On one side reinforcements had been sent to North America under Arbuthnot in the early months of the year, and an attack on the Channel Islands had been beaten off. Sir Charles Hardy, an old officer, was drawn from retirement and appointed to succeed Keppel, when he and other admirals refused to serve. Hardy sailed with the grand fleet of thirty-five sail to the West on the 16th June, and remained at sea covering the trade and watching for the enemy. With bolder management he might easily have delivered a crushing stroke at D’Orvilliers at the Sisargas during the fifty mortal days while the French were waiting for the lagging Spaniards. D’Orvilliers and Córdoba reached as high as Plymouth on the 14th August, and their presence caused a lively panic in the country. But nothing came of it all, except the capture of the =Ardent=, 64, which fell into their hands by the bad management of her captain. First the allies were paralysed by calms, then the wind turned easterly on the 17th, and blew them out westward. They sighted Hardy, but failed to bring him to action or to prevent him reaching Spithead, and by the 14th September had broken up and had turned back to their respective homes. The four days’ command of the Channel for which Napoleon was to sigh had been theirs, but they did nothing with the opportunity. CHAPTER VIII THE AMERICAN WAR TILL THE FALL OF YORKTOWN AUTHORITIES.—As before. The course of the war in 1780 was dictated by the political conditions. France, disappointed by the futile end of the great demonstration in the Channel in 1779, did not renounce naval warfare in European waters, but was turning her attention towards giving more effectual aid to the Americans, and to efforts in combination with the Spaniards for the entire expulsion of England from the West Indies. Spain watching Minorca, and blocking Gibraltar, was prepared to co-operate with France in Europe and the Antilles, while making an effort to recover Florida. Don Bernardo de Galves, sailing from Havana, did achieve success in this minor and isolated operation. The most effectual defence for us would have been to blockade Brest, Ferrol, Cadiz, and Toulon. But with an equality of numbers against us and the peremptory obligation to give naval support to the army in America—the cancer which drained our strength in all these years—the high line could not be taken. Moreover, the rigid enforcement of our belligerent rights against neutrals at sea was steadily bringing us into collision with Holland, to the verge of a conflict with the Northern Powers, Russia, Prussia, and the Scandinavian States, and this would have been sheer ruin; for the revolt of the plantations had cut us off from the supply of American naval stores, and we were dependent on the Baltic for timber, pitch, and hemp, without which our fleets could not have been fitted for sea.