On this day in 1827, three allied fleets sailed into a bay in Greece, and in a few hours of thunderous close range gunnery they annihilated an entire enemy fleet and helped give birth to a nation. It was the last great sea battle ever fought entirely under sail. This is the Battle of Navarino. By 1827 the Greeks had been fighting a desperate war of independence against the Ottoman Empire, and they were losing. Ottoman and Egyptian forces were crushing the revolt, and a huge Turkish and Egyptian fleet lay anchored in the sheltered bay of Navarino, on the west coast of the Peloponnese, supporting the brutal campaign to stamp out Greek freedom. The great powers of Europe, Britain, France, and Russia, had intervened diplomatically, sending a combined fleet under the British admiral Edward Codrington to pressure the Ottomans into a ceasefire. The allied fleet sailed right into Navarino Bay to anchor among the enemy and force the issue, a bold and dangerous move. The Ottoman-Egyptian fleet was far more numerous, dozens upon dozens of warships packed into the bay, but the allies had more of the heavy ships of the line, the floating fortresses that could throw a crushing weight of iron. The two fleets sat crammed together in the enclosed water, nerves stretched to breaking, and nobody had officially ordered a battle. Then a shot was fired, and the whole bay erupted. What followed was a few hours of some of the most intense close range fighting in the history of sail. Jammed together in the confined anchorage, the ships blasted each other at point blank range, broadside answering broadside, until the water was covered in smoke, wreckage, and burning hulls. The allied gunnery was devastating. One by one the Ottoman and Egyptian ships were battered into wrecks, set ablaze, and blown apart, many exploding as the fires reached their magazines. When the smoke cleared, the result was total. The Ottoman-Egyptian fleet had been destroyed, with dozens of ships sunk or burned and thousands of men killed. The allies, astonishingly, had not lost a single ship, though many were badly damaged and their crews had suffered. It was a crushing, one sided victory. The consequences were enormous. With their fleet gone, the Ottomans could no longer sustain the war to crush the Greek revolt from the sea, and the destruction of that fleet proved a decisive step toward Greek independence. Yet in a strange twist, the victorious admiral Codrington was recalled and criticized at home, because the British government had never actually wanted a war with the Ottoman Empire and found the whole bloody triumph deeply awkward. Navarino was a battle almost nobody had formally ordered, that no one could quite disown, and that changed the map of Europe. And it holds one more distinction. It was the last major battle in history fought entirely by wooden sailing ships, the final thunder of the age of sail, on this day in 1827.