On the 30th April Watson and Clive went on from the coast of Malabar to that of Coromandel on the east. By the 20th June they reached Madras. The French Government, not being as yet ready for war, had recalled Dupleix and had brought a pause in the conflict of the companies. Watson’s next service was to carry Clive to Bengal to revenge the Black Hole of Calcutta, and to begin the conquest of India. But as this service became rapidly connected with the war against France, and as the operations in the eastern seas lay very much apart, I shall turn from them till they can be taken up again, and connected with the general movements of the world-wide conflict. While Admiral Watson’s squadron was recruiting from its long voyage at Bombay, warlike operations, the forerunners of open war, were beginning on the Atlantic. The appeals of the colonists who found themselves unable to expel the French from the post they had established on the Ohio—Fort Duquesne on the site of what is now Pittsburg—had at last induced the British Government to take action. In December 1754 Commodore Keppel, a gentleman of the Albemarle family, who had sailed as midshipman with Anson and was destined to play a prominent part in coming years, left the Downs with a body of troops under command of Braddock. The expedition reached Hampton Roads by the 20th February 1755. Its disastrous end, in an ill-planned and worse-directed attack on Fort Duquesne in July of this year, is a well-known episode of our colonial history. The sending of Braddock stimulated the French Government to reinforce its garrisons in Canada. On the 3rd May of 1755 the Lieutenant-General Count de Macnémara sailed from Brest with nine sail of the line fully armed and seven frigates. He had under his protection eleven sail of the line fitted as transports and full of troops. These vessels were armed with 24 or 22 guns only, or as the French expression has it, _en flûte_. To be armed _en flûte_ was to be armed like a flyboat with guns only on the upper deck. Macnémara saw his charge well out into the ocean, and then returned to Brest with six of the liners and three of the frigates. The other warships and the transports held on to Canada under the command of Dubois de Lamotte.