The anxious attentions of General Washington, therefore, were unremittingly directed to the south.

One of those incidents which fortune occasionally produces, on the seizing or neglect of which the greatest military events frequently depend, presented, sooner than was expected, an opportunity which he deemed capable of being improved to the destruction of the British army in Virginia.
The French fleet, from its arrival on the American coast, had been blocked up in the harbour of Newport; and the land forces of that nation had been reduced to a state of inactivity by the necessity of defending their ships.

Late in January, a detachment from the British fleet was encountered on the east end of Long Island by a furious storm, in which such damage was sustained as to destroy for a time the naval superiority which Arbuthnot had uniformly preserved.
To turn this temporary superiority to advantage, Monsieur Destouches resolved to detach a ship of the line, with two frigates, to the Chesapeake; a force which the delegation from Virginia had assured him would be sufficient for the purpose.
On receiving certain accounts of the loss sustained in the storm, General Washington conceived the design of improving that circumstance by immediate and powerful operations against Arnold.
Confident that the critical moment must be seized, or the enterprise would fail, he ordered a detachment of twelve hundred men, under the command of the Marquis de Lafayette, to the head of the Chesapeake; there to embark for that part of Virginia which was to become the theatre of action, under convoy of a French frigate, for which he applied to the admiral.

He immediately communicated this measure to the Count de Rochambeau, and to Monsieur Destouches, to whom he also stated his conviction that no serious advantage could be expected from a few ships, unaided by land troops.

"There were," he said, "a variety of positions to be taken by Arnold, one of which was Portsmouth, his present station, where his ships might be so protected by his batteries on the shore as to defy a mere naval attack; and where he would certainly be able to maintain himself until the losses sustained in the late storm should be repaired, and the superiority at sea recovered, when he would unquestionably be relieved." To insure the success of the expedition, he recommended that the whole fleet should be employed on it, and that a detachment of one thousand men should be embarked for the same service.
[Sidenote: February 9.] These representations did not prevail.