My point is that the Royal Navy was an instrument of mobility and massive firepower. The naval guns dominated any port city. Had the Royal Navy not been opposed by the French at Yorktown, then the war would not have ended with the surrender of Cornwallis and the Revolution might well have been unsuccessful.
Without the cannon from Ticonderoga, Boston might well have remained under occupation and Boston could have been reinforced rather than abandoned.
The British could not win the war by occupying seaports. They had to somehow either crush the rebellion or convince the colonists to give up.
I disagree that the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown was essential to the ending of the war.
The British were losing, strategically speaking, from the very beginning. Their basic problem was that the colonies had no single vulnerable spot. Unless the British could break the colonists’ will to resist, they would have to conquer and occupy the entire country and hold it down by military force. This was quite beyond their capabilities.
They first attempted to crush the center of disaffection in MA, succeeeding mainly in rallying the other colonies to their defense.
Then they occupied the strategic point of NY, very nearly destroying the American army in the process. Closest they ever came to winning. But no sense of urgency kept them from following thru.
They they tried their best-conceived strategic move, Burgoyne’s invasion from Canada combined with a thrust up the Hudson. But the Brits in NYC preferred to go haring off the Philadelphia to win “glory” for themselves by conquering the “capital” of the rebellion. Burgoyne got trapped, the French entered the war, and victory became quite impossible, though it took them a number of years to admit to it.
Aside from various raids on coastal objectives, the major following move was an attempt to roll the colonies up from the South, the mission Cornwallis was engaged in when he got trapped at Yorktown.
The British could march anywhere they wanted in the South, and won almost all the battles, but the minute their army marched on the militias closed in behind them and their “conquest” vanished.
The British basic problem was the same one the Union had in our Civil War. The Americans (and the South) only had to avoid losing, the British (and the Union) had to win.
The Union figured out how to accomplish this, the British never did.