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By Root 827 0

Hardy died. The sigh of relief was short, for Hardy’s successor, when Admiral Barrington refused the command, was the seventy-year-old Admiral Francis Geary, another withered apple, whom an officer described as “wholly debilitated in his faculties, his memory and judgment lost, wavering and indeterminate in everything.” In three months Geary was not dead but exhausted, reporting that he could not get out of bed in the morning and sending his doctor’s opinion confirming his request for leave. When Barrington, who was second in command, again refused to move up, the Admiralty searched its own premises for an officer not likely to collapse, and found a member of the Admiralty’s Board in his fifties, Vice-Admiral Darby, willing to take the command.

While Rodney had been held idle, a scramble in the West Indies had taken place when the French, after the stalemate at Ushant, redirected their offensive against British commerce from the Caribbean. By aggressive troop landings, they captured Dominica, lying between Martinique and Guadeloupe, giving them a strong position in the middle of the Leeward and Windward islands. At the same time, the British took back Ste. Lucie, which Rodney always considered the key base from which to observe Fort Royal in Martinique. In the following summer of 1779, more islands fell with the French capture of St. Vincent near the middle of the Windward chain and of Grenada at the bottom.

When Spain joined France against Britain in June, 1779, both powers had reached the conclusion that defeat of their common enemy could best be realized by attack on the heart rather than on the limbs; by direct invasion of the home islands rather than assault on her sea-lanes and wide-flung colonies, reaching across the world from Ceylon to Jamaica. The invasion was planned for the summer of 1779 with a combined fleet of 66, far greater strength than the 45 ships that Britain could muster in the Channel for defense. What saved her was a worse case of French ministerial indecision and sloppy management than her own. Correspondence between Versailles and Madrid had been under way since December, but coordination of the fleets and commanders was on paper, not in practice, which proved a serious flaw. D’Orvilliers, the French commander, sailed for the rendezvous under hurried orders the first week in June and was not joined by the main Spanish fleet until July 23, by which time he had been cruising for six weeks doing nothing, with ships already short of provisions and water. They were poorly manned, he complained, with “mediocre captains,” of whom there is “a still greater number on this cruise than in the last one.” Sickness, which had already taken a terrible toll among the Spaniards, was spreading among his crews. Further time was lost in the translation of signal books and orders which had not been prepared in peace time. Conscious of too little joint experience to expect good maneuvering, D’Orvilliers wrote that he would have to place his hopes on “bravery and firmness.”

Alarm gripped England as people caught sight of the white-winged herd of enemy sails coming up the Channel. A Royal Proclamation ordered horses and cattle to be withdrawn from the coasts, booms to be placed across harbors, troops to be encamped on the south coast. Weather again came to the aid of the English, not like the storm that had scattered the Armada of Philip II but its opposite—a calm that held the enemy motionless within sight of Plymouth. The situation of the French fleet, D’Orvilliers reported, “becomes worse every day” because of the epidemic of sickness and the dwindling water supply. On top of this, a frigate arrived bringing a total change of orders for a landing at Falmouth, on the coast of Cornwall, instead of on the Isle of Wight as was the original plan. Furthermore, D’Orvilliers was told that the King wished the fleet to remain at sea “for several months” and that a supply convoy was “about to leave” Brest to meet him. To change a vast plan of operations at the last moment when army and navy were already at sea was hardly a