Volume 38, Number 5 · March 7, 1991
Achilles in the Caribbean
By Bernard Knox
Omeros
by Derek Walcott
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 325 pp., $25.00
After playing a decisive role in the defeat and surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown in 1781, the French fleet, under its Admiral De Grasse, sailed south to carry on the war against England in the Caribbean. In April of the following year, in a naval engagement known to the English as the Battle of the Saints, De Grasse in his turn was defeated, by Admiral Rodney of the British navy, surrendering his person and his flagship, the 120-gun Ville de Paris. 'Her name,' says Mahan in his classic work on the influence of sea power, 'commemorating the great city whose gift she had been to the King, and the fact that no French naval commander-in-chief had before been taken prisoner in battle, conspired to bestow a peculiar brilliancy upon Rodney's victory,' which was also 'particularly…marked by a maneuver that was then looked upon as exceptionally daring and decisive—'breaking the line.' '
Review, 2118 words
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