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By Root 1015 0

age, and perhaps also the hostility of his colleagues, was he relieved, to be replaced in 1781 in the naval command in America by a cousin of Lord North. Unable to acknowledge even now that the hour was dark, requiring something more than the husk of an ancient mariner, the Navy Board could do no better in its limited range of choices than delve into its collection of old men of the sea and select Sir Thomas Graves. At sixty-seven, considered old age in those days, he was well past his prime and past the prime, too, of combat seamanship. Graves’s main characteristic was a highly developed caution, and his career had already skated within a hair of the court-martial verdict of “negligence” such as condemned Admiral Byng, but which in Graves’s case had judiciously settled for “error of judgment.” That too can be fatal. If negative qualities can ever be said to be determining, Graves makes the point.

The worst mistake in America, in Rodney’s opinion, had been the “fatal measure” of the evacuation of Rhode Island, which Clinton had given up in October, 1779, for the sake of concentrating his forces on the southern campaign—or, as he later claimed, under the “enforced” advice of Admiral Arbuthnot, who said Rhode Island “was of no use to the Navy and he could not spare a single ship for its defense.” British departure left Newport to the French, with the serious loss of Narragansett, which Rodney called “the best and noblest harbour in America, capable of containing the whole navy of Britain” and from where, he added in a grand vision, the navy “could blockade the three capital cities of America, namely Boston, New York and Philadelphia” in 48 hours.

Rodney’s greatest frustration was the failure of his “most strenuous endeavours” to persuade his associates Clinton and Arbuthnot to undertake an offensive for the recovery of Rhode Island. Arbuthnot would not put the navy at such a risk and the animus between him and Clinton precluded any agreed-upon action. “The fleet would never see Rhode Island,” asserted a naval officer, “because the General hates the Admiral.” Clinton said it was now too late, the French on reoccupation having strongly fortified it, and while it might have been taken before with 6,000 men, it would now take 15,000, which he could not spare for fear of an expected attack by Washington’s army on New York of which he had learned from intercepted letters delivered to him by Loyalist agents. The same story of intercepted letters is told in relation to Allied plans for the final campaign. For many years, statements have circulated that they were a deliberate plant by Washington to keep Clinton paralyzed, but subsequent researches have disproved this deception by the Commander-in-Chief.

Rodney had an idea, inventive and outrageous and characteristic of his readiness for independent action without reference to orders, of how to dislodge the French from Rhode Island. In a discussion with Clinton of which Clinton kept a record, he proposed—on the assumption, as everyone believed, that another French squadron was on the way to join de Ternay, commanding the French naval forces at Newport—to let some British ships under French colors appear off Block Island at a time when the wind was fair for de Ternay to emerge, and let them be engaged in a sham fight with Arbuthnot’s ships. De Ternay would certainly come out to assist his supposed compatriots and, once lured into battle, could be effectively demolished by the combined force of Rodney’s and the New York squadrons. Clearly this was not a man who would have hesitated to use the French flag in attacking St. Eustatius. Doubtless the plan was too much for the safe turn of mind of Clinton and Arbuthnot, for nothing more was heard of it and the “noble bay” of Rodney’s visionary sweep remained in French control.

On departure from America, Rodney wrote to Sandwich to report that the war was being conducted with a “slackness inconceivable in every branch,” and taking particular note of Clinton’s inertia. Washington’s intercepted letters, whether genuine or a plant, affected