lding up a
great empire in which France should rule over a multitude of vassal
native princes. In the pursuit of this end he displayed great tact and
untiring activity, perhaps also a somewhat soaring and fantastic
imagination; but when he met La Bourdonnais, whose simpler and sounder
views aimed at sea supremacy, at a dominion based upon free and
certain communication with the home country instead of the shifting
sands of Eastern intrigues and alliances, discord at once arose.
"Naval inferiority," says a French historian who considers Dupleix to
have had the higher aims, "was the principal cause that arrested his
progress;"[88] but naval superiority was precisely the point at which
La Bourdonnais, himself a seaman and the governor of an island, aimed.
It may be that with the weakness of Canada, compared to the English
colonies, sea power could not there have changed the actual issue; but
in the condition of the rival nations in India everything depended
upon controlling the sea.

Such were the relative situations of the three countries in the
principal foreign theatres of war. No mention has been made of the
colonies on the west coast of Africa, because they were mere trading
stations having no military importance. The Cape of Good Hope was in
possession of the Dutch, who took no active part in the earlier wars,
but long maintained toward England a benevolent neutrality, surviving
from the alliance in the former wars of the century. It is necessary
to mention briefly the condition of the military navies, which were
to have an importance as yet unrealized. Neither precise numbers nor
an exact account of condition of the ships can be given; but the
relative efficiency can be fairly estimated. Campbell, the English
contemporary naval historian, says that in 1727 the English navy had
eighty-four ships-of-the-line, from sixty guns up; forty 50-gun ships,
and fifty-four frigates and smaller vessels. In 1734 this number had
fallen to seventy ships-of-the-line and nineteen 50-gun ships. In
1744, after four years of war with Spain alone, the number was ninety
ships-of-the-line and eighty-four frigates. The French navy at the
same time he estimates at forty-five ships-of-the-line and sixty-seven
frigates. In 1747, near the end of the first war, he says that the
royal navy of Spain was reduced to twenty-two ships-of-the-line, that
of France to thirty-one, while the English had risen to one hundred
and twenty-six. The French writ