American Revolutionary War: Encyclopedia II - American Revolutionary War - War at sea

American Revolutionary War - War at sea

Main article: Naval operations in the American Revolutionary War

Meanwhile the co-operation of the French became active. In July Count Rochambeau arrived at Newport, Rhode Island. That place had been occupied by the British from 1776 to the close of 1779. An unsuccessful attempt was made to drive them out in 1778 by the Revolutionaries assisted by the French admiral d'Estaing and a French corps.

• First Battle of Ushant - July 27, 1778
• John Paul Jones
• Continental Navy
• Battle of Cape St. Vincent (1780)
• Second Battle of Ushant - December 12, 1781

American Revolutionary War - Gulf Coast

After Spain declared war against Great Britain in June of 1779, Count Bernardo de Gálvez, the Spanish governor of Louisiana, seized three British Mississippi River outposts: Manchac, Baton Rouge, and Natchez. Gálvez then captured Mobile on March 14, 1780, and, in May of 1781, forced the surrender of the British outpost at Pensacola, Florida. On May 8, 1782, Gálvez captured the British naval base at New Providence in the Bahamas. Galvez also supplied soldiers to George Rogers Clark and had been supplying substantial quantities of war supplies to the American rebels from as early as 1777.

American Revolutionary War - Caribbean

The Battle of the Saintes took place in 1782, during the American War of Independence, and was a victory of a British fleet under Admiral Sir George Rodney over a French fleet under the Comte de Grasse. The defeat dashed the hopes of France and Spain to take Jamaica and other colonies from the British.

American Revolutionary War - India

The Franco-British war spilled over into India in 1780, in the form of the Second Anglo-Mysore War. The two chief combatants were Tipu Sultan, ruler of the Kingdom of Mysore and a key French ally, and the British government of Madras. The Anglo-Mysore conflict was bloody but inconclusive, and ended in a draw at the Treaty of Mangalore in 1784.

American Revolutionary War - Netherlands

Also in 1780, the British struck against the United Provinces of the Netherlands in the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War to preempt Dutch involvement in the League of Armed Neutrality, directed primarily against the British Navy during the war. Agitation by Dutch radicals and a friendly attitude towards the United States by the Dutch government, both influenced by the American Revolution, also encouraged the British to attack.

The war lasted into 1784 and was disastrous to the Dutch mercantile economy.

American Revolutionary War - Mediterranean

On February 5, 1782, Spanish and French forces captured Minorca, which had been under British control since the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. A further Franco-Spanish effort to recover Gibraltar was unsuccessful. Minorca was ceded to Spain in the peace treaty.

American Revolutionary War - Whitehaven

An interesting footnote to this war was the actual landing on Britain itself of a ship from the U.S. Navy. This occurred in 1778 when the port of Whitehaven in Cumberland was raided by John Paul Jones. The landing was a surprise attack, taken as an action of revenge by Jones, and was never intended as an invasion. Nevertheless, it caused hysteria in England, with the attack showing a weakness that could be exploited by other states such as France or Spain. Its result was an intense period of fortification in British ports.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "War at sea", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki