be correct, it should have established the invincibility of men who under such prodigious disparity of suffering could maintain their position so tenaciously.  After the loss of Mud Island, Red Bank could not be held to advantage, and it was evacuated on the 21st, when an attack was imminent.  The American vessels retreated up the river; but they were cornered, and of course ultimately were destroyed.  The obstructions being now removed, the British water communications by the line of the Delaware were established,—­eight weeks after the occupation of the city, which was to be evacuated necessarily six months later.

While these things were passing, Howe’s triumph was marred by the news of Burgoyne’s surrender on the 17th of October.  For this he could not but feel that the home government must consider him largely responsible; for in the Chesapeake, too late to retrieve his false step, he had received a letter from the minister of war saying that, whatever else he undertook, support to Burgoyne was the great object to be kept in view.

During the operations round Philadelphia, Sir Henry Clinton in New York had done enough to show what strong probabilities of success would have attended an advance up the Hudson, by the twenty thousand men whom Howe could have taken with him.  Starting on the 3d of October with three thousand troops, accompanied by a small naval division of frigates, Clinton in a week had reached West Point, fifty miles up the river.  The American fortifications along the way were captured, defences levelled, stores and shipping burned; while an insignificant detachment, with the light vessels, went fifty miles further up, and there destroyed more military stores without encountering any resistance worth mentioning.  Certainly, had Howe taken the same line of operations, he would have had to reckon with Washington’s ten thousand men which confronted him on the march from the Chesapeake to Philadelphia; but his flank would have been covered, up to Albany, by a navigable stream on either side of which he could operate by that flying bridge which the presence and control of the navy continually constituted.  Save the fortifications, which Clinton easily carried, there was no threat to his communications or to his flank, such as the hill country of New Jersey had offered and Washington had skilfully utilised.

The campaign of 1777 thus ended for the British with a conspicuous disaster, and with an apparent success which was as disastrous as a failure.  At its close they held Narragansett Bay, the city and harbour of New York, and the city of Philadelphia.  The first was an admirable naval base, especially for sailing ships, for the reasons given by Rodney.  The second was then, as it is now, the greatest military position on the Atlantic coast of the United States; and although the two could not communicate by land, they did support each other as naval stations in a war essentially dependent upon maritime power.