though the English
had taken two hundred and forty of our privateers, their
comrades still took eight hundred and twelve English vessels.
The explanation of the number of these prizes lies in the
prodigious growth of the English shipping. In 1760 it is claimed
that the English had at sea eight thousand sail; of these the
French captured nearly one tenth, despite escorts and cruisers.
In the four years from 1756 to 1760 the French lost only nine
hundred and fifty vessels."[108]

But this discrepancy is justly attributed by an English writer "to the
diminution of the French commerce and the dread of falling into the
hands of the English, which kept many of their trading-vessels from
going to sea;" and he goes on to point out that the capture of vessels
was not the principal benefit resulting from the efficiency of
England's fleets. "Captures like Duquesne, Louisburg, Prince Edward's
Island, the reduction of Senegal, and later on of Guadeloupe and
Martinique, were events no less destructive to French commerce and
colonies than advantageous to those of England."[109] The
multiplication of French privateers was indeed a sad token to an
instructed eye, showing behind them merchant shipping in enforced
idleness, whose crews and whose owners were driven to speculative
pillage in order to live. Nor was this risk wholly in vain. The same
Englishman confesses that in 1759 the losses of merchantmen showed a
worse balance than the ships-of-war. While the French were striving in
vain to regain equality upon the sea and repair their losses, but to
no purpose, for "in building and arming vessels they labored only for
the English fleet," yet, "notwithstanding the courage and vigilance of
English cruisers, French privateers so swarmed that in this year they
took two hundred and forty British vessels, chiefly coasters and small
craft." In 1760 the same authority gives the British loss in
trading-vessels at over three hundred, and in 1761 at over eight
hundred, three times that of the French; but he adds: "It would not
have been wonderful had they taken more and richer ships. While their
commerce was nearly destroyed, and they had few merchant-ships at
sea, the trading-fleets of England covered the seas. Every year her
commerce was increasing; the money which the war carried out was
returned by the produce of her industry. Eight thousand vessels were
employed by the traders of Great Britain." The extent of