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’s request an “official letter” and had apparently gained for him the King’s permission for leave, but hopes that “you will not avail yourself of your permission to leave your command in the present critical situation of our affairs. The whole government, and the public in general, are satisfied while you retain your command.” The war, Sandwich asserts with the benighted self-confidence of a minister who knows nothing, nor had ever bothered to learn anything of the field or the opponent, “cannot last much longer.” About French intervention, Sandwich was relaxed and casual, offering his opinion that “it is most probable that the French fleet in your seas will go to North America in the hurricane months.…” This demonstrated a poor sense of timing, for the hurricane months were still five months off, and the French, who had heard the urgency of the American call, had no need to wait until then—nor did they. “No one can so well judge,” Sandwich concluded, “of the propriety of following them as yourself,” and he leaves Rodney to be guided “by your own feelings.” Rodney’s feelings, as confided to his wife on March 18, were simple: “I must leave this country in June at farthest.” He mentions his severe gout as the reason plus “a very painful complaint” (prostate trouble). It was at this time that he gave vent to his vengeful feelings about the traitorous traders on St. Eustatius: “I cannot express the fatigue I have suffered on this island. Had I not stayed here, every villainy would be practiced by the persons who call themselves English.” It was now, in the irritable distress of his illness, that he issued his wrathful threat to leave the island “a mere desert.” He added the sad hope that would soon miscarry: “If my great convoy of prizes arrive safe in England, I shall be happy as, exclusive of satisfying all debts, something will be left for my dear children.”

On March 21, Sandwich forwarded an intelligence report to Rodney telling of a fleet of 25 sail about to leave from Brest, though Sandwich could not say where it was destined; probably, he suggested, to the West Indies and afterward to North America or to join the Spanish at Cádiz to “check your conquests.” His supposition was correct, if not alert, for this was de Grasse departing with his fleet on the first leg of his journey to America, which was already public knowledge. Mme. du Deffand, Walpole’s faithful correspondent on all the gossip of the French capital, had already written to him about a regiment in Saint-Simon’s command “which is one of those destined for America. Voilà nouvelles publiques.” (This is public news.) Public as it was, the report of the enemy’s approach, which was important for Rodney to know, did not reach him until a week after de Grasse had already arrived in the Leeward Islands and had met Hood in combat.

The Admiralty’s dispatches were sent by the cutter Swallow, evidently under an impression of speed derived from her name. Though fast for its size, a cutter, a single-masted vessel, carried only a small portion of the sail area of a frigate in which to catch the propelling winds. In contrast, the Americans, for the urgent correspondence between Rochambeau and de Grasse, used the French frigate Concorde, which zipped back and forth between Boston and the Leeward Islands in rapid transits of sixteen and eighteen days. The difference in sailing time was not simply a matter of ships but because the British, certain they knew best about everything oceanic, persisted in bucking the Gulf Stream. Flowing in a peculiar northerly circular course, the current slowed progress from Europe to the Caribbean while its swift current in the Atlantic shortened mail time from Europe to America. Traced first by whalers of Nantucket who followed the track of the whales, the course and speed of the stream was made known to Benjamin Franklin when he was Postmaster General by his cousin Captain Timothy Folger of Nantucket for use by the masters of mail packets crossing the ocean. Folger explained why American captains of merchant ships made faster time from London