This painting records an important allied victory during the War of the Spanish Succession. On 23 October 1702 an Anglo-Dutch fleet returning from an unsuccessful attempt to capture Cadiz learned of a Spanish treasure fleet escorted by French war-ships returning from the Americas. The allied force, commanded by Admiral George Rooke (1650-1709), engaged the enemy in Vigo Bay (near the north-western corner of Spain); they captured or disabled all the French and Spanish ships. This rather diagrammatic bird’s-eye representation of the battle shows the moment at which the British ships (sweeping left to right) and their Dutch allies (here kept in the background) break through the boom set across the narrowest part of the entrance to the bay at the Randa strait leading to the harbour of Redondela. Sir Thomas Hopsonn leads the attack in the ‘Torbay’, which has just broken the boom and is about to be burnt by a fire-ship (a fire subsequently controlled). A column of British infantry can be seen on the near shore; this is the 2,000 men under the command of the Duke of Ormonde, who had been set down at Teis and who successfully stormed the Fort Randa and silenced its guns.