es,--the English resumed the attack upon the Southern
States, which had for a moment been suspended. The fleet and army left
New York for Georgia in the last weeks of 1779, and after assembling
at Tybee, moved upon Charleston by way of Edisto. The powerlessness of
the Americans upon the sea left this movement unembarrassed save by
single cruisers, which picked up some stragglers,--affording another
lesson of the petty results of a merely cruising warfare. The siege of
Charleston began at the end of March,--the English ships soon after
passing the bar and Fort Moultrie without serious damage, and
anchoring within gunshot of the place. Fort Moultrie was soon and
easily reduced by land approaches, and the city itself was surrendered
on the 12th of May, after a siege of forty days. The whole State was
then quickly overrun and brought into military subjection.

The fragments of D'Estaing's late fleet were joined by a reinforcement
from France under the Comte de Guichen, who assumed chief command in
the West Indian seas March 22, 1780. The next day he sailed for Sta.
Lucia, which he hoped to find unprepared; but a crusty, hard-fighting
old admiral of the traditional English type, Sir Hyde Parker, had so
settled himself at the anchorage, with sixteen ships, that Guichen
with his twenty-two would not attack. The opportunity, if it were one,
did not recur. De Guichen, returning to Martinique, anchored there on
the 27th; and the same day Parker at Sta. Lucia was joined by the new
English commander-in-chief, Rodney.

This since celebrated, but then only distinguished, admiral was
sixty-two years old at the time of assuming a command where he was to
win an undying fame. Of distinguished courage and professional skill,
but with extravagant if not irregular habits, money embarrassments had
detained him in exile in France at the time the war began. A boast of
his ability to deal with the French fleet, if circumstances enabled
him to go back to England, led a French nobleman who heard it to
assume his debts, moved by feelings in which chivalry and national
pique probably bore equal shares. Upon his return he was given a
command, and sailed, in January, 1780, with a fleet of twenty
ships-of-the-line, to relieve Gibraltar, then closely invested. Off
Cadiz, with a good luck for which he was proverbial, he fell in with a
Spanish fleet of eleven ships-of-the-line, which awkwardly held their
ground until too late to fly.[139] Throwing out t