Weathering cold and gales during the severe winter months of the new year, Royal Navy cruisers kept blockading stations at the entrance to Delaware and Chesapeake Bays and off major harbors. Some inward and outward bound American ships escaped their vigilance, but many others were sent as prizes to New York or Halifax.

Robert Morris, encouraged by John Paul Jones' capture of the Mellish and his other successes, prepared detailed plans for a naval operation designed to draw British warships away from the Atlantic coast. This grandiose scheme, which never came to fruition, envisioned a Continental fleet under Jones striking at shipping and raiding enemy positions in the West Indies and at Pensacola and St. Augustine.

British marauders without authority or privateer commissions from the Crown were operating out of Antigua, capturing American ships and causing no end of grief for Vice Admiral James Young, commanding on the Leeward Islands station. The French vehemently complained to Young about the actions of these freebooters in the waters around Martinique.

To forge a tighter control over shipping and exports, Massachusetts declared a temporary general embargo prohibiting sailings from that state's ports without permission. Requests for permission and exceptions to the embargo flooded the General Court, and seem to have been almost universally granted.

Crew members left on board Lexington after her capture by H.M.S. Pearl rose, overpowered the British prize-crew and brought the Continental brig safely into Baltimore.

Philadelphia-built Randolph, Captain Nicholas Biddle, was the first of the new Continental frigates to get to sea. The other twelve frigates still needed cannon and men, or were otherwise not ready. Those at Rhode Island and in the Hudson River were securely bottled-up by a British fleet.