The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783

This lack of order, according to English accounts, threw out of action two of their fifty-gun ships, -- a circumstance which, while discreditable to Johnstone, confirmed Suffren's judgment in precipitating his attack. Had he received the aid upon which, after all deductions, he was justified in counting, he would have destroyed the English squadron; as it was, he saved the Cape Colony at Porto Praya. It is not surprising, therefore, that the French Court, notwithstanding its traditional sea policy and the diplomatic embarrassment caused by the violation of Portuguese neutrality, should have heartily and generously acknowledged a vigor of action to which it was unused in its admirals.

It has been said that Suffren, who had watched the cautious movements of D'Estaing in America, and had served in the Seven Years' War, attributed in part the reverses suffered by the French at sea to the introduction of Tactics, which he stigmatized as the veil of timidity; but that the results of the fight at Porto Praya, necessarily engaged without previous arrangement, convinced him that system and method had their use.^[171] Certainly his tactical combinations afterward were of a high order, especially in his earlier actions in the East (for he seems again to have abandoned them in the later fights under the disappointment caused by his captains' disaffection or blundering). But his great and transcendent merit lay in the clearness with which he recognized in the English fleets, the exponent of the British sea power, the proper enemy of the French fleet, to be attacked first and always when with any show of equality. Far from blind to the importance of those ulterior objects to which the action of the French navy was so constantly subordinated, he yet saw plainly that the way to assure those objects was not by economizing his own ships, but by destroying those of the enemy. Attack, not defense, was the road to sea power in his eyes; and sea power meant control of the issues upon the land, at least in regions distant from Europe. This view out of the English policy he had the courage to take, after forty years

[171] La Serre: Essais Hist. et Critiques sur la Marine Française.