On 6 October 1799, a Franco-Dutch army under Guillaume Brune defeated an Anglo-Russian army under Ralph Abercromby and the Duke of York in the Battle of Castricum.
On the return journey, A-Apple was brought down by anti-aircraft fire, probably by gunners at Castricum-aan-Zee, who reported shooting down an aircraft at 2.58am.
It was here that the French explorers became convinced that the coast visited by Maarten Gerritsz Vries in the Castricum in 1643 (i.e., in fact, the east coast of Hokkaido and Sakhalin) was not the mainland, since they French were now at the same latitude as the Dutch had been a century and a half before, but the location looked entirely different.