transport Worcester, having on board a detachment of troops under Lieutenant-colonel Lockhart. On the 5th of December the squadron arrived off Point Panka ; and a commission, with a flag of truce, was immediately sent to the commandant of the Dutch naval force, for the surrender of the ships of war lying at Gressie. The Dutch commodore thought fit to detain the boat, and to place in arrest the persons on board of her : he then sent one of his officers to Sir Edward, with information of the unwarrantable step he had taken, accompanied with a flat refusal to deliver up the ships, although they were all in a dismantled state, with their guns on shore.

On the next morning, the 6th, the Culloden and Powerful, having been lightened, sailed up, accompanied by the remainder of the squadron, to Gressie, cannonading a battery of twelve 9 and 18 pounders at Sambelangan on the island of Madura ; the fire from which, with hot shot, struck several of the ships, but hurt no person on board, and was very soon silenced. The governor and council of Sourabaya, a settlement about 15 miles higher up the river, and to which Gressie was subordinate, released the gentlemen of the commission and the boat's crew, disclaimed the violent measures pursued by the commodore, and offered to treat. A treaty was accordingly concluded for delivering up the ships of war, consisting, as already mentioned, of the two 68-gun ships Pluto and Revolutie, also a sheer-hulk (late a 68-gun ship), the Kortenaar, together with the Rutkoff company's ship, pierced for 40 guns. But the Dutch commodore had previously scuttled the whole of them. On the 11th the British completed the destruction of the ships, by setting them on fire ; and then proceeded to destroy the guns and military stores in the garrison of Gressie, and at the battery of Sambelangan.

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