One contemporary writer critical of the scuttling of the "Terrible" wrote that "she made no more water than she did before battle", and, more acidly, "If an able officer had been at the head of the fleet, the "Terrible" would not have been destroyed." Admiral Rodney was critical of Graves' tactics, writing, "by contracting his own line he might have brought his nineteen against the enemy's fourteen or fifteen, [...] disabled them before they could have received succor, [... and] gained a complete victory." Defending his own behaviour in not sending his full fleet to North America, he also wrote that "f the admiral in America had met Sir Samuel Hood near the Chesapeake", that Cornwallis's surrender might have been prevented.