es now occasioned by the break with Russia,
were well understood, and hopes rose high; but heavy in the other
scale were his unbroken record of success, and the fact that the War
in the Peninsula, the sustenance of which was now doubly imperative in
order to maintain the fatal dissemination of his forces between the
two extremities of Europe, depended upon intercourse with the United
States. The corn of America fed the British and their allies in the
Peninsula, and so abundantly, that flour was cheaper in Lisbon than in
Liverpool. In 1811, 802 American vessels entered the Tagus to 860
British; and from all the rest of the outside world there came only
75. The Peninsula itself, Spain and Portugal together, sent but
452.[481] The merchants of Baltimore, petitioning against the
Non-Intercourse Act, said that $100,000,000 were owing by British
merchants to Americans, which could only be repaid by importations
from England; and that this debt was chiefly for shipments to Spain
and Portugal.[482] The yearly export thither, mainly for the armies,
was 700,000 barrels of flour, besides grain in other forms.[483] The
maintenance of this supply would be endangered by war.

Upon the continuance of peace depended also the enjoyment of the
relatively tranquil conditions which Great Britain, after years of
vexation, had succeeded at last in establishing in the western basin
of the Atlantic, and especially in the Caribbean Sea. In 1808 the
revolt of the Spanish people turned the Spanish West Indies once more
to her side; and in 1809 and 1810 the conquest of the last of the
French islands gave her control of the whole region, depriving French
privateers of every base for local operations against British
commerce. In 1812, by returns to September 1, the Royal Navy had at
sea one hundred and twenty ships of the line and one hundred and
forty-five frigates, besides four hundred and twenty-one other
cruisers, sixteen of which were larger and the rest smaller than the
frigate class--a total of six hundred and eighty-six.[484] Of these
there were on the North American and West India stations only three of
the line, fifteen frigates, and sixty-one smaller--a total of
seventy-nine.[485] The huge remainder of over six hundred ships of war
were detained elsewhere by the exigencies of the contest, the naval
range of which stretched from the Levant to the shores of Denmark and
Norway, then one kingdom under Napoleon's control; and in the far
Easte