The admiral had met his accustomed fortune in weather when he was least able to contend with his implacable enemy. He had left Plymouth on the 9th June with one 90-gun ship, eleven 74, one of 64, and a single frigate. If numbers were all in war, while speed and efficiency were little, his squadron had been more than enough to sweep D’Estaign from the coast of America. But Byron sailed late, and his ships were ill provided in all ways. The crews had been made up by drafts of prisoners who brought the jail fever with them. So bad was the condition of the fleet that it was unable to contend with a summer storm which broke on it in the middle of the North Atlantic on the 3rd July. Some of the ships returned home, and all were scattered. Byron himself struggled on alone toward Sandy Hook till the 18th August, when he sighted the French fleet, and turned back to Halifax, where he found one only of his command. Except the =Cornwall=, none reached Howe’s flag in time to be of service. Those which limped in later, and by degrees, were crippled in rigging, and foul with putrid fevers. On the 29th July, the day before the =Cornwall= joined his flag, Howe heard that D’Estaign had been sighted off Rhode Island, to the east of New York. The object of the Frenchman was manifestly to co-operate with the insurgents in attacking the British force then occupying the island, under the command of General Pigott. Howe was the last man in the world to be deterred by mere inferiority of numbers from exerting himself in the king’s service, and outmatched as he still was, he prepared to support General Pigott. Contrary winds detained him at New York till the 6th August. On the 9th he was off the southern end of Rhode Island. Rhode Island is one of several which nearly block up a great oblong bay opening to the south in the coast, which here runs nearly due east and west. It is separated from the mainland on the east by the Sakonnet Channel, and from the island of Conanicut on the west, by the Eastern Passage. The Western Passage divides Conanicut from the mainland, and leads to the land-locked waters of Narragansett Bay. The town of Newport stands nearly at the south-western end of Rhode Island, and here General Pigott had concentrated his troops when the American general, Sullivan, passed over from the mainland to attack him. D’Estaign had anchored within Brenton’s Ledge, at the south-western point of Rhode Island, on the 29th July. He sent two frigates up the Sakonnet Channel and two liners up the Western Passage to Narragansett Bay, and then entered the Eastern Passage on the 8th August, anchoring above the town of Newport, at Goat Island, between Conanicut and Rhode Island. His appearance in overwhelming strength sufficed to gain him a naval success without fighting. A small British flotilla, consisting of the frigates and sloops =Orpheus=, =Lark=, =Juno=, =Flora=, and =Falcon=, was caught at hopeless disadvantage, and was burnt by the