"Captures like Duquesne, Louisburg, Prince Edward's Island, the reduction of Senegal, and later on of Guadeloupe and Martinique, were events no less destructive to French commerce and colonies than advantageous to those of England."[109] The multiplication of French privateers was indeed a sad token to an instructed eye, showing behind them merchant shipping in enforced idleness, whose crews and whose owners were driven to speculative pillage in order to live.

Nor was this risk wholly in vain.

The same Englishman confesses that in 1759 the losses of merchantmen showed a worse balance than the ships-of-war.

While the French were striving in vain to regain equality upon the sea and repair their losses, but to no purpose, for "in building and arming vessels they labored only for the English fleet," yet, "notwithstanding the courage and vigilance of English cruisers, French privateers so swarmed that in this year they took two hundred and forty British vessels, chiefly coasters and small craft." In 1760 the same authority gives the British loss in trading-vessels at over three hundred, and in 1761 at over eight hundred, three times that of the French; but he adds: "It would not have been wonderful had they taken more and richer ships.

While their commerce was nearly destroyed, and they had few merchant-ships at sea, the trading-fleets of England covered the seas.