The Battle of the Gullet

The bloodiest sea battle in the history of the narrow sea.

Why it came to this

Everything the blacks had, they had because of the sea. Corlys VelaryonÔÇÖs fleet was the largest in Westeros, and when he declared for Rhaenyra it did not simply add ships to her side ÔÇö it put a noose around the enemy capital. The Velaryons closed the Gullet, the narrow passage that all shipping bound for KingÔÇÖs Landing must use, and the city began to feel it in the price of bread within weeks. A blockade is a slow weapon, but it is a weapon that cannot be answered by courage, and the greens had no fleet worth the name to answer it with.

So they bought one. The Three Daughters ÔÇö Lys, Myr and Tyrosh, in the alliance called the Triarchy ÔÇö had their own quarrel with the Velaryons going back to the wars in the Stepstones, and needed very little encouragement beyond gold and a promise of plunder. What sailed north was not a Westerosi royal fleet but a coalition armada under Lysene command: ninety warships proper, and behind them a much larger tail of hired and requisitioned hulls carrying men who had come for the sacking rather than the cause.

The blacks knew a fleet was coming and did not know when. What made the timing catastrophic was an unrelated decision taken on Dragonstone: with the war going badly enough to think about the worst case, arrangements had been made to send RhaenyraÔÇÖs two youngest sons out of the country to safety across the narrow sea. Their ships were putting to sea, under escort, at the precise moment the Triarchy came up the passage. The two events had nothing to do with each other. That is what makes the Gullet the ugliest accident of the entire war.

The ground and the hosts

The Gullet is a funnel. Dragonstone and Driftmark sit on one side, the mainland on the other, and the water between narrows as it runs toward Blackwater Bay. It is the only sensible approach to KingÔÇÖs Landing from the east and it is a bad place to fight a fleet action, because there is nowhere to go. Ships engaged in the Gullet cannot manoeuvre out of contact, cannot easily disengage to leeward, and cannot avoid becoming a single tangled mass once the grappling starts. Both fleets knew this. Both went in anyway, one because it had no choice and one because it wanted the tangle.

The Triarchy commander was Sharako Lohar of Lys, an admiral of real ability with a reputation for eccentricity that has probably been exaggerated by hostile chroniclers. His plan was not subtle and did not need to be: come up the passage in strength, overwhelm the blockade by numbers, and put the transportsÔÇÖ men ashore on Driftmark and Dragonstone to burn the Velaryon power at its root.

The blacksÔÇÖ strength on the water was the Velaryon fleet, superb ship for ship and heavily outnumbered on the day, scattered along the blockade line rather than concentrated. Their strength in the air was potentially decisive and, as it turned out, poorly coordinated. Prince Jacaerys Velaryon was at sea with the convoy on his dragon Vermax. The other riders were on Dragonstone ÔÇö including several of the newly saddled dragonseeds, common-born Targaryen bastards who had claimed the riderless dragons of the island weeks earlier and had almost no experience of doing anything with them.

The one clear fact about the numbers is that they were enormous by naval standards and that most of the men who died were in the water rather than on it. Beyond the ninety warships, the size of the Triarchy tail is not recorded with any confidence, and the totals that circulate afterwards vary by a factor that should make anybody cautious.

How it was fought

It began as a collision at the mouth of the passage. The Triarchy van came up and took the nearest blockading squadrons before they could concentrate, and the first phase was a straightforward matter of numbers: two and three ships on one, boarded, taken or burned. The blockade line was not so much broken as eaten from one end.

The convoy carrying the princes was caught in the middle of this. It had put out on the assumption of an empty sea and found itself inside a fleet action, with warships on both sides of it and no room to run for shelter. One of the transports was taken by boarding and one got clear; which was which, and the sequence of it, is one of the details the accounts most disagree about, since almost everybody who could have described it was in the water within the hour.

Jacaerys Velaryon brought Vermax into the fight immediately, alone, without waiting for the island. This was brave and, tactically, the worst possible decision. A dragon over a fleet has to come low to do anything, and low over ships means inside the effective range of every crossbow, every scorpion and every archer on every deck in the tangle ÔÇö hundreds of them, shooting upward at a single target from all sides at once. That is a volume of shooting no dragon in the histories had faced before, and it is the specific tactical fact that decided the day.

