I came across this wikipedia article that describes a dutch fleet frozen at anchor at Den Helder being stormed and captured by French Hussars. I found the article in a different post on reddit and someone in that thread said that this is almost certainly false, stating that there are no good primary sources that corroborate that version of the story. The truth, according to the person saying it was false, is that the fleet did surrender to the French but there was no battle or surprise ambush and that the hussars were merely the regiment sent to accept the surrender. So historians of /r/AskHistorians, can anyone enlighten me about this?
Follow up if anyone has any knowledge, are there other credible and interesting instances of a "naval" battle between land units and sea units, particularly where the land combatants won?
In his work Geschiedenis van het Nederlandse zeewezen (History of Dutch Maritime Matters, first printed 1833-1848), Dutch historian J.C. de Jonge attempts to rebut the (mostly French) claims that you can read in the wikipedia article. He start off by dismissing the story as a fable to then immediately nuance (or aggravate?) that remark slightly into (freely translated and paraphrased by myself) "an embellishment of an insignificant event". His critique is as follows:
Firstly, he notes the similarities between all accounts and suspects the earlier writers complacently mimic each other's accounts. He remarks that the original account, from which all the other ones stemmed, and which seems to be the one that's recounted in the english wiki article, is general Antoine Henri Jomini's account from his 1819 work Histoire critique et militaire des guerres de la Revolution. The sources for this account are unclear and de Jonge has found official reports from 1795 that do mention that the hussars captured the fleet, but he could not find anything about a "charge across the frozen Zuiderzee," or any hostility between the Dutch and French (the Dutch leadership had ordered all troops not to attack or resist French forces two days prior, an order that had reached the commander of the Dutch fleet as well) as mentioned by wikipedia and Jomini.
Secondly, de Jonge has found no reports or precedent for the Zuiderzee to have been so frozen over as to allow a mass of troops as mentioned by the French sources to cross the ice.
De Jonge goes on to give accounts by Dutch officers and inhabitants of Den Helder, who claim that the French did not arrive in Den Helder across the ice, but simply used the road into town, that there were no hostilities between the French and Dutch and that the fleet passed to the French by a verbal agreement between the commanders of both sides (incidentally the French commander who arrived a few days later was a Dutchman, general Johan Willem de Winter).
The French, upon reaching Den Helder in the night, would have sent a small number of hussars across the ice to the flagship of the Dutch fleet. According to de Jonge, this event would have inspired the embellishments that can be read in the wikipedia article. He speculates that the origin of the embellishments would have been the bragging of one or several of the hussars present in Den Helder.
Source:
J.C. de Jonge - Geschiedenis van het Nederlandsche zeewezen, part 6, 1845 (in Dutch) p. 518-537 (the search terms in the link were used to pinpoint the story, Ahlé was one of the witnesses interviewed by de Jonge, Snelheid was the ship he served on)