uffren deserves to be remembered both for what he
actually accomplished under grave difficulties and what he might
have done had he been served by loyal and efficient subordinates.
Among all the commanders of this war he stands preeminent for naval
genius, and this eminence is all the more extraordinary when one
realizes that his resourcefulness, tenacity, aggressiveness, his
contempt of the formal, parade tactics of his day, were notoriously
absent in the rest of the French service. Such was the admiration
felt for him by his adversaries that after the end of the war,
when the French squadron arrived at Cape Town on its way home and
found the British squadron anchored there, all the British officers,
from Hughes down, went aboard the French flagship to tender their
homage.[1]

[Footnote 1: "If ever a man lived who justified Napoleon's maxim
that war is an affair not of men but of a man, it was he. It was
by his personal merit that his squadron came to the very verge of
winning a triumphant success. That he failed was due to the fact
that the French Navy... was honeycombed by the intellectual and moral
vices which were bringing France to the great Revolution--corruption,
self-seeking, acrid class insolence, and skinless, morbid vanity."--THE
ROYAL NAVY, David Hannay, II, 287.]

Although the War of American Independence was unsuccessfully fought
by Great Britain and she was compelled to recognize the independence
of her rebellious colonies, she lost comparatively little else by the
terms of peace. As we have seen, her hold in India was unchanged.
The stubborn defense of Gibraltar throughout the war, aided by
occasional timely relief by a British fleet, saved that stronghold
for the English flag. To Spain England was forced to surrender
Florida and Minorca. France got back all the West Indian islands
she had lost, with the exception of Tobago, but gained nothing
besides. The war therefore did not restore to France her colonial
empire of former days or make any change in the relative overseas
strength of the two nations. Despite the blunders of the war no
rival sea power challenged that of Great Britain at the conclusion
of peace.

Meanwhile, just before the war and during its early years, an English
naval officer was laying the foundation for an enormous expansion
of the British empire in the east. This was James Cook, a man who
owed his commission in the navy and his subsequent fame to nothing
in family or political