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.Great must have been his distrust of his forces, one would say.When is a navy to fight, if this was not a time?He carried on a distant cannonade, with results so far against the English, as to make his backwardness yetmore extraordinary.Can a policy or a tradition which justifies such a line of conduct be good? The followingday, April 80, De Grasse, having thrown away his chance, attempted to follow Hood; but the latter had nolonger any reason for fighting, and his original inferiority was increased by the severe injuries of some shipson the 29th.De Grasse could not overtake him, owing to the inferior speed of his fleet, many of the ships notbeing coppered, a fact worthy of note, as French vessels by model and size were generally faster thanEnglish; but this superiority was sacrificed through the delay of the government in adopting the newimprovement.Hood rejoined Rodney at Antigua; and De Grasse, after remaining a short the at Fort Royal, made an attemptupon Gros Ilot Bay, the possession of which by the English kept all the movements of his fleet undersurveillance.Foiled here, he moved against Tobago, which surrendered June 2, 1781.Sailing thence, aftersome minor operations, he anchored on the 26th of July at Cap Francais (now Cape Haytien), in the island ofHayti.Here he found awaiting him a French frigate from the United States, bearing despatches fromWashington and Rochambeau, upon which he was to take the most momentous action that fell to any Frenchadmiral during the war.The invasion of the Southern States by the English, beginning in Georgia and followed by the taking ofCharleston and the military control of the two extreme States, had been pressed on to the northward by way ofCamden into North Carolina.On the 16th of August, 1780, General Gates was totally defeated at Camden;and during the following nine months the English under Cornwallis persisted in their attempts to overrunNorth Carolina.These operations, the narration of which is foreign to our immediate subject, had ended byforcing Cornwallis, despite many successes in actual encounter, to fall back exhausted toward the seaboard,and finally open Wilmington, in which place depots for such a contingency had been established.Hisopponent, General Greene, then turned the American troops toward South Carolina.Cornwallis, too weak todream of controlling, or even penetrating, into the interior of an unfriendly country, had now to choosebetween returning to Charleston, to assure there and in South Carolina the shaken British power, and movingnorthward again into Virginia, there to join hands with a small expeditionary force operating on the JamesRiver under Generals Phillips and Arnold.To fall back would be a confession that the weary marching andfighting of months past had been without results, and the general readily convinced himself that theChesapeake was the proper seat of war, even if New York itself had to be abandoned.Thecommander-in-chief, Sir Henry Clinton, by no means shared this opinion, upon which was justified a steptaken without asking him. Operations in the Chesapeake, he wrote,  are attended with great risk unless weare sure of a permanent superiority at sea.I tremble for the fatal consequences that may ensue. ForCornwallis, taking the matter into his own hands, had marched from Wilmington on the 25th of April, 1781,joining the British already at Petersburg on the 20th of May.The forces thus united numbered seven thousandmen.Driven back from the open country of South Carolina into Charleston, there now remained two centresof British power, at New York and in the Chesapeake.With New Jersey and Pennsylvania in the hands ofthe Americans, communication between the two depended wholly upon the sea.Despite his unfavorable criticism of Cornwallis's action, Clinton had himself already risked a largedetachment in the Chesapeake.A body of sixteen hundred men under Benedict Arnold had ravaged thecountry of the James and burned Richmond in January of this same year.In the hopes of capturing Arnold,Lafayette had been sent to Virginia with a nucleus of twelve hundred troops, and on the evening of the 8th ofMarch the French squadron at Newport sailed, in concerted movement, to control the waters of the bay.Admiral Arbuthnot, commanding the English fleet lying in Gardiner's Bay, (1) learned the departure by hislookouts, and started in pursuit on the morning of the 10th, thirty-six hours later.Favored either by diligenceor luck, he made such good time that when the two fleets came in sight of each other, a little outside of theCHAPTER X.MARITIME WAR IN NORTH AMERICA AND WEST INDIES, 1778-1781. ITS INFLUENCE U173The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783capes of the Chesapeake, the English were leading.(2) They at once went about to meet their enemy, who, onhis part, formed a line-of-battle.The wind at this the was west, so that neither could head directly into thebay.  1.At the eastern end of Long Island.2.The French ascribe this disadvantage to the fact that some oftheir ships were not coppered. The two fleets were nearly equal in strength, there being eight ships on each side; but the English had oneninety-gun ship, while of the French one was only a heavy frigate, which was put into the line [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]