An allied fleet destroyed the Ottoman navy at Navarino on October 20, 1827. British, French, and Russian ships had entered the bay to enforce a truce in the Greek War of Independence, and the shooting began without any formal declaration. The result decided a war.
The allied commanders had no order to fight. They sailed in to show force and to demand that the Ottoman-Egyptian fleet stop its attacks on the Greeks, and a scuffle over a boat escalated into a general action. Once the guns opened, there was no calling it back. The bay became a furnace.
The battle was the last great one fought entirely under sail. The allied ships, better gunned and better handled, destroyed or disabled most of the Ottoman and Egyptian vessels in the confined anchorage. The wooden warship had reached its end as the master of the seas.
Navarino settled the Greek question. The great powers had been reluctant to intervene, and the battle forced their hand, and within a few years Greece was recognized as an independent state. The Ottoman Empire, already weakening, lost a fleet it could not replace.
The battle was an accident that became a turning point. No government in London, Paris, or St Petersburg had quite wanted it, and all of them had to take responsibility for it. The age of sail closed at Navarino, in a bay in the Peloponnese.