Battle of the Gullet

The Battle of the Gullet was a decisive and costly naval battle in 130 AC: the Triarchy’s attack was broken by dragonriders, yet the assault devastated Driftmark, killed Prince Jacaerys Velaryon, and left Prince Viserys Targaryen a captive. The outcome was therefore no simple victory. The attackers lost most of their fleet, while Rhaenyra Targaryen’s side suffered losses that reached from the royal succession to the heart of House Velaryon’s power and wealth.

Causes and Opening Moves

The battle followed a diplomatic and military alignment engineered by Otto Hightower. His efforts bore fruit when the High Council of the Triarchy met in Tyrosh and accepted an alliance. A fleet of ninety warships then sailed from the Stepstones toward the Gullet, the passage between Dragonstone and Driftmark. The arrival of the fleet coincided with the passage of the Pentoshi cog Gay Abandon, which carried two of Rhaenyra’s sons, Prince Aegon Targaryen the Younger and Prince Viserys Targaryen.

The escorts sent to protect the cog were sunk or captured, and Gay Abandon itself fell into enemy hands. Aegon escaped only by reaching Dragonstone on his dragon, Stormcloud. The nine-year-old had never flown before; the flight was also his last. Stormcloud arrived with numerous arrows embedded in his body and a scorpion bolt in his neck, and died within the hour. Aegon survived, but Viserys had no means of escape from the captured ship.

Viserys tried to pass unnoticed. He hid his dragon’s egg and changed into ragged, salt-stained clothes, presenting himself as an ordinary ship’s boy. One of the actual ship’s boys betrayed him. A Tyroshi captain first recognized the prince’s identity, but the fleet’s admiral, Sharako Lohar of Lys, soon took possession of the captive. The capture placed a second royal son in enemy hands just as the naval assault was beginning.

The Attack on Driftmark

Sharako divided his fleet into two forces, intending one to enter the Gullet south of Dragonstone and the other to attack from the north. The battle began in the early morning of the fifth day of the 130th year since Aegon’s Conquest. With the rising sun behind them, the warships surprised many of Corlys Velaryon’s galleys. Some were rammed; others were boarded by attackers using ropes and grapnels.

The southern squadron passed Dragonstone without attacking it and struck Driftmark instead. Its troops landed at Spicetown while fireships set ablaze vessels emerging from the harbor to meet them. By mid-morning, Spicetown was burning and Myrish and Tyroshi soldiers were attacking High Tide. The choice to bypass Dragonstone thus left the ancient stronghold untouched but transferred the force of the assault to the Velaryon seat and its port.

Prince Jacaerys entered the fight on Vermax, attacking a line of Lysene galleys. The Triarchy’s sailors had faced dragons before in the wars against Prince Daemon Targaryen in the Stepstones. They resisted with the weapons available to them, reasoning that killing the rider might drive the dragon away. One ship caught fire, then another, but the crews continued fighting until they saw more dragons approaching around Dragonmont.

Silverwing, Sheepstealer, Seasmoke, and Vermithor joined Jacaerys and Vermax. Faced with five dragons rather than one, the Triarchy’s formation broke. Warships turned away, while dragonfire set vessels alight or destroyed them; men abandoned burning ships for the sea. The intervention reversed the immediate course of the engagement, although it did not prevent the battle from continuing through the night on both sides of Dragonstone.

The Loss of Vermax and Jacaerys

The accounts disagree about how Vermax fell. One version claims that a crossbowman shot the dragon through the eye, a story the history compares to the account of Meraxes’s death in Dorne. Another describes a sailor in the crow’s nest of a Myrish galley throwing a grapnel as Vermax passed over the fleet. A prong caught between the dragon’s scales, and the chain, secured around the mast, tore at his belly as the ship and the dragon pulled against one another.

In that second account, Vermax fell into a burning galley and became entangled in its rigging before the sinking ship dragged him underwater. Jacaerys reportedly escaped the wreckage and clung briefly to a piece of it, but Myrish crossbowmen fired on him. He was struck and then hit in the neck by another quarrel before the sea swallowed him. The death of the Prince of Dragonstone and heir to the Iron Throne was the battle’s most consequential loss for Rhaenyra’s cause.

Defeat, Destruction, and Aftermath

The Triarchy’s fleet suffered a near-total defeat. Of Sharako’s ninety warships from Myr, Lys, and Tyrosh, only twenty-eight limped home, and all but three of those surviving vessels were crewed by Lyseni. The scale of the losses soon became a political wound: widows in Myr and Tyrosh accused Sharako of sacrificing their fleets while holding back his own. That quarrel helped set the three cities against one another in the Daughters’ War, which ended the Triarchy two years later.

Driftmark paid heavily for the attackers’ diversion. Spicetown was sacked, its inhabitants killed and its buildings burned; the town was never rebuilt. High Tide was also put to the torch. The eastern treasures Corlys had gathered on his voyages were lost in the fire, servants died while trying to escape, and the Velaryon fleet lost almost a third of its strength. Thousands perished. The scale of the fleet’s losses could not erase the destruction ashore or the death of Jacaerys.

Prince Viserys’s fate remained uncertain to those who survived. No one could agree which ship he had been aboard, and men on both sides presumed that he had drowned, burned, or been killed. Aegon Targaryen the Younger had escaped, but the account says he could not forgive himself for leaving his brother behind when he fled on Stormcloud. Corlys Velaryon, congratulated on the outcome, treated the word victory as inadequate to describe what had happened.

The battle also left distinct impressions on the dragonriders who returned to Dragonstone. Hugh Hammer and Ulf White celebrated their new standing as knights and spoke ambitiously of becoming lords. Nettles, who had fought alongside them, returned with her face darkened by smoke and streaked with tears. Addam Velaryon, formerly known as Addam of Hull, sought out Corlys after the battle, but the account does not disclose what passed between them. These sharply different responses close the episode without softening its central contradiction: the Triarchy’s fleet was shattered, but the losses in princes, ships, homes, and people made the result a victory marked by grief.