Three Ships in the Atlantic: Imperial Politics, Time-Consciousness, and the Road to Independence

On the morning of June 8, 1755, two ships cautiously approached each other in the Gulf of St. Lawrence off the coast of Newfoundland. Toussaint Hocquart, the captain of the French vessel Alcide, eyed Richard Howe, the captain of the English ship Dunkirk, across a narrow span of frigid water. Hocquart shouted, “Sommes-nous en paix ou en guerre?” Are we at peace or at war?

Accounts differ about what exactly happened next. According to the French, Hocquart paused a moment and then repeated his question. Howe replied “bien distinctement” – very distinctly – to Hocquart, “La Paix! La Paix!” (Peace! Peace!)[1]Then, with his next breath, Howe ordered the Dunkirk to open fire at the Alcide.

In the British accounts, Howe never cried “Peace! Peace!” at all. Rather, Howe informed Hocquart that he was awaiting orders from his commander, Admiral Edward Boscawen, and advised the Alcide to prepare, in the meantime, for the possibility of battle. Then, Boscawen raised the signal flag and gave the order to engage. At this point, Howe commanded the Dunkirk to launch a furious broadside at the Alcide.[2]

All accounts agree that the Dunkirk’s ferocious attack devastated the French ship, and the Alcide had no choice but to surrender.[3]Two nearby French ships, seeing what had befallen the Alcide, attempted to flee from the British squadron. The Dauphin Royal managed to escape, but the Lys was not so lucky. Thus began and ended the first naval battle in a global conflict that would come to be known as the Seven Years’ War.

Hocquart’s mistake had been to sail his vessel into a hazy zone of temporal ambiguity, where peacetime and wartime melded together uncertainly. In his report to the Marine Militaire accounting for the loss of the Alcide, Hocquart explained that he had “felt impelled to let the enemy take the initiative since war had not been declared in Europe before his departure.”[4]From the French perspective, Howe had unfairly taken advantage of Hocquart’s temporal confusion by making war under the cover of peace. 

The British counternarrative likewise underscored the centrality of time and communication to the events of June 8, 1755. In the British telling, Howe had been a paragon of fair play. He had acknowledged the temporal ambiguity of the moment and had advised Hocquart to prepare for the possibility of battle, even when it meant giving up the potential advantage of surprise.

Captain Lorgeril of the Lys, the French vessel captured alongside the Alcide, certainly did not see it that way. He derided the British underhanded manipulation of time: “Behold! a very singular kind of peace, or rather a war declared in a very singular manner.”[5] Hocquart’s question, Howe’s alleged deception, and Lorgeril’s sarcasm highlight the threads of time-consciousness running through the war. 

Hocquart’s uncertainty about the time on the other side of the Atlantic cost him the battle. The British, with fresher instructions and clearer information, exploited this temporal dislocation to their advantage. In this moment, information was power, and the British had more of it. 

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Twenty-one years later, in 1776, Howe found himself in command of another ship on the Atlantic – but this time, he would be on the losing side of the temporal mismatch. On May 3, 1776, George III appointed Richard and his brother William “his Majesty’s Commissioners for restoring peace to his Majesty’s Colonies and Plantations in North-America.” Howe set sail from Falmouth, armed with careful plans that British ministers had crafted over several months.On July 12, Admiral Howe anchored HMS Eagle off Staten Island with detailed diplomatic instructions. But his carefully prepared peace overtures were already irrelevant. Unbeknownst to Howe, the Continental Congress had declared independence ten days prior. Howe’s orders, crafted in the calm corridors of Whitehall months earlier, were already anachronisms. Events had rendered his carefully worded circulars and conciliatory overtures irrelevant before they ever reached American soil. 

Howe’s secretary, Henry Strachey, described the panic that the British experienced when they learned of the Declaration of Independence: they had lost control of the timeline.

Now, Howe could not act on his instructions from the metropole without “embarrassing Consequences” because “the Congress had declared the Colonies to be independent States and disavowed the Authority of the King, as well as of the Parliament of Great Britain.”[6]Suddenly, it was the imperial center that was operating on outdated information. And this time, it was the revolutionaries who benefited from the delay. Unable to respond to events on the ground without new instructions from a distant metropole, Howe stayed anchored aboard the Eagle for weeks, immobilized by the mismatch between metropolitan time and revolutionary change. The British, once arbiters of imperial chronology, suddenly found themselves disoriented by delay.[7]/a>

In this inversion of temporal power, Howe’s paralysis aboard his vessel became emblematic of a broader imperial disorientation. Imperial governance had depended on the management and strategic exploitation of transatlantic delays. But by the time Howe arrived off the coast of Staten Island in July 1776, the temporal and spatial center of gravity had shifted. Howe himself admitted as much.

At a September 1776 meeting with Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and John Rutledge, Howe stated that “they [the colonists] themselves had changed the ground since he left England by their Declaration of Independency.”[8] 

Howe’s secretary Strachey saw the temporal game at play: “There is no doubt that the violent Members of the Congress drove forward the Declaration of Independency, before the Arrival of Lord Howe, on purpose to defeat the Operation of his pacific Powers. We have been by many sensible Men…that if Lord Howe had arrived a few Weeks sooner, before the intoxicating Arguments for Freedom and Independency had taken such strong hold, the then very general Wishes for Peace would have met & effectuated the Purpose of the Commission.”

Now, all Strachey and Howe could do was hope that “if it should be thought proper to make any Alteration in the Instructions, in consequence of the Declaration of Independency,” the imperial officials at Whitehall would “take care that any such Alteration shall be void of Ambiguity.”[9]

Where once colonial subjects anxiously awaited news from across the Atlantic, they were now shaping the tempo of events. In 1776, the colonists became the ones who acted first, and the imperial officials, those who scrambled to catch up. Imperial time had broken down. Colonial Americans no longer waited for British orders to arrive before deciding how to act. The lag in imperial communication, once a symbol of authority, had become a liability. The pace of political change in the colonies now outstripped the metropole’s capacity to govern them. The very delay that had once served imperial interests now advanced the cause of independence. 

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Helena Yoo-Roth is a historian of early America whose work explores the intersections of politics, culture, communications, and empire. Her first book project, American Timelines: Imperial Communications, Colonial Time-Consciousness, and the Coming of the American Revolution, reframes the origins of the American Revolution by illustrating how American colonists and imperial officials came to inhabit different temporal worlds. She argues that the emergence of “colonial time-consciousness”—a heightened awareness of the delays and consequences of transatlantic communications—shaped political action, sharpened Americans' critiques of empire, and ultimately propelled the thirteen colonies to independence. More broadly, her research investigates how the entanglement of time and space in the early modern Atlantic world generated explosive political consequences around the world.

She received her BA in American Studies from Columbia University and her MA and PhD in History from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her research has been supported by the American Philosophical Society, the Huntington Library, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the American Trust for the British Library, the William L. Clements Library, the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon, and the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture.