The Fleets Involved


	The British fleet was composed of a mixture of various rates of well-found new vessels and antiques scraped from Rotten Row. The latter included Princess Amelia, a member of the very unpopular 3-decker 80s, too old to carry either her designed main armament of 32 pounders or her top deck 12 pounders. Nonetheless, the British fleet held an edge both in crew quality and overall gun-power, as the Dutch fleet was in scarcely better condition and consisted of generally smaller ships, as Dutch shipbuilding had not kept pace with the size increases common in other naval powers of the late eighteenth century.


	For reasons of balance (and that the older class was far more numerous), the Argo has been taken as a 2-decker 44, rather than a 40-gun frigate. Admiraal Generaal carries the armament of the 74-gun Vrijheid at Camperdown, which is believed to be representative of this type, the largest fleet unit in use by the Dutch at the time. The 56-gun ships are all of the 18-pdr class 154ft class, as also encountered at Camperdown. Sources on the 68-gun vessels are less certain, there seem to have been two classes, mounting 24-pdr or 32-pdr guns on the lower deck. One of each is represented, the heavier version being allocated to the flagship.