of August between Sir Hyde Parker and the Dutch admiral Zoutman, both being engaged in protecting trade; but Holland did not affect the general course of the war. The allies again failed to make a vigorous attack on the British forces in the Channel. They could not even prevent Admiral George Darby from relieving Gibraltar and Minorca in April. The second of these places was closely invested later on, and was compelled to surrender on the 5th of February 1782. But a vigorous policy was carried out by France in the West Indies and America, while she began a most resolute attack on the British position in the East Indies.
In the West Indies Rodney, having received news of the breach with Holland early in the year, took the island of St Eustatius, which had been a great depot of contraband of war, on the 3rd of February. The British admiral was accused of applying himself so entirely to seizing and selling his booty that he would not allow his second in command, Sir Samuel Hood, who had recently joined him, to take proper measures to impede the arrival of French forces known to be on their way to Martinique. The French admiral, the count de Grasse, reached the island with reinforcements in April. Until July he was engaged in a series of skilful operations directed to menacing the British islands while he avoided being brought to battle by Rodney. In July he sailed for the coast of North America, whither he was followed in August by Sir S. Hood, Rodney having been compelled to return home in ill-health.
On the coast of North America the war came to its crisis. In the earlier part of the year the British at New York and the French at Newport continued to watch one another. In April the British admiral Arbuthnot did indeed succeed in baffling an attempt of the French to carry reinforcements to the American cause in Virginia. The action he fought off the capes of Virginia on the 16th of April was ill conducted, but his main purpose was achieved. Washington, who was wisely anxious to concentrate attack on one or other of the centres of British power in Virginia or New York, had to wait till the arrival of Grasse before he could see his ideas applied. The French admiral gave the allies a superiority of naval strength on the coast of Virginia, and Lord Cornwallis, the British commander, was beleaguered in Yorktown. Admiral Thomas Graves, Arbuthnot’s successor, who had been joined by Hood from the West Indies, endeavoured to drive off the French fleet. But the feeble battle he fought on the 5th of September failed to shake the French hold on the Chesapeake, and Grasse having been reinforced, Graves sailed away. Yorktown fell on the 19th of October, and the war was settled as far as the coast of North America was concerned.
The French admiral, having rendered this vital service to his ally, now returned to the West Indies, whither he was followed by Hood, and resumed the attacks on the British islands. In January and February 1782 he conquered St Christopher, in spite of the most determined opposition of Hood, who with a much inferior force first drove him from his anchorage at Basseterre, and then repulsed his repeated attacks. The next purpose of the French was to combine with the Spaniards for an attack on Jamaica. Sir George Rodney, having returned to his command with reinforcements, baffled this plan by the series of operations which culminated in the battle of the 12th of April 1782. (See Saints, Battle of.) No further operations of note occurred in the West Indies. At home Howe relieved Gibraltar for the last time in September and October 1782.
The war in the East Indies formed a separate series of episodes. In 1778 the British authorities had little difficulty in seizing the French settlement of Pondicherry. A naval engagement of a very feeble kind took place on the 10th of August in the Bay of Bengal, between the British naval officer in command and M. de Tronjoly. But the French were too weak in these seas for offensive movements, and therefore remained quiescent at Bourbon and Mauritius till the beginning of 1782. In the spring of 1781 the bailli de Suffren was sent to the East with a small squadron; on his way he fell upon a British force which had been sent to take the Cape from the Dutch, and which he found in the Portuguese anchorage of Porto Praya, on the 16th of April. Having provided for the security of the Cape, Suffren went on to the French islands. He sailed from them early in 1782 to carry out a vehement attack on the British forces in the Bay of Bengal. From the 17th of February 1782 to the 20th of June 1783 he fought a series of fine actions against Sir Edward Hughes, by which he secured a marked superiority on the water. Though he had no port in which to refit and no ally save Hyder Ali, he kept the sea and did not even return to the French islands during the north-easterly monsoon. Suffren failed in his main purpose, which was to make such a capture as would put his government in a strong position during the negotiations for peace. But his capture of Trincomalee in July 1782 in spite of Sir Edward Hughes, and the heavy loss he inflicted on the British fleet in several of the actions he fought, constitute the most honourable part of the French naval operations in the war.
Authorities.—The Influence of Sea Power upon History, Captain Mahan, gives the best critical examination of the naval aspects of the war. The French side will be found in the Histoire de la marine française pendant la Guerre de l’Indépendance américaine (Paris, 1877), by Captain Chevalier. For accounts of the American navy see C. O. Paullin, The Navy of the American Revolution (Chicago, 1906); E. S. Maclay, History of the U.S. Navy, vol. i. (New York, 1897): C. H. Lincoln, Naval Records of the American Revolution (Washington, 1906); and Edward Field, Esek Hopkins, Commander-in-chief of the Continental Navy during the American Revolution (Providence, R.I., 1898). For details of actions the reader may be referred to Beatson’s Naval and Military Memoirs of Great Britain from 1727 to 1783 (London, 1804), and to Sir W. Laird Clowes’s The Royal Navy: A History (London, 1897, &c.). (D. H.)
AMERICAN WAR OF 1812. The war between the United States and Great Britain, commonly known as “of 1812,” began by the American declaration of war on the 18th of June of that year, and lasted till the beginning of 1815. The treaty of peace signed at Ghent on the 24th of December 1814 was ratified by the president of the United States on the 17th of February 1815. These two years and a half of conflict were filled with isolated encounters which can hardly be reduced to coherent and ordered operations. Although the outbreak of war had been preceded by years of angry diplomatic dispute, the United States were absolutely unready, while Great Britain was still hard pressed by the hostility of Napoleon, and was compelled to retain the greater part of her forces and her best crews in European waters, till the ruin of the Grande Armée in Russia and the rising of Germany left her free to send an overwhelming force of ships to American waters.
The forces actually available on the American side when the war began consisted of a small squadron of very fine frigates and sloops in an efficient state. Twenty-two was the extreme limit of the naval force the States were able to commission. The paper strength of the army was 35,000, but the service was voluntary and unpopular, while there was an almost total want of trained and experienced officers. The available strength was a bare third of the nominal. The militia, called in to aid the regulars, proved untrustworthy. They objected to serve beyond the limits of their states, were not amenable to discipline, and behaved as a rule very ill in the presence of the enemy. On the British side, the naval force in American waters under Sir John Borlase Warren, who took up the general command on the 26th of September 1812, consisted of ninety-seven vessels in all, of which eleven were of the line and thirty-four were frigates, a power much greater than the national navy of America, but inadequate to the blockade of the long coast from New Brunswick to Florida. The total number of British troops present in Canada in July 1812 was officially stated to be 5004, consisting in part of Canadians.
The scene of operations naturally divided into three sections:—(1) the ocean; (2) the Canadian frontier, from Lake Huron, by Lakes Erie and Ontario, the course of the St Lawrence and Lake Champlain; (3) the coast of the United States. As the operations on these three fields had little interaction on one another, it will be more convenient to take them separately than to follow the confusing chronological order.
