orcements from England, and was resolved to wait a little longer
for their arrival, in hopes of being able to annoy the enemy more
effectually. In the beginning of October, the fleet sailed to
Quiberon-bay, where they destroyed the Ardent, a French ship of war
of sixty-four guns; and a detachment of the forces being landed, took
possession of a fort in the peninsula; while the little islands of Houat
and Hey die were reduced by the sailors. In this situation the admiral
and general continued till the seventeenth day of the month, when the
forts being dismantled, and the troops re-embarked, the fleet sailed
from the French coast; the admiral returned to England, and the
transports with the soldiers proceeded to Ireland, where they arrived in
safety.

NAVAL TRANSACTIONS in the WEST INDIES.

This expedition, weak and frivolous as it may seem, was resented by the
French nation as one of the greatest insults they had ever sustained;
and demonstrated the possibility of hurting France in her tenderest
parts, by means of an armament of this nature, well timed, and
vigorously conducted. Indeed, nothing could be more absurd or
precipitate than an attempt to distress the enemy by landing a handful
of troops, without draught-horses, tents, or artillery, from a fleet of
ships lying on an open beach, exposed to the uncertainty of weather in
the most tempestuous season of the year, so as to render the retreat and
re-embarkation altogether precarious. The British squadrons in the West
Indies performed no exploit of consequence in the course of this year.
The commerce was but indifferently protected. Commodore Lee, stationed
off Martinico, allowed a French fleet of merchant-ships, and their
convoy, to pass by his squadron unmolested; and commodore Mitchel
behaved scandalously in a rencontre with the French squadron, under the
conduct of monsieur de Conflans, who in his return to Europe took
the Severn, an English ship of fifty guns. The cruisers on all sides,
English, French, and Spaniards, were extremely alert; and though the
English lost the greater number of ships, this difference was more than
overbalanced by the superior value of the prizes taken from the enemy.
In the course of this year, two-and-twenty Spanish privateers, and
sixty-six merchant vessels, including ten register ships, fell into the
hands of the British cruisers; from the French they took seven ships of
war, ninety privateers, and about three hundred ships of