The allies
planned to seize and hold the Isle of Wight. England has often
been threatened and yet has been so long free from the tramp of
hostile armies that we are tempted to dismiss lightly such
dangers. But in the summer of 1779 the danger was real. Of
warships carrying fifty guns or more France and Spain together
had one hundred and twenty-one, while Britain had seventy. The
British Channel fleet for the defense of home coasts numbered
forty ships of the line while France and Spain together had
sixty-six. Nor had Britain resources in any other quarter upon
which she could readily draw. In the West Indies she had
twenty-one ships of the line while France had twenty-five. The
British could not find comfort in any supposed superiority in the
structure of their ships. Then and later, as Nelson admitted when
he was fighting Spain, the Spanish ships were better built than
the British.
Lurking in the background to haunt British thought was the
growing American navy. John Paul was a Scots sailor, who had been
a slave trader and subsequently master of a West India
merchantman, and on going to America had assumed the name of
Jones. He was a man of boundless ambition, vanity, and vigor, and
when he commanded American privateers he became a terror to the
maritime people from whom he sprang.
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