The only cure for melancholy being action, I resolved upon another escapade from the hands of my enemies. Rather than rot again in a prisoners’ pen—as I would be bound to do as soon as the hospital was removed from this place—I would willingly face any conceivable hardship and danger, in the wilds of America, as a free man. With this object in view, I waited the next day, November 28th, upon the Surgeon-General, and resigned my situation in the General Hospital; acquainting him that I intended to follow the troops to Winchester. Having then received the balance of pay due to me for the hospital service, which was forty shillings, I relinquished my wig and epaulettes and put on the clothes of a private soldier who had that day died of a wound. I packed my knapsack with shirts, stockings and other necessaries; and also took about half a pound of flour, some dried beef and a small bottle of rum—but these were to be a reserve and only drawn upon in an extremity. My next consideration was how to elude the French and American sentinels who guarded the barriers on the road to the North. This was likely to prove a difficult task, but I was aware that both the French guard and the American were relieved at ten o’clock in the forenoon and I judged that the best time to elude them was when the relief was in progress and their attention therefore distracted.
I was right in this conclusion. I found the French guard, who were Soissonais and wore fine rose-coloured facings, more concerned with the ceremony and show of the guard-changing than with the chief object in hand, which was to prevent prisoners from escaping. I wrapped a blanket around my regimentals and appeared as an innocent sightseer, seating myself on the barrier. While the old guard were inspected by their officer before dismissal, and the new guard were being addressed by theirs—the sentinel of the old guard being already withdrawn, and that of the new guard not yet posted—I climbed down on the other side of the barrier and strolled along the Rappahannock road.
The American method of guard-changing was equally characteristic of the newer nation. At ten o’clock the old guard was due to be relieved and therefore merely walked off, trusting that a few minutes later the new guard would arrive. I found the post deserted and, passing the barrier, immediately struck right-handed into the tangled pine-woods that fringed the road.
I made a circuit of about a mile in order to avoid the piquet guard, which was thrown out at a convenient distance to protect the camp from possible attack, and then made for the road at a point a few miles beyond. Unfortunately, not knowing that the road took a sharp turn to the left after a few miles, I did not strike it again so soon as I had expected. I grew confused and alarmed and thus became aware how weak my health still was. To extricate myself from this wood seemed like a task set a dreamer in a nightmare. There were many ponds, which to a romantic eye would have seemed delightful but grossly offended mine. I climbed upon a slight hill above one of them just as the sun was setting, but could make out nothing save continued forest, nor keep my teeth from chattering in the sudden chill that ascended from the pond.
Before it was completely dark I came upon a rough track that led from a clearing where some trees had lately been burned for tar, and this fetched me to a collection of poor houses standing close to the road of my search.
I went to the nearest house and knocked. A rough man came to the door, swaying on his legs. He had but one eye and, as I descried in the blaze of a huge pine-wood fire that burned in the grate, very long nails.
‘What do you want?’ he asked in a ruffianly voice, his whole person reeking very strongly of apple-brandy.
‘A lodging for the night, if you please,’ I replied.
‘Do you see these talons of mine?’ he asked, displaying them in uncination. ‘Now ain’t they a pretty set? I suppose you wouldn’t like to fight me, would you—nothing barred? Bite, bollock and gouge is my trade—in which I lost one eye, over to Hob’s Hole, last quarter-races. Yet I would be happy to risk another peeper in a good cause. I warrant you’re a red-coat son of a bitch, run off from Gloucester, heigh? Now I’m surprised you dare show your curséd face at my door: phoo, you lousy fellow! You red-coats ain’t fighters: all that you are equal to is swaggering about at the grogshops and nanny-houses. Who turned you out of the Carolinas, tell me that? Little dried-up General Marion did, he and his patriot crew on their poor starved tackies, with grape-vine bridles and sheep-skin saddles: ay, they made you run all right, I’ll warrant ’em. Well, say now, will you fight? Or shall I swing you back by the collar to Gloucester Point?’
A woman’s voice came from the room within. ‘Dear me now, Joe my honey, why will you ever be picking quarrels? Perhaps this traveller has a little hard money to pay his score. Hearts alive, in these times, we surely can’t quarrel with hard money?’
