Victory at Yorktown Read Online Free PDF Page B

back to where they had been in 1763—basically granting the Americans everything they wanted except independence. The hope was that this proposal would persuade the Congress not to ratify the treaty with France, and a British ship bearing the commission and a French vessel carrying the treaties raced each other across the Atlantic. *
    The French won, though even had they not done so Congress would not have agreed to any proposal that did not include independence. On May 2 the treaties were presented to the legislators in York, Pennsylvania, where Congress was sitting, and were ratified two days later. Their significance was soon evident. On July 11, 1780, an express rode up to General William Heath’s headquarters in Providence, Rhode Island, with news that the fleet of “our illustrious ally” had been sighted off Newport. After dispatching a messenger to George Washington, Heath hurried down to the dock, boarded a packet to Newport that arrived about midnight, and next morning called on the Comte de Rochambeau, who had come ashore the previous evening with his staff, and was understandably perplexed when no American officer greeted them and they found “no one in the streets; only a few sad and frightened faces in the windows.”
    That was the beginning of a long, enduring friendship between the two men, and the down-to-earth Heath also had an opportunity to meet and size up a number of Rochambeau’s fellow officers, one of whom was the Chevalier de Chastellux, a distinguished philosopher-soldier, veteran of campaigns in Germany during the Seven Years’ War, darling of the Paris salons, a famous author and friend of the great Voltaire, with a coveted membership in the forty-member French Academy. The group also included Admiral the Chevalier de Ternay, commander of the squadron of seven sail of the line and five smaller vessels that had escorted the transports carrying more than five thousand French soldiers. The fleet had sailed from Brest on May 2 and traveled by the southern route, where it was less likely to encounter British men-of-war, but even so, they had had several brief engagements.
    An indication of how terrible these long ocean journeys were for the soldiers who were sandwiched like sardines in quarters that were inhuman, to say the best for them, is that as many as 2,600 soldiers and seamen were sick by the time they landed—two-thirds of them suffering with scurvy—and the first order of business on shore was to set up hospital facilities for them. On board one ship, with two servants and all his personal effects (which included “large stores of sugar, lemons, and syrups”), was Baron Ludwig von Closen, a Bavarian whose adopted country was France. On the crossing he had shared what he called a “large compartment” with nineteen others. The space was fifteen feet long, twelve feet wide, and four and a half feet high; it was “not too comfortable,” according to the baron, especially considering the noise, “exhalations and other bad odors produced by the passengers.” If these were quarters for officers, those for the troops and ordinary seamen can only be imagined.
    The Deux-Ponts regiment alone lost nine men during the seventy-two-day passage and counted 450 sick when they disembarked. Those who had suffered most on the voyage were big, robust men, and the Germans among them proved to be the worst sailors. (Led by Guillaume, Comte de Deux-Ponts, this regiment came from the ever-shifting borderland between France and Germany; as many as one-third of Rochambeau’s army was made up of German and Swiss troops.)
    Happily for posterity, Closen kept a diary of his experiences in America and later wrote a full account of the French expeditionary force from the spring of 1780 until its return to France in June 1783. Sprightly, candid, and humorous, the memoir and the drawings he made reveal a great deal about life in colonial America as well