conveyed to Brest, in France. A British fleet reduced the settlements of Demerara and Essequibo, in Dutch Guiana, in South America; but a British squadron on its way to attack the Dutch colony at the Cape of Good Hope was defeated off the Cape de Verde Islands by the French fleet under Bailli de Suffrein.

In May, 1781, the Spanish governor of Louisiana completed the conquest of Florida from the English by the capture of Pensacola. The English and French fleets had several partial engagements in the West Indies in April, May and June, 1781, but without any decisive results. Late in May (1781) a large French land force effected a landing on the island of Tobago, which surrendered to them June 3d. In August (1781) a severe but indecisive engagement occurred on the Dogger Bank, in the North Sea, between the English fleet under Admiral Sir Peter Parker and the Dutch fleet under Admiral Zoutman. Both fleets were rendered almost unmanageable, and regained their respective ports with extreme difficulty.

As we have seen, the war in North America ended with the surrender of Lord Cornwallis to General Washington at Yorktown, Virginia, October 19, 1781. In the meantime the attention of all Europe was attracted to the siege of Gibraltar by the combined armies and navies of France and Spain. The fortress had been besieged since 1779, but the besiegers had made no progress in the way of its reduction. The garrison in the fortress consisted of seven thousand British troops under General Elliot, and suffered greatly for want of fuel and provisions, while being exposed to an almost incessant cannonade from the Spanish batteries situated on the peninsula connecting the fortress with the mainland. During three weeks in May, 1781, one hundred thousand shot and shell were thrown into the fortress. All Europe considered a longer defense of the fortress impossible; but suddenly, on the night of November 27, 1781, a select band of two thousand men from the brave little British garrison made a sally

from the fortress, and stormed and utterly demolished the enemy's works in less than an hour, inflicting a damage estimated at two million pounds sterling.

During the same month (November, 1781) the French fleet under the Count de Grasse had recaptured the Dutch island of St. Eustatia, in the West Indies, from the British. The French afterward conquered the island of St. Christophers, Nevis and Montserrat from the English. In February, 1782, the French also recaptured the Dutch settlements of Demerara and Essequibo, in Guiana, in South America, from the English.

In February, 1782, the Spaniards compelled the island of Minorca to surrender, after a long siege almost as memorable as that of Gibraltar, during which the British garrison made a most heroic defense. It appeared that England would be driven into a dishonorable peace, but the heroic determination of the English people to uphold their national honor was never more strikingly manifested. With the whole civilized world united against her, Great Britain was rescued from her dangerous and humiliating position by the victories of her navy.

The British fleet under Admiral Rodney gained a great and decisive victory over the French fleet under the Count de Grasse in the West Indies, between the islands of Martinique and Guadaloupe, April 12, 1782; most of the French ships being captured, that of the Count de Grasse among the number, and the French loss in killed, wounded and prisoners being eleven thousand men, while the loss of the English in killed and wounded was only about eleven hundred.

During the year 1782 the fortress of Gibraitar, which had bidden defiance to the armies and navies of France and Spain for three years, sustained one of the most memorable sieges recorded in the annals of warfare. The Spaniards had constructed many enormous floating batteries in the bay of Gibraltar, and twelve hundred pieces of heavy ordnance had been brought to the place to be used in the different methods of

assault. In addition to their floating batteries, the besiegers had eighty large boats, mounted with heavy guns and mortars, along with an immense number of frigates, sloops and schooners; while the united fleets of France and Spain, consisting of fifty ships-of-the-line, were to cover and support the assault on the fortress. Eighty thousand barrels of gunpowder were provided for the occasion, and more than a hundred thousand French and Spanish soldiers and seamen were employed in the siege of the strong fortress.

A grand attack was opened on the fortress on September 13, 1782. Early in the morning of that day the Spanish floating batteries came forward, and at ten o'clock they took their stations about a thousand yards from the rock of Gibraltar and opened a terrific cannonade, which was joined in by all the artillery and mortars in the Spanish lines and approaches. At the same time the heroic British garrison under General Elliot replied with all their batteries, discharging both hot and cold shot; and for several hours both sides maintained a terrific cannonade and bombardment without the least intermission. About two o'clock in the afternoon the largest Spanish floating battery was observed to emit smoke, and toward midnight it was plainly perceived to be on fire. The fight was still raging fiercely, and other floating batteries began to kindle. Signals of distress were made, and boats were sent to take the men from the burning ships; but these boats were interrupted by the English gunboats, which now advanced to the assault, raking the whole line of Spanish floating batteries with their fire, and thus completing the confusion. The floating batteries were soon abandoned to the flames or to the English.