I naturally did not own to the possession of coin, lest it be all stripped from me on some pretext or other. Instead I begged them to take me in as a charity.
‘Charity, eh, a pretty story! I swear you’re in the wrong furrow,’ cried the woman warmly, coming forward; and I observed that she was very fat and had only one eye, like her husband, and that the flesh about it was bruised red, blue and yellow. Her face was blowsy, and scratched from cheek to chin. ‘Charity indeed, you ugly jack? Those that have no money have no business to travel. Get you gone!’
Here her husband interposed, thrusting her aside: ‘No, stay, you poor bastard,’ he said. ‘I’ll fight you for the price of a night’s lodging.’
I told him I could not oblige him, being unskilled in the manner of fighting in use thereabouts (compared with which an Irish boxing match is mere kiss-in-the-ring) and but lately recovered from a severe illness. He called me a white-livered gallow’s fruit and rushed out from the door to kick at me with his hob-nailed shoes; but tripped over his spaniel in the half-light and measured his length in the mud.
The sight of this couple disgusted me. I had never witnessed a rough Virginia fight, but the mode had been described to me as resembling that of wild beasts. The practitioners, who were of course all men of the lower orders, prided themselves upon the dexterity with which they could gouge or scoop out an eye. To perform this horrid operation the combatant would twist his forefingers in his adversary’s long side-locks and then apply his thumbs to the base of the orb. What was worse than all, these wretches would endeavour to the utmost to castrate each other.
I went away into the woods, my stomach sick, my heart low, and my head ringing again as when the shell had broken above me; so that I was scarcely able to determine what course to take. The weather turning very cold with a violent wind from the north, I made a desperate effort and brought myself to the door of a house a few hundred yards away. Through the chink of a window-shutter I saw a severe-looking woman of about thirty years old seated at a table surrounded by a number of children. She was ladling them out a meal of rice and boiled bacon, with a bowl of milk for each poured from a pitcher.
I knocked, and she bade me enter.
‘What do you want?’ she demanded.
‘Please, madam, only the favour of a corner of your house to sleep in. I have lately been ill and have lost my way upon the road.’
She looked at me very sternly and asked: ‘How can you expect such a favour from me, or any woman of Virginia, seeing you came from England with an intent to destroy our country?’
I replied very humbly: ‘Indeed, madam, you are wrong. I was never in England in my life. I was first sent from Ireland to protect the homesteads of Canada from an unprovoked invasion by Americans.’
She startled at this. I continued: ‘But you know how wars go, madam: one campaign leads to another. I have at least always refrained from plunder and private injury, and obeyed my officers, as a soldier is bound to do.’
A little girl slipped down from her stool and came up to me: ‘I have a little red bird in a cage,’ she said. ‘It is very clever, you know. It eats the crumbs I give it. Come and see it, poor man.’
‘Child, go back to your food, instantly,’ the mother said scoldingly but not unpleased.
‘Then I will
show the poor man my bird afterwards,’ said the child gravely.
‘Your little maid has a sweet nature.’ I remarked. ‘She knows that I am unfortunate and wishes to do what she can to cheer me.’
The woman almost angrily ladled me out some of the rice, together with a small piece of the bacon, and drew up a chair for me. ‘Eat,’ she commanded. I ate.
She then drew me a pewter pot of cider. ‘Drink,’ she commanded. I drank.
The little girl said: ‘My name is Henrietta. My brothers provoke me by calling me Etta. What is your name?’
I told her that it was Roger Lamb and she simply laughed. The other children were abashed and said nothing. The woman began asking me questions about Ireland, which I was at pains to answer as fully as I could. While we were talking, her husband came in, with a large bundle of faggots on his shoulder, which he threw on the floor. He was a large, heavy man with a humane countenance.
‘Whom have we here?’ he asked.
‘A straggler from Lord Cornwallis’ army,’ I replied. ‘A Cyclops and his wife refused me lodging further down the road, though I could hardly stand from faintness. But your good wife has been very kind to me.’
