Print 'The Coffin Expedition or Boney's Invincible Armada Half Seas Over (caricature)'.

One of many prints published in the months after the renewal of war in May 1803 dealing with the threatened Napoleonic invasion of Britain. Like Gillray’s ‘Destruction of the French Gun-Boats’ (see PAF4005), published just over a month earlier, it satirizes the impracticability of an invasion, presenting it as a doom-laden venture that will inevitably send thousands of Frenchmen to their certain deaths. The print takes this idea to bizarre and macabre lengths, by transforming the French gunboats into floating coffins manned by crews wearing shrouds and bonnets rouges. Some are already drowning in the water. One utters the opinion that Napoleon has deliberately launched the expedition ‘on purpose for our Funeral’, repeating the much-vaunted anti-Napoleonic black propaganda about Napoleon’s supposed treachery and duplicity towards his own troops.