Strange to say, this pious suggestion had been mostly
answered before it had been made. Disaster after disaster
fell upon the doomed French fleet from the very day it
sailed. The admiral was the Duc d'Anville, one of the
illustrious La Rochefoucaulds, whose family name is known
wherever French is read. He was not wanting either in
courage or good sense; but, like his fleet, he had little
experience at sea. The French ships, as usual, were better
than the British. But the French themselves were a nation
of landsmen. They had no great class of seamen to draw
upon at will, a fact which made an average French crew
inferior to an average British one. This was bad enough.
But the most important point of all was that their fleets
were still worse than their single ships. The British
always had fleets at sea, constantly engaged in combined
manoeuvres. The French had not; and, in face of the
British command of the sea, they could not have them.
The French harbours were watched so closely that the
French fleets were often attacked and defeated before
they had begun to learn how to work together.
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