The British March to the 1/88th of a Mile
So far this month I’ve been looking at the publishing history of Lt. Col. Robert Donkin’s Historical Collections and Remarks, particularly the removal of an incendiary footnote and how that might have affected the publishing schedule.
There are other significant blanks in the book, not made by a knife but left by the author.
On page 170, Donkin discussed the British troops’ march to Concord on 18–19 Apr 1775.
Did Donkin just forget, and Hugh Gaine’s print shop never told him? Did he expect to write those figures in after printing, only to be caught up in the footnote brouhaha and capturing Philadelphia?
However it came about, Donkin didn’t tell readers how long the march to Concord was, in space or time. Just that it was impressive, believe him.
Frank Warren Coburn undertook the measurement in his 1912 study, The Battle of April 19, 1775. He had the advantage of bicycle with a cyclometer that measured distance to the 88th of a mile, or 60 feet. Coburn calculated that the companies who went all the way to James Barrett’s house and back to Bunker’s Hill traveled 39 and 71/88 miles. That’s over five miles more than the troops who stopped in central Concord.
As to time, which was measured less exactly in the eighteenth century, David Hackett Fischer rounded up all the reports and estimates of when things happened in Appendix L of Paul Revere’s Ride (1995), and Derek W. Beck further analyzed those in Appendix 7 of Igniting the American Revolution (2015).
Based on those analyses, the figures Donkin was looking for were:
- the troops were under fire for eight hours, from leaving Concord at noