Schooners like these played a vital role in the American Revolution. wynnter/iStock via Getty Images Plus George Washington knew his forces could not win the American Revolutionary War without some measure of sea power. “It follows then as certain as that night succeeds the day,” he later wrote in a letter, “that without a decisive naval force we can do nothing definitive, and with it everything honorable and glorious.” The problem was that the American commander did not have a navy. As a profe