Vermax went down into the water. How is disputed. Some accounts have him brought down by shooting, others by a burning shipÔÇÖs rigging fouling him as he passed low over the tangle, others that he simply went into the sea exhausted and drowned in the way that dragons do when they lose the air. Nobody watching had a clear view, because by then the middle of the Gullet was a single burning raft of grappled hulls with smoke lying across the whole of it.

The dragons from Dragonstone came late. Three more got into the air and fell on the Triarchy fleet in earnest, and this phase was pure slaughter. Ships in a grapple cannot scatter; a fleet packed into a narrow passage and set alight burns as a unit. The fire spread from hull to hull along the tangle and the sea itself was covered in burning wreck and burning oil. The men who went over the side to escape the fire found that there was nowhere to swim to that was not also on fire.

The Triarchy broke, but breaking in the Gullet was not an escape. The passage was choked with their own burning ships. Some got out to open water and some ran themselves ashore on Driftmark, where the landing parties they had brought for plunder were put into a fight they had not planned and were destroyed piecemeal against the islanders. The pursuit ran for the rest of the day and the burning went on into the night, visible from both shores.

By dawn the invasion no longer existed as a fighting force. Neither did the blockade. The blacks had annihilated an enemy fleet in the narrow water and had spent, doing it, the instrument that had been strangling KingÔÇÖs Landing.

What it cost

The Gullet is remembered as the bloodiest sea fight in the history of the narrow sea and the figures usually cited run into many thousands drowned or burned. They are not reliable. Sea battles produce the least trustworthy casualty counts of any kind of engagement, because the dead are not on a field to be counted, and the GulletÔÇÖs dead were spread from Driftmark to the mainland shore over the following weeks. What can be said honestly is that both fleets were destroyed as fighting formations in a single day, and that the great majority of the loss was drowning and fire rather than blade.

Driftmark was burned along much of its coast by the parties that got ashore, and the Velaryon towns took harm they were decades recovering from. The Velaryon fleet, the largest in Westeros and the accumulated work of generations, was reduced to a fraction of itself.

The Triarchy was broken as a naval power by the same afternoon. The alliance of the Three Daughters had been the dominant force in the eastern narrow sea; it did not survive the losses or the recriminations that followed, and the Stepstones were left to whoever wanted them next, which is a story of its own.

House Velaryon was ruined in ships and remained, for the moment, indispensable ÔÇö the greens still had no fleet, and no gold left to hire another one. The blockade, however, was over, and KingÔÇÖs Landing ate again.

What it changed

Strategically the Gullet was a black victory that functioned as a defeat. The invasion was annihilated and the greensÔÇÖ one attempt to buy a navy came to nothing ÔÇö but the blacks had won the war at sea by expending the thing that made winning at sea worth anything. The stranglehold on the capital was gone and could not be reimposed, and from that point the blacksÔÇÖ advantage was entirely in the air, which is a much less patient and much less controllable instrument than a fleet.

It also permanently changed how anybody sensible thought about dragons over ships. Before the Gullet, a dragon was assumed to be unanswerable by men who could not reach it. Afterwards it was understood that massed shooting from a packed fleet is one of the few things in the world that can reach one, and that a rider who goes low over a tangle is taking a risk of a different order from a rider over a battlefield.

And it took the war past the point where either side could imagine a negotiated end. Both councils had now lost enough that the loss itself had become the argument for continuing.

What became of it ÔÇö if an ending is written, it is here. Spoilers.

Prince Jacaerys Velaryon, RhaenyraÔÇÖs eldest son and her heir, died in the Gullet with Vermax. He was in his middle teens. Accounts differ on whether he went into the water with his dragon or leapt onto an enemy deck as Vermax fell and was shot down there; the second version is the one the singers preferred and it may well be true. His body was not recovered. His mother was never told a version of it that she believed.

The two younger princes had been sent out for safety and were separated by the battle. One ship carried Aegon the Younger clear and turned back for Dragonstone. The other, carrying Prince Viserys, was taken by boarding; the boy was found among the survivors, recognised as worth a ransom rather than a throat, and vanished into the Free Cities for years. He was thought dead by nearly everyone for the remainder of the war.

Sharako Lohar survived the destruction of his own fleet, made his way to Westeros, and ended up in the greensÔÇÖ service on land, where the aftermath of the Gullet followed him. His end came in a quarrel among his own supposed allies rather than at any enemyÔÇÖs hand.