1718
Ocracoke Inlet
The setting
Teach's Hole channel, Ocracoke, Province of North Carolina (approx. 35.10 N, 76.00 W - approximate to the engagement area, sufficient for the map layer, not for the site)
terrain_class `inlet`. Thatch's habitual anchorage, and the passage every hull bound for northeastern North Carolina had to make. draft_gate = 1 - and note which side it cost: the gate excluded the pursuer's best hulls, and the pursuer had to shed his own advantage to enter. scale_type `nominal`.
Reveal the outcome
Recorded sideRoyal Navy detachment (Lt. Robert Maynard, of HMS Pearl)
Recorded resultvictory
Royal Navy detachment victory; Thatch's crew annihilated and the commander killed. The taken cargo was cocoa, indigo and cotton - not specie.
How the atlas explains it
The state had to shed its own advantage to reach the target, and it very nearly lost the action doing so. Spotswood could not send the warships he had: Pearl and Lyme were fourth-rates and could not enter the inlet. He hired shallow-draft sloops, borrowed their crews, took local pilots - and Maynard still put both sloops aground going in. Thatch's counter was to fight the boarding rather than the ship, which is the correct counter when the enemy has spent his gun advantage to get to you.
What followed
The clearest case of the draft gate operating against the hunter rather than for him, and the row that carries the prize-composition finding: Maynard's take was cocoa, indigo and cotton, not specie. Success in this era ran on liquidity - the ability to convert bulk colonial cargo into money - so the fence was infrastructure and closing the market turned a capture into worthless weight. The prize-composition test (cargo class across the trial records, which itemise) is recorded as pending.