7 o'clock on May 26 the Swedish force attacked with Uggla's second squadron in the lead, the two fleet sailing side by side while exchanging gunfire. According to the master gunner on Kronan Anders Gyllenspak one of the allied admirals, the Dutch Philip van Allemonde, sailed too close in his flagship Delft and received "a few tough shots with bar shot" by the heavy artillery on Kronan "so that the beakhead went completely asunder, and then the entire ship's side, and finally the stern, so that one could drive a horse and carriage through it". The heavy damage forced Allemonde to move his flag to Gideon and disengage himself from the fighting.
Despite the superiority in numbers, the Swedish side was not able to take advantage of the situation to engage the allied ships at close range to board and capture them. Rather, the battle turned into a ranged artillery duel. When Juel disengaged around four o'clock in the afternoon, the only ships to pursue him were Kronan, Solen and Draken and Uggla's squadron, while the rest stayed behind. With less than half of his forces behind him, Creutz was unable to press the chase for the allied fleet, which was able to run into the reefs at Falsterborev off the Scanian coast. Even though the Swedish fleet was the more powerful force, it was unable to sink or disable any enemy ships and lost the boyer Kung David.
Read more about this topic: Battle Of Bornholm (1676)
Famous quotes containing the word battle:
“One may confidently assert that when thirty thousand men fight a pitched battle against an equal number of troops, there are about twenty thousand on each side with the pox.”
—Voltaire [François Marie Arouet] (1694–1778)
“What a battle a man must fight everywhere to maintain his standing army of thoughts, and march with them in orderly array through the always hostile country! How many enemies there are to sane thinking! Every soldier has succumbed to them before he enlists for those other battles.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Forty years after a battle it is easy for a noncombatant to reason about how it ought to have been fought. It is another thing personally and under fire to have to direct the fighting while involved in the obscuring smoke of it.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)