have fallen into our hands two days before De Grasse got there with his twenty-one sail;” to which Rodney, in full strength, would again have opposed twenty. “Now the enemy may do as they will;” for they were united in Martinique, twenty-eight to twenty.  In short, Rodney saw at Tobago only the one French detachment; Hood saw therein the definition of the enemy’s purpose, the necessity laid on them to fly to the aid of their exposed division, and the chance to anticipate them,—­to gain an advantage first, and to beat them afterwards.

Rodney’s tentative and inadequate action was not improbably induced partly by the “extreme want of water,” which he reported in his despatches; and this again was due to failure to prepare adequately during the period of respite foreseen by Hood, but unnoted by his own preoccupied mind.  The result is instructive.  Drake fell in with the main body of the French, and of course had to retire,—­fortunate in regaining his commander-in-chief unmolested.  De Grasse’s movement had become known in Barbados, and as soon as Drake appeared Rodney sailed with the fleet, but upon arriving off Tobago, on June 5th, learned that it had surrendered on the 2d.  Its fall he duly attributed to local neglect and cowardice; but evidently the presence of the British fleet might have had some effect.  He then returned to Barbados, and during the passage the hostile fleets sighted each other on the 9th,—­twenty British to twenty-three French; but Rodney was unwilling to engage lest he might be entangled with the foul ground about Grenada.  As that island was then in the enemy’s hands, he could get no anchorage there, and so might be driven to leeward of his opponent, exposing Barbados.  It is perhaps needless to point out that had he been to windward of Martinique when De Grasse first arrived, as Hood wished, he would have been twenty to twenty, with clear ground, and the antagonist embarrassed with convoy.  His present perplexities, in their successive phases, can be seen throughout to be the result of sticking to St. Eustatius, not only physically, but mentally.

And so it was with what followed.  On reaching Barbados again, he had to report that the French were back in Martinique, and now twenty-eight through the arming of the ships en flute.  Despite their superiority, “they do not venture to move,” he said somewhat sneeringly, and doubtless his “fleet in being” had an effect on them; but they were also intent on a really great operation.  On July 5th, De Grasse sailed for Cap Francois in Hayti, there to organize a visit to the continent in support of Washington’s operations.  Rodney, pursuant to his sagacious plan of the previous years, sent also a detachment of fourteen ships under Hood, which he endeavored, but unsuccessfully, to have increased by some from Jamaica.  That De Grasse would take his whole fleet to North America, leaving none in the West Indies, nor sending any to Europe, was a step that neither Rodney nor Hood foresaw.  The miscalculation cannot be imputed to either as an error at this time.  It was simply one of the deceptions to which the defensive is ever liable; but it is fairly chargeable to the original fault whereby the French admiral was enabled to enter Fort Royal uninjured in the previous April.  From the time his fleet was concentrated, the British had to accept the defensive with its embarrassments.