If the naval strategy on both sides was feeble the tactics were equally so. The contrast between the fighting of Blake, Monk, Tromp and de Ruyter and that of the admirals of this period is striking. For example, on May 1, 1689, the English admiral Herbert and the French admiral Châteaurenault fought an indecisive action in Bantry Bay, Ireland. After considerable powder had been shot away without the loss of a ship on either side, the French went back to protect their transports in the bay; Herbert also withdrew, and was made Earl of Torrington for his "victory." This same officer commanding a Dutch and English fleet encountered the French under Tourville off Beachy Head on the south coast of England (July 10, 1690). It is true that Tourville's force was stronger, but Torrington acted with no enterprise and was thoroughly beaten. At the same time the French admiral showed lack of push in following up his victory, which might have been crushing. By this time the line ahead order of fighting had become a fetich on both sides. The most noted naval battle of this war is that of La Hogue (May 29, 1692), which has been celebrated as a great British victory. In this action an allied fleet of 99 were opposed to a French fleet of 44 under Tourville. Tourville offered battle under such odds only because he had imperative orders from his king to fight the enemy. During the action the French did not lose a single ship, but in the four days' retreat the vessels became separated in trying to find shelter and fifteen were destroyed or taken. This was a severe blow to the the French navy but by no means decisive. The subsequent inactivity of the fleet was due to the demands of the war on land.
As the war became more and more a continental affair, Louis was compelled to utilize all his resources for his military campaigns. For this reason the splendid fleet with which he had begun the war gradually disappeared from the sea. Some of these men of war were lent to great privateersmen like Jean Bart and Du Guay Trouin, who took out powerful squadrons of from five to ten ships of the line, strong enough to overcome the naval escorts of a British convoy, and ravaged English commerce. In this matter of protecting shipping the naval strategy was as vacillating and blind as in everything else. Nevertheless no mere commerce destroying will serve to win the control of the sea, and despite the losses in trade and the low ebb to which English naval efficiency had sunk, the British flag still dominated the ocean routes while the greater part of the French fleet rotted in port.
In this war of the League of Augsburg, Louis XIV was fighting practically all Europe, and the strain was too great for a nation already weakened by a long series of wars. By the terms of peace which he found himself obliged to accept, he lost nearly everything that he had gained by conquest during his long reign.
Wars of the Spanish and the Austrian Succession
After a brief interval of peace war blazed out again over the question whether a French Bourbon should be king of Spain,—the War of the Spanish Succession, 1702-1713. England's aim in this war was to acquire some of the Spanish colonies in America and to prevent any loss of trading privileges hitherto enjoyed by the English and the Dutch. But as it turned out nothing of importance was accomplished in the western hemisphere except by the terms of peace. The French and Spanish attempted no major operations by sea. But the English navy captured Minorca, with its important harbor of Port Mahon, and Rooke, with more initiative than he had ever shown before in his career, took Gibraltar (August 4, 1704). These two prizes made Great Britain for the first time a Mediterranean power, and the fact that she held the gateway to the inland sea was of great importance in subsequent naval history.
In addition to these captures the terms of peace (the Treaty of Utrecht) yielded to England from the French Newfoundland, the Hudson Bay territory, and Nova Scotia. All that the French had left on the eastern coast of Canada was Cape Breton Island, with Louisburg, which was the key to the St. Lawrence. As for commercial privileges, England had gained from the Portuguese, who had been allies in the war, a practical monopoly of their carrying trade; and from France she had taken the entire monopoly of the slave trade to the Spanish American colonies which had been formerly granted by Spain to France. Holland got nothing out of the war as affecting her interests at sea,—not even a trading post. Her alliance with Great Britain had become as some one has called it, that of "the giant and the dwarf." At the conclusion of the War of the Spanish Succession, to quote the words of Mahan, "England was the sea power; there was no second."
In this war as in the preceding, French privateersmen made great inroads on British commerce, and some of these privateering operations were conducted on a grand scale. For example, Du Guay Trouin took a squadron of six ships of the line and two frigates, together with 2000 troops, across the Atlantic and attacked Rio Janeiro. He had little difficulty in forcing its submission and extorting a ransom of $400,000. The activities of the privateers led to a clause in the treaty of peace requiring the French to destroy the fortifications of the port of Dunkirk, which was notorious as the nest of these corsairs.
The War of the Austrian Succession, 1740-1748, was another of the dynastic quarrels of this age, with France and Spain arrayed against England. It has no naval interest for our purposes here. The peace of 1748, however, leaving things exactly as they were when the war began, settled none of the existing grudge between Great Britain and France. Eight years later, hostilities began again in the Seven Years' War, 1756-1763, in which Great Britain entered on the side of Prussia against a great coalition of Continental powers headed by France.
The Seven Years' War
The naval interest of this war is centered in the year 1759, when France, having lost Louisburg on account of England's control of the sea, decided to concentrate naval and military forces on an invasion of England. Before the plans for this projected thrust were completed, Quebec also had fallen to the British. The attempted invasion of 1759 is not so well known as that of Napoleon in 1805, but it furnished the pattern that Napoleon copied and had a better chance of success than his. In brief, a small squadron under the famous privateer Thurot was to threaten the Scotch and Irish coasts, acting as a diversion to draw off the British fleet. Meanwhile the squadron at Toulon was to dodge the British off that port, pass the Straits and join Conflans, who had the main French fleet at Brest. The united forces were then to cover the crossing of the troops in transports and flatboats to the English coast.