Battle of Diamond Rock

31 May – 2 June 1805, Diamond Rock, off Martinique

Franco-Spanish victory; the British garrison surrendered

In January 1804 Commodore Samuel Hood landed a party from his flagship Centaur on Diamond Rock, a sheer island off the south of Martinique, and hauled guns up its cliffs. Commissioned as the sloop HMS Diamond Rock under Commander James Wilkes Maurice, the rock and its 120 men harassed every ship trying to reach Fort-de-France for seventeen months. When Villeneuve's fleet arrived at Martinique in May 1805, the governor persuaded him to take it. Captain Julien Cosmao of Pluton went with Berwick, the frigate Sirène, a corvette, a schooner, eleven gunboats and several hundred troops, Spanish gunboats among them. Maurice spiked the guns at the landing place and held the summit. The attackers had brought no scaling ladders and lost three gunboats and two boats full of soldiers under the British fire. But the rock's main water cistern had cracked in an earth tremor, and on 2 June, out of water and almost out of ammunition, Maurice surrendered, having lost two men killed. A court-martial honourably acquitted him for the loss of his 'ship'.