The French were also helped by the admiral's power to detain the two hundred merchant-ships, the "West India trade," awaiting convoy at Cap Francais, where they remained from July till November, when the close of operations left him at liberty to convoy them with ships-of-war.
The incident illustrates one weakness of a mercantile country with representative government, compared with a purely military nation.

"If the British government," wrote an officer of that day, "had sanctioned, or a British admiral had adopted, such a measure, the one would have been turned out and the other hanged."[152] Rodney at the same time had felt it necessary to detach five ships-of-the-line with convoys, while half a dozen more went home with the trade from Jamaica.
It is easier to criticise the division of the English fleet between the West Indies and North America in the successive years 1780 and 1781, than to realize the embarrassment of the situation.

This embarrassment was but the reflection of the military difficulty of England's position, all over the world, in this great and unequal war.
England was everywhere outmatched and embarrassed, as she has always been as an empire, by the number of her exposed points.

In Europe the Channel fleet was more than once driven into its ports by overwhelming forces.

Gibraltar, closely blockaded by land and sea, was only kept alive in its desperate resistance by the skill of English seamen triumphing over the inaptness and discords of their combined enemies.
In the East Indies, Sir Edward Hughes met in Suffren an opponent as superior to him in numbers as was De Grasse to Hood, and of far greater ability.