Wow, had to do a lot of reading on some of these, especially the Asian ones.
Having read up on Hansan, I’m shocked to see any votes to remove it at this point. The Koreans were outnumbered and annihilated the Japanese. The Wikipedia page seems to have a bit of trouble with consistency in numbers, but claims that either 47 Japanese ships were destroyed and 12 captured, or 66 destroyed, out of 73 – while no Korean ships were lost; the casualty list is 9000 to 133, AND it crippled the Japanese invasion of China, saving the Ming dynasty, AND the Korean admiral introduced a new tactic (“crane wing”) based on new technology (cannons). It seems to be positively bristling with criteria for decisiveness.
The same cannot be said of the battles starting with Y. Yamen is plagued by uncertain numbers and seems to have involved a lot of noncombatants, and marked the last gasp of an already-beaten dynasty in flight. Yalu, much later (the pre-dreadnought era) did see one side suffer substantial ship losses, but that side (the Chinese) successfully carried out the amphibious landing they were protecting, and their enemy withdrew. The war was decided on land anyway.
I’m also throwing Quiberon Bay in there. The Wikipedia article displays outstanding confusion as to the losses:
[QUOTE=Wikipedia]
The British Admiral Sir Edward Hawke with 23 ships of the line caught up with a French fleet with 21 ships of the line under Marshal de Conflans and, after hard fighting, sank, captured, or forced aground most of them
[/QUOTE]
but lists French losses thusly:
6 wrecked/destroyed
1 captured
If 7 is “most” of 21, I’m bad at math. Furthermore, in the order of battle section, it’s revealed that a lot of the ships ran aground, or in one case, a ship was mysteriously “lost.” The battle is credited with determining the fate of New France in the New World, I suppose on the presumption that, had they not lost control of the seas, the French could have dramatically reversed their colonization policy and massively reinforced New France in ways they never showed any interest in otherwise, but that seems pretty speculative.
Jutland’s on my short list too, but I’ll hold my fire for now.
Yalu - 2
Yamen - 2
Quiberon Bay - 1