alth temporarily to give up the West
Indian command and return to England. In the spring of 1782 he was again
sent to the West Indies, at a moment when the situation of affairs was most
menacing for British power beyond the Atlantic. Cornwallis had been forced
to surrender at Yorktown, and the success of the revolted American colonies
was now assured. The French fleet in the West Indies had been joined by
reinforcements under the Comte de Grasse, who had gone out as
commander-in-chief, taking with him a considerable military force that was
to combine with an expedition from the Spanish American colonies, not for
the capture of some small islands in the Antilles, but for the conquest of
Jamaica, the centre of British power and British trade in the West Indian
seas.

Kempenfeldt, a good sailor (now remembered chiefly as the admiral who "went
down with twice three hundred men," when the "Royal George" sank at
Spithead), dispersed and destroyed at the mouth of the Channel a large
French convoy of supplies for De Grasse, and drove the squadron that
protected it into Brest. With his task thus lightened, Rodney put to sea
with four ships of the line, and after a stormy passage reached Barbadoes
on 19 February, 1782. Sailing thence to Antigua, he formed a junction with
and took command of the West Indian fleet, which Hood had commanded during
his absence in England. From Antigua he took the fleet to St. Lucia, where
he established his head-quarters in Gros Islet Bay. St. Lucia was the
favourite base of operations of our West Indian fleets in the old wars, and
the scene of much desperate fighting by land and sea. The year before De
Grasse had failed in an attempt to seize it.

The fleet of the Comte de Grasse was only some forty miles away to the
northward. It lay at Martinique, in the bay of Fort Royal (now Fort de
France). Though it has nothing to do with the fortunes of Rodney and De
Grasse, it is interesting to note that in a convent school looking out on
the bay there was just then a little schoolgirl named Josephine de la
Pagerie, daughter of an artillery lieutenant in the garrison, who was to
live to be Empress of the French, when France was the mistress of Europe.

During the month of March both fleets were busy preparing for sea. Rodney
was reinforced from England, and a small squadron from Brest joined De
Grasse. The reinforcements received during March had given Rodney the
advantage of numbers. He had thirty-six sail