The groans and shrieks of the Spaniards on board the burning ships were pitiful beyond description, and the Spaniards ceased firing; whereupon the English, with characteristic humanity, forgetting that the Spaniards were their enemies, and thinking of them only as suffering fellowmen, hastened to their rescue, and saved four hun

dred of them from the perils by which they were surrounded. But all the floating batteries were consumed by the flames, and the French and Spanish armies and fleets were unable to renew the assault. During the night the brave garrison of Gibraltar was relieved by Lord Howe's fleet from England, and the French and Spaniards relinquished the siege of the impregnable for

tress.

After

The siege of Gibraltar was the last important event of the War of the American Revolution in Europe; but in the meantime the struggle had extended to India, where Hyder Ali, Sultan of Mysore, a soldier of fortune, had been engaged in hostilities with the English East India Company since 1767, but with little success until the War of American Independence, when he was aided by the French and the Dutch. the English East India Company, during the administration of Warren Hastings, who had become Governor General of British India in 1773, had reduced all the French settlements in India and humbled the Mahrattas, Hyder Ali and his valiant son Tippoo Saib entered the Carnatic in 1780 with an army of a hundred thousand native Hindoos, aided by a French force, and attacked and annihilated the English forces in the presidency of Madras under Baillie and Fletcher, killing or capturing the whole force. Madras was in extreme danger of capture. In 1781 the English were reinforced; and the progress of Hyder Ali in the Carnatic was checked by Sir Eyre Coote, who recovered the Carnatic and totally routed Hyder Ali at the head of two hundred thousand men at Porto Novo, Cuddalore and Pallalore.

In 1782 the English captured Negapatam and all the Dutch settlements in India; but this success was interrupted by the defeat of Colonel Braithwaite, whose forces were surprised, surrounded and cut to pieces by a native force under Tippoo Saib and an auxiliary French force under M. Lally. In 1783 several indecisive actions occurred between the British fleet under Admiral Hughes and the French fleet under Bailli

de Suffrein in the Indian seas, but the operations on land were impeded by the jealousies of the civil and military authorities. Hyder Ali died in 1782, and was succeeded as Sultan of Mysore by his son Tippoo Saib, who, after the conclusion of peace between England and France in 1783, concluded a treaty with the English East India Company, in which the Company made humiliating concessions which detracted from the · respect hitherto paid to the English name in India, A. D. 1784.

END OF THE WAR.

As we have seen, the surrender of Lord Cornwallis had fully convinced the English people of the folly and hopelessness of recovering the British dominion in North America; but Lord North's Ministry declared their determination to carry on "a war of posts." The nation at large opposed this foolish project; and Parliament, yielding to the voice of the English people, gradually withdrew its support from the administration. Finally, on March 4, 1782, on the motion of General Conway, the House of Commons voted that "whoever shall advise His Majesty to the continuation of the American war shall be considered a public enemy." This vote of want of confidence in the Ministry led to the immediate resignation of Lord North and his colleagues; whereupon a Whig Ministry under the Marquis of Rockingham came into power, pledged to the restoration of peace. A member of this Ministry was the great statesman Charles James Fox, an earnest friend of the Americans during the whole period of the war, and an opponent of the system of Parliamentary taxation of the colonies, which had led to the war.

The New Ministry immediately commenced negotiations for peace with all the belligerent powers at war with England, and sent orders to the British commanders in America to cease from hostilities against the Americans; but the negotiations were protracted for some months by the changes in the British Ministry, while hostilities were prosecuted with vigor between Great

Britain and her European enemies until after the repulse of the French and Spaniards in the siege of Gibraltar, in September, 1782. The Marquis of Rockingham, whose administration was signalized by the concession of Ireland's legislative independence, died in July, 1782; whereupon the Earl of Shelburne became Prime Minister, which so displeased Mr. Fox and the larger Whig faction which he headed that he and his friends in the Ministry resigned.

Conferences for peace were opened at Paris, through the mediation of the Emperor Joseph II. of Germany and the Empress Catharine the Great of Russia; and, under the Ministry of the Earl of Shelburne, Great Britain concluded peace with the belligerent powers with which she had been at war. The United States appointed John Adams of Massachusetts, John Jay of New York, Dr. Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania, Thomas Jefferson of Virginia and Henry Laurens of South Carolina to proceed to France as commissioners to, conclude a treaty of peace with Great Britain; but Mr. Jefferson did not serve.

By the Preliminary Peace of Versailles, November 30, 1782, between England and the United States, the former acknowledged the independence of the latter. England concluded the Preliminary Peace of Paris with France and Spain, January 20, 1783; England and France restoring their respective conquests, except the island of Tobago, in the West Indies, and the forts on the river Senegal, in Africa, which were retained by France; while Spain kept Florida and the island of Minorca, but could not purchase Gibraltar, though she offered Oran, in Africa, and the island of Porto Rico, in the West Indies, in exchange. Though England unreservedly acknowledged the independence of the United States, she retained Canada, the Hudson's Bay Territory, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Labrador and Newfoundland. Finally, September 3, 1783, a definitive treaty of peace was signed at Paris between the United States, Great Britain, France and Spain; and the United States became an ac

knowledged power among the nations of the earth, with its boundaries extending northward to the Great Lakes and Canada, westward to the Mississippi, and southward to the Spanish possessions on the Gulf of Mexico, and obtained an unlimited right of fishing on the banks of Newfoundland.

The preliminary treaty of peace between England and Holland was signed at Paris, September 3, 1783; but the definitive treaty between these two powers was not signed until May 20, 1784, when the Dutch ceded Negapatam to Great Britain, and granted to British subjects a free trade in the Indian seas in which the Dutch had hitherto maintained an exclusive commerce and navigation.

Although the establishment of American independence may have been galling to English pride, the United States as an independent republic were of far greater commercial value to the mother country than they had been as English colonies; while the overtaxed English people were relieved of the burden of supporting an extensive military establishment three thousand miles from home, and their material prosperity was thereby unhampered.

Says John Richard Green, the English historian: "What startled men most at the time was the discovery that England was not ruined by the loss of her colonies or by the completeness of her defeat. She rose from it indeed stronger and greater than ever. The next ten years saw a display of industrial activity such as the world had never witnessed before. During the twenty years which followed she wrestled almost single-handed against the energy of the French Revolution, as well as against the colossal force of Napoleonic tyranny, and came out of the one struggle unconquered and out of the other a conqueror. Never had England stood higher among the nations of the Old World than after Waterloo; but she was already conscious that her real greatness lay not in the Old World but in the New. From the moment of the Declaration of Independence it mattered little whether England counted for

less or more with the nations around her. She was no longer a mere rival of Germany or Russia or France. She was from that hour a mother of nations. In America she had begotten a great people, and her emigrant ships were still to carry on the movement of the Teutonic race from which she she herself had sprung. Her work was to be colonization. Her settlers were to dispute Africa with the Kaffir and the Hottentot, to wrest New Zealand from the Maori, to sow on the shores of Australia the seeds of great nations. And to these nations she was to give not only her blood and her speech, but the freedom which she had won. It is the thought of this which flings its grandeur around the pettiest details of our story in the past. The history of France has little result beyond France itself. German or Italian history has no direct issue outside the bounds of Germany or Italy. But England is only a small part of the outcome of English history. Its greatest issue lies not within the narrow limits of the mother island, but in the destinies of nations yet to be. The struggles of her patriots, the wisdom of her statesmen, the steady love of liberty and law in her people at large, were shaping in the past of our little island the future of mankind."

The British evacuated Savannah on the 11th of July, 1782; Charleston on the 14th of December of the same year; and New York on the 25th of November, 1783. The joy of the Americans at the return of peace was mingled with gloomy apprehensions of coming evil, foreshadowed in the murmurings of the unpaid soldiers, the condition of the public finances, and the jealousies of the States. The soldiers had been unpaid for a long time, because the national treasury was empty. Crafty men encouraged the discontent of the army by charging Congress with neglect; and in the spring of 1783 an anonymous address was circulated in Washington's camp at Newburg, on the Hudson, advising the army to take matters into its own hands, and to obtain justice by making a demonstration that should arouse the fears of the American