Strange But True Naval Battles

It turns out that Japan was not the only place the Yuan Mongol Navy lost (more here); but perhaps even stranger than that, there was a World War I battle between the British and German navies - off the coast of a Chilean island in the Pacific. This was the mechanism through which British naval advantage erased the late-starting German ambitions in the Pacific and East Asia. (The U.S. and German navies had almost come to blows in Samoa several decades before, during the Samoan Civil War.)

More familiar to Americans, there was also a battle between Union and Confederate vessels off the coast of France.