ABSTRACT
On 16 May 1778 the French Toulon squadron under Comte d’Estaing sailed out of the Mediterranean Sea, unchallenged through the Straits of Gibraltar, into the Atlantic Ocean. 1 In London soon thereafter the House of Lords and the House of Commons rang with denunciations of the government for permitting this to happen, calling such disregard of traditional strategy irresponsible and near treason. 2 Modern students have agreed with Parliament that to have allowed the French to sail was a mistake and one writer believes it to have been perhaps “the most serious mistake that was made by the British in the course of the war.” 3 Certainly without the powerful French fleet blockading Chesapeake Bay there would have been no American victory at Yorktown. 4 What is too rarely realized is the important role the Continental Navy of the United Colonies played in helping to draw the Royal Navy to the Western Hemisphere and thus so dividing its forces as to make any effective confrontation of the French in 1778 tactically impossible. The Earl of Sandwich, the First Lord of the Admiralty, lamented in April 1778, that: “there are not ships enough as yet in readiness to form a squadron fit to meet the Toulon fleet under Monsieur d’Estaing unless we were to sacrifice every other intended service to this object.” 5 To do so would “expose our own coast and Ireland…as the Brest fleet would be superior to anything we shall have ready for sea.” The reason why, as King George III himself bemoaned shortly thereafter in his message calling for “every effort to fit out the fleet,” was that “having been obliged to send…everything we had to America, has crippled us.” 6 The cream of the Royal Navy then cruised in the waters of the Western Hemisphere, thousands of miles from home, sent there in part to answer the challenge of the Continental Navy of the United Colonies.
