[5] On 17 March 1809, Foxhound joined Admiral Lord Gambier's Channel fleet anchored off the Basque Roads.

The 15 French vessels there, commanded by Vice-Admiral Zacharie Allemand, lay behind a boom protected by 30 guns.

(Gambier had earlier objected to the plan to use explosion (Cochrane's invention) and fire ships, calling it "a horrible and anti-Christian mode of warfare".)

In 1847 the Admiralty awarded the then-surviving participants in the battle the Naval General Service Medal with the clasp "Basque Roads 1809".

[10] This article includes data released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported UK: England & Wales Licence, by the National Maritime Museum, as part of the Warship Histories project.