He considered for a moment. ‘I served with Dan Morgan in Canada. But twenty-five men of our whole regiment saw home again. The sufferings that I experienced in that year are burned in my soul. Well, upon my word, it would be very hard indeed to turn you out of my door on such a severe evening as this. You may bide here this night. Wife, fetch a little straw from the barn, and shake it down here by the fire.’
She did so, and the husband and I talked amicably, as fellow-soldiers, upon the hardships and cruelties of war, and the wife interposed now and again, speaking very sharp against the French connexion. She said that at Alexandria on their way to these parts, the French officers had danced minuets with several handsome young American ladies, in the middle of the camp; and this was very well, though she did not hold with dancing herself. But the nasty French soldiers who watched the dance in a great circle had from the heat of the weather disengaged themselves from their clothes, and stood around dressed only in their shirts, which were neither long nor in good repair. ‘Moreover,’ she said, ‘the officers themselves were very sly and lecherous. Each had brought a fashionable assortment of coloured ribbands from Paris, such as our ladies of Virginia tie in their poke-bonnets, with which they counted upon buying the honour of the best-bred girls in the dominion.’
The husband judiciously remarked: ‘Indeed, wife, I hope that they found they had reckoned amiss. But, as you know, when such girls are confronted with officers of rank and title, there is “no wisdom below the girdle”.’
‘La, husband,’ she cried indignantly. ‘How coarse you talk, and before a stranger too!’
The good man, before I retired to rest, showed me two Cherokee Indian scalps, properly dressed and mounted on frames, that he had taken in revenge for the murder of his wife’s brother. I slept soundly, and awoke greatly refreshed. I gave the children some trifling presents: to one a lump of chalk, to another a Fusilier’s button, to little Henrietta a Virginia bill for (I believe) eighteenpence or some such small amount. It was printed upon the silver paper used by English hatters—a consignment of this paper having been seized by an American privateer, and made into money by the Virginian Assembly, as difficult to counterfeit. Tobacco money, Congress money and the earlier Assembly money were all now highly suspect, because of the reams of counterfeit circulated by loyal Americans. The children and their parents seemed much gratified by my gifts, and after a breakfast of milk and stirabout I left them with the warmest emotions of thankfulness.
Henrietta kissed me, before I went; and I reflected fondly as I marched along the high road that my lost daughter must, by now, be about the same age as this dear child, namely four years and a piece.
During this day, November 29th, I marched very hard on the main road, which was sandy, without meeting any interruption: for a party of convalescents had marched this way, two days before, from the hospital and it was supposed that I had not been able to keep up with them, and was trying to overtake them. I came to the Rancatank River at a place called Turk’s Ferry, where a negro, who was conveying several fine hogs over the stream, allowed me a free passage in his scowl, or flat-bottomed boat, upon my agreeing to help him manage his unruly drove. Like the Prodigal Son of the Parable this worn-out mungo envied his swine. He told me: ‘Him Bockarorra Gentleman’—meaning the white planter—‘make de poor black man workee, make the hoss workee, make the ox workee, make ebberyting all workee togarrer, only de hog. Him, de hog, no workee: him eat, him drink, him saunter, him sleep at pleasure, him old hog libb like murrer gentleman.’ By evening I reached the town of Urbanna on the Rappahannock River, above forty miles from Gloucester Point.
I entered the town boldly, keeping to the account of myself as a convalescent straggler, which the travellers I met had fastened upon me by their inquisitive guesses as to my condition and intention. I came to a large building which proved to be an ‘ordinary’, and a stout, florid gentleman in a gay waistcoat accosted me from his chair on the portico. ‘Heigh, Soldier, there is plenty of room inside for such as you, and plenty of drink.’
I enquired: ‘How for such as me?’
He laughed. ‘Well, you look mighty innocent, but you can’t deceive me. You are looking for a master, I’ll be bound.’
‘I do not understand you,’ said I.
‘Then I’ll be plain,’ he said. ‘There are a great many of your men in my house, who are determined to remain in the country. They have hired themselves to different gentlemen. You had better join with them. You shall be well used and in a short time you may become a citizen of America.’
