The Major Operations of the Navies in the War of American Independence

garrison reaching Yorktown on the 22d of August. Cornwallis's force was then seven thousand troops; and there were with him besides about a thousand seamen, belonging to some half-dozen small vessels, which were shut up in the York by the arrival from Haiti of the French fleet under de Grasse, which on August 30th, 1781, had anchored in Lynnhaven Bay, inside of Cape Henry.

On July 2d Arbuthnot had sailed for England, leaving the command at New York to Rear-Admiral Thomas Graves. Graves on the same day wrote to Rodney by the brig Active, that intercepted dispatches of the enemy had revealed that a large division from the West Indies was to arrive on the American coast during the summer, to cooperate with the force already in Newport. Rodney, on the other hand, dispatched to New York on July 7th the Swallow sloop, 16, with word that, if he sent reinforcements from the West Indies, they would be ordered to make the Capes of the Chesapeake, and to coast thence to New York. He asked, therefore, that cruisers with information might be stationed along that route. Two days later, having then certain news that de Grasse had sailed for Cap François, he sent this intelligence to Sir Peter Parker at Jamaica, and gave Sir Samuel Hood preparatory orders to command a reinforcement of ships destined for the continent. This, however, was limited in numbers to fifteen sail of the line, Rodney being misled by his intelligence, which gave fourteen ships as the size of the French division having the same destination, and reported that de Grasse himself would convoy the trade from Cap François to France. On the 24th instructions were issued for Hood to proceed on this duty. He was first to convoy the trade from Jamaica as far as the passage between Cuba and Haiti, and thence to make the utmost speed to the Chesapeake. A false rumor, of French ships reaching Martinique from Europe, slightly delayed this