Kent history

The Medway Raid, 1667

You are a gunner on the battery at Upnor Castle. The Dutch fleet is coming up the river: fireships, sloops, men-of-war, and boats towing away the king's flagship. Stop as many as you can.

How to play

• Look along the river by dragging on the picture (or the left and right arrow keys). The crosshairs stay in the middle; you move the view.
• Fire with a tap on the picture, the FIRE button, or the space bar. The ball takes time to arrive, and drops at range, so aim ahead of a moving ship and a little above the distant ones. Watch where the splash lands and correct.
• Three guns. Each takes a few seconds to reload; switch guns (buttons or keys 1, 2, 3) to keep firing. From wave two you can load chain shot, which slows a ship; from wave three, heated shot, slow to prepare but it sets a fireship ablaze with one hit.
• Ships that get past you are through to Chatham. Each wave needs a set number stopped. A Dutch man-of-war that lingers in front of the battery will fire back and knock out one of your guns for the wave.

The real raid

In June 1667, near the end of the Second Anglo-Dutch War, a Dutch fleet under Michiel de Ruyter sailed into the Thames estuary, took the unfinished fort at Sheerness, broke the chain across the Medway at Gillingham and burned or captured warships laid up at Chatham. The flagship Royal Charles was towed away to the Netherlands, where its stern carving is still in the Rijksmuseum. The guns at Upnor Castle and hastily placed batteries fired on the Dutch on 13 June and did some damage, but could not stop them. Samuel Pepys, who ran the Navy Board, wrote that the news made "all our hearts ache". It remains one of the worst defeats in the Royal Navy's history, and it led directly to the Treaty of Breda the following month.

A game, not a reconstruction: the waves, ships and gunnery are invented for play, and in the game you fare better than the real battery did. Nothing is sent to our servers; your best score stays in this browser.