od chose to believe that the
order for line ahead still held until the signal was repeated,
whereupon he bore down. As the French turned away at the same time,
to keep their distance, Hood contributed nothing to the fighting
of the day. At sunset the battle ended. The British had lost 90
killed and 246 wounded; the French, a total of 200. Several of the
British ships were badly damaged, one of which was in a sinking
condition and had to be burned. The two fleets continued on an
easterly course about three miles apart, and for five days more
the two maneuvered without fighting. Graves was too much injured by
the first day's encounter to attack again and de Grasse was content
to let him alone. Graves still had an opportunity to cut back and
enter the bay, taking a position from which it would have been
hard to dislodge him and effecting the main object of the expedition
by holding the mouth of the Chesapeake. But this apparently did not
occur to him. De Grasse, who had imperiled Washington's campaign
by cruising so far from the entrance, finally returned on the 11th,
and found that the Newport squadron had arrived safely the day
before. When Graves saw that the French fleet was now increased to
36 line-of-battle ships, he gave up hope of winning the bay and
returned to New York, leaving Cornwallis to his fate. A little
over a month later, October 19, the latter surrendered, and with
his sword passed the last hope of subduing the American revolution.

This battle of the Capes, or Lynnhaven, has never until recent
times been given its true historical perspective, largely because
in itself it was a rather tame affair. But as the historian Reich[1]
observes, "battles, like men, are important not for their dramatic
splendor but for their efficiency and consequences.... The battle
off Cape Henry had ultimate effects infinitely more important than
Waterloo." Certainly there never was a more striking example of
the "influence of sea power" on a campaign. Just at the crisis of
the American Revolution the French navy, by denying to the British
their communications by sea, struck the decisive blow of the war.
This was the French _revanche_ for the humiliation of 1763.

[Footnote 1: FOUNDATIONS OF MODERN EUROPE, p. 24.]

The British failure in this action was due to a dull commander
in chief carrying out a blundering attack based on the Fighting
Instructions. Blame must fall also on his second in command, Hood,
who, though a bril