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It fell to Rear Admiral Hood, as Rodney's successor, to block De Grasse. But the Frenchman daringly took his fleet the long way around, through the treacherous Bahama channels, on his way to the Chesapeake. Hood sailed a shorter rhumb-line course, missed De Grasse, saw nothing amiss at the Chesapeake and went on to New York. There he fell under the command of Thomas Graves, who happened to be his senior.
Belatedly, the combined Graves-Hood fleet of 19 ships of the line looked into the mouth of the Chesapeake on the morning of Sept. 5, 1781, and saw there a forest of masts. They were De Grasse's. Though outnumbered and outgunned by the 24 French ships, the British still had a huge advantage: they had sea room in which to maneuver and a fair wind.
Graves's Minuet. De Grasse had to weigh anchor hurriedly and beat out through a pass then only three miles wide. If Graves had been a Drake or a Nelson, he would have swooped in close and raked each French ship in turn, "crossing the T" as their line came out. But Graves obeyed the admiralty's standing orders. As though in a minuet, he gave De Grasse time and room to get his ships out in the open, then ponderously moved to engage them, ship by ship. Even worse, he simultaneously flew two signals giving contradictory orders for maneuvering.
After little more than three hours of smoky but unspectacular gunnery, the fleets drifted apart. No ship on either side had been sunk, though three of the British had been badly damaged and one was later scuttled. Casualties were moderate and remarkably equal. But the French sailed back into the Chesapeake and held it.
For Cornwallis, cut off from all hope of relief, the battle proved the coup de Grasse. Six weeks later, he surrendered. Today, Larrabee notes, there are few memorials of American gratitude to De Grasse; it took 100 years to raise a statue of the Frenchman at Yorktown. The British, on the other hand, gave a peerage and a fat pension to Graves. After all, he had lost no battle, no ships—"he had merely lost America."