Meanwhile the French had a great chance.On the 11th of July their fleet, much stronger than the British, arrived from the Delaware, and anchored off Sandy Hook.Admiral Howe knew his danger.He asked for volunteers from the merchant ships and the sailors offered themselves almost to a man.If d'Estaing could beat Howe's inferior fleet, the transports at New York would be at his mercy and the British army, with no other source of supply, must surrender.Washington was near, to give help on land.The end of the war seemed not far away.But it did not come.The French admirals were often taken from an army command, and d'Estaing was not a sailor but a soldier.He feared the skill of Howe, a really great sailor, whose seven available ships were drawn up in line at Sandy Hook so that their guns bore on ships coming in across the bar.D'Estaing hovered outside.Pilots from New York told him that at high tide there were only twenty-two feet of water on the bar and this was not enough for his great ships, one of which carried ninety-one guns.On the 22d of July there was the highest of tides with, in reality, thirty feet of water on the bar, and a wind from the northeast which would have brought d'Estaing's ships easily through the channel into the harbor.The British expected the hottest naval fight in their history.At three in the afternoon d'Estaing moved but it was to sail away out of sight.
Opportunity, though once spurned, seemed yet to knock again.The one other point held by the British was Newport, Rhode Island.
Here General Pigot had five thousand men and only perilous communications by sea with New York.Washington, keenly desirous to capture this army, sent General Greene to aid General Sullivan in command at Providence, and d'Estaing arrived off Newport to give aid.Greene had fifteen hundred fine soldiers, Sullivan had nine thousand New England militia, and d'Estaing four thousand French regulars.A force of fourteen thousand five hundred men threatened five thousand British.But on the 9th of August Howe suddenly appeared near Newport with his smaller fleet.D'Estaing put to sea to fight him, and a great naval battle was imminent, when a terrific storm blew up and separated and almost shattered both fleets.D'Estaing then, in spite of American protests, insisted on taking the French ships to Boston to refit and with them the French soldiers.Sullivan publicly denounced the French admiral as having basely deserted him and his own disgusted yeomanry left in hundreds for their farms to gather in the harvest.In September, with d'Estaing safely away, Clinton sailed into Newport with five thousand men.Washington's campaign against Rhode Island had failed completely.
The summer of 1778 thus turned out badly for Washington.Help from France which had aroused such joyous hopes in America had achieved little and the allies were hurling reproaches at each other.French and American soldiers had riotous fights in Boston and a French officer was killed.The British, meanwhile, were landing at small ports on the coast, which had been the haunts of privateers, and were not only burning shipping and stores but were devastating the country with Loyalist regiments recruited in America.The French told the Americans that they were expecting too much from the alliance, and the cautious Washington expressed fear that help from outside would relax effort at home.Both were right.By the autumn the British had been reinforced and the French fleet had gone to the West Indies.Truly the mountain in labor of the French alliance seemed to have brought forth only a ridiculous mouse.None the less was it to prove, in the end, the decisive factor in the struggle.
The alliance with France altered the whole character of the war, which ceased now to be merely a war in North America.France soon gained an ally in Europe.Bourbon Spain had no thought of helping the colonies in rebellion against their king, and she viewed their ambitions to extend westward with jealous concern, since she desired for herself both sides of the Mississippi.Spain, however, had a grievance against Britain, for Britain would not yield Gibraltar, that rocky fragment of Spain commanding the entrance to the Mediterranean which Britain had wrested from her as she had wrested also Minorca and Florida.So, in April, 1779, Spain joined France in war on Great Britain.France agreed not only to furnish an army for the invasion of England but never to make peace until Britain had handed back Gibraltar.The allies planned to seize and hold the Isle of Wight.England has often been threatened and yet has been so long free from the tramp of hostile armies that we are tempted to dismiss lightly such dangers.But in the summer of 1779 the danger was real.Of warships carrying fifty guns or more France and Spain together had one hundred and twenty-one, while Britain had seventy.The British Channel fleet for the defense of home coasts numbered forty ships of the line while France and Spain together had sixty-six.Nor had Britain resources in any other quarter upon which she could readily draw.In the West Indies she had twenty-one ships of the line while France had twenty-five.The British could not find comfort in any supposed superiority in the structure of their ships.Then and later, as Nelson admitted when he was fighting Spain, the Spanish ships were better built than the British.