I thanked him, and thought it wise to go in, for I did not wish to offend him, lest my true character might appear.
On the porch hung a placard which read:
Four pence a night for a bed.
Six pence with supper.
No more than five to sleep in one bed.
No boots to be worn in bed.
No dogs allowed upstairs.
No drinking tolerated in the kitchen.
New England travellers to pay on the nail.
Inside I found about forty British soldiers, none of them of my own regiment, but one of The Thirty-Third, who had hired themselves to different gentlemen about the country as mechanics, grooms, overseers and such. Each plantation in Virginia resembled a small village and now carried on various novel industries, by slave labour, to supply the manufactured goods that had formerly been imported from England. Experienced tailors, potters, weavers, whitesmiths and the like who would initiate or superintend such labours were therefore highly useful to the planters. I was strongly importuned by these soldiers to follow their example, rather than be conveyed to a prison pen in a barren country; but my mind revolted at the thought.
Towards midnight in came a shift-eyed person with a wide hat and a silver-headed cane. He represented himself as a lawyer and a close comrade of the famous Mr. Daniel Boone, of Bridnorth in Somersetshire, who had passed westward over the Alleghany Mountains in the year 1759, and become an enthusiastic admirer of the territory he found on the further side of the range, called Kentucke. This eloquent person, drawing me into a corner, enlarged upon the diversity and glories of nature met with in that delightful clime of Kentucke: her fruits and flowers so beautifully coloured, elegantly shaped and charmingly flavoured, the great quantity of game, the fertile soil, the enormous and dignified Ohio rolling through the plains in inconceivable grandeur, the distant mountains penetrating the clouds with their venerable brows. Just before the war, he informed me, Mr. Boone had made his first settlement in this same favourite though forlorn district; and there engaged the Indians in a conflict of great savagery, losing two of his own sons and two brothers at their hands. Now, however, ‘peace crowned the sylvan shade’, for Mr. Boone had been reinforced by a great number of settlers, who had removed across the mountains
with their families in order to avoid the exactions of Congress and the raids of King George’s soldiers.
I observed that his account was interesting, and believed that much of reality and fact must belong to his description—which to some would appear greatly exaggerated. He appeared somewhat offended at my saying this and warmed up to a peroration recalling that of a recruiting sergeant in search of ‘prime young fellows to exercise the profession of arms’. At the close he offered me, free and without charges, a debenture of three hundred acres, with a fine deep bottom, in a fertile location upon the Ohio—and now wasn’t that a handsome offer, he asked.
I enquired, to what sort of a trap was this cheese set as the bait?
He solemnly assured me that there was no trap at all. Mr. Boone wanted brave and hardy men to strengthen the infant settlement, which would soon be a new State sending its own delegates to Congress, and therefore offered land free to likely settlers in order to increase the common wealth.
Here I had to affect the clown, and asked this recruiting sergeant whether it were not true that Indians carried off and roasted white men at a slow fire, then hacked them gradually in pieces, as one might snip slices off a prime Virginia ham?
He asked, was I then a coward?
For reply I chanted, in a close parody of a song from Mr. Bickerstaffe’s comedy, The Recruiting Sergeant:
Ay, ay, master Lawyer, I wish you good day,
You have no need at present, I thank you, to stay:
My stomach for Kentucke’s gone from me, I trow.
When it comes back again, I’ll take care you shall know.
My companions set up a shout of laughter at this declamation; and the gentleman from Kentucke flew in a rage and rushed out of the room. I wished the soldiers good-night and soon fell fast asleep.
Early on the next morning their masters came with horses and took them all away. I retired out of the way to the privy, lest I be accosted with an offer of odious service.
When all had ridden off, I prepared to discharge my debt. But the landlord, who was a militia colonel, refused my coin with a wave of his hand. He said to me: ‘Why, now, I swear I thought you had given me leg-bail! You are Sergeant Lamb of The Twenty-Third, are you not? An acquaintance of yours in The Thirty-Third gives you a high character. He says that you write a very good hand and understand accounts.’
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