The nationalities of the ships shown in this drawing are uncertain as such the action is hard to name. It is unusual in that it appears to involve two commodores (flying the swallowtail pennants) in two-deckers, possibly with one other two-decker present in the far background. It may in fact be a skirmish in which the ships with single decks of guns are Indiamen rather than frigates, similar to those under the (merchant) Commodore Dance that drove off the French under Linois in the Strait of Malacca in 1804. However this is far from certain. Like PAD8789, which appears to show the end of the same action, it has been squared up in pencil for enlargement to canvas.