their transports on being informed that she was one of a large convoy which had sailed the latter end of the preceding month for our relief.”  The admiral himself had been carried beyond and gone into Tetuan, in Morocco, whence he finally arrived on January 26th, having sent on a supply fleet to Minorca, the garrison of which was undergoing a severance from the outer world more extreme even than that of Gibraltar.  Upon the return thence of the convoying ships he again put to sea, February 13th, with the entire fleet, which accompanied him three days sail to the westward, when it parted company for England; he with only four ships-of-the-line pursuing his way to his station.  On March 27th he reached Santa Lucia, where he found seventeen of-the-line, composing his command.  Three weeks later he met the enemy; barely three months, almost to a day, after the affair at St. Vincent.

The antecedent circumstances of the war, and the recent history of the French navy, gave a singular opportuneness of occasion, and of personal fitness, to Rodney’s arrival at this moment.  The humiliations of the Seven Years War, with the loss of so much of the French colonial empire, traceable in chief measure to naval decadence, had impressed the French government with the need of reviving their navy, which had consequently received a material development in quality, as well as in quantity, unparalleled since the days of Colbert and Seignelay, near a century before.  Concomitant with this had been a singular progress in the theory of naval evolutions, and of their handmaid, naval signalling, among French officers; an advance to which the lucid, speculative, character of the national genius greatly contributed.  Although they as yet lacked practice, and were numerically too few, the French officers were well equipped by mental resources, by instruction and reflection, to handle large fleets; and they now had large fleets to handle.  No such conjunction had occurred since Tourville; none such recurred during the Revolution.

The condition was unique in naval history of the sail period.  To meet it, assuming an approach to equality in contending fleets, was required, first, a commander-in-chief, and then a competent body of officers.  The latter the British had only in the sense of fine seamen and gallant men.  In courage there is no occasion to institute comparisons between the two nations; in kind there may have been a difference, but certainly not in degree.  The practical superiority of seamanship in the British may be taken as a set-off to the more highly trained understanding of military principles and methods on the part of their enemy.  For commander-in-chief, there were at this time but two, Howe and Rodney, whose professional equipment, as shown in practice, fitted them to oppose the French methods.  Of these Rodney was the better, because possessed of a quicker power of initiative, and also of that personal severity required to enforce strict conformity of action among indifferent or sullen subordinates.