The Marine Committee naturally planned and carried out naval enterprises which had in view two or more forms of secondary operations. Sometimes it ordered its vessels to take stations at sea where they would be in position to intercept both the West India trade, and the enemy’s transports plying between New York and England. Often it left the specific object of a cruise to the Navy Board at Boston, or to the commander of a ship, and issued merely the general order to proceed to sea and cruise against the enemy. Any plan of the Committee which was directed towards meeting an immediate emergency was rarely carried out. The movements of the vessels were rendered uncertain by reason of depleted crews, deficient equipments, and the position of the British fleets. The Committee was often in the dark as to the exact state of a vessel in New England with reference to its preparation for sea. Consequently it made many plans and gave many orders which could not be put into operation. The telegraph, cable, and rapid postal services have revolutionized the direction of naval movements. In prize-getting the Marine Committee’s most successful years were 1776 and 1779. Beginning with 1776 the number of prizes taken by the Continental vessels for each year of the Committee’s incumbency was, respectively, sixty, twenty, twenty, and fifty. The fifty prizes captured in 1779 were probably more valuable than the one hundred taken in the other three years. As regards the number of Continental vessels lost, the years 1776 and 1779, when the fleet was decreased by but three ships, again prove to be the most fortunate years. In 1777 and 1778 twenty-six vessels, ten of which were frigates, were lost.[215] With the memory of the misfortunes of the past two years in mind, well might the Marine Committee write, towards the end of 1778, of “the bad success that hath hitherto attended our Navy.” In May, 1778, it wrote to the Navy Board at Boston, that the “Committee are entirely of Opinion with you that it will be proper to send out a Collected force to Cruise against our enemies that we recover the injured reputation of our Navy and the losses we have sustained.”[216]