Excerpted from the George Washington Book Prize finalist In the Hurricane's Eye: The Genius of George Washington and the Victory at Yorktown by Nathaniel Philbrick, published by Viking Penguin, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2018 by Nathaniel Philbrick, published in Penguin Books 2019.
When France entered the American Revolutionary War in the spring of 1778, George Washington dared to hope his new ally had put victory within reach. Finally, the British navy's hold on the Atlantic Seaboard was about to be broken. If the French succeeded in establishing what Washington called "naval superiority," the enemy's army would be left open to attack from not only the land but also the sea. But after two and a half years of trying, the French had been unable to contain the British navy.
First, an inexplicably protracted Atlantic crossing prevented French admiral Comte d'Estaing from trapping the enemy's fleet in Philadelphia. Shortly after that, d'Estaing turned his attention to British-occupied New York, only to call off the attack for fear his ships would run aground at the bar across the harbor mouth. A few weeks after that, a storm off the coast of southern New England prevented d'Estaing from engaging the British in a naval battle that promised to be a glorious victory for France.
