of landsmen. They had no great class of seamen to draw
upon at will, a fact which made an average French crew
inferior to an average British one. This was bad enough.
But the most important point of all was that their fleets
were still worse than their single ships. The British
always had fleets at sea, constantly engaged in combined
manoeuvres. The French had not; and, in face of the
British command of the sea, they could not have them.
The French harbours were watched so closely that the
French fleets were often attacked and defeated before
they had begun to learn how to work together. Consequently,
they found it still harder to unite two different fleets
against their almost ubiquitous enemy.

D'Anville's problem was insoluble from the start, Four
large men-of-war from the West Indies were to join him
at Chibucto Bay, now the harbour of Halifax, under Admiral
Conflans, the same who was defeated by Hawke in Quiberon
Bay thirteen years later, on the very day that Wolfe was
buried. Each contributory part of the great French naval
plan failed in the working out. D'Anville's command was
a collection of ships, not a co-ordinated fleet. The
French dockyards had been neglected; so some of the ships
were late, which made it impossible to practise manoeuvres
before sailing for the front. Then, in the bungling hurry
of fitting out, the hulls of several vessels were left
foul, which made them dull sailers; while nearly all the
holds were left unscoured, which, of course, helped to
propagate the fevers, scurvy, plague, and pestilence
brought on by bad food badly stowed. Nor was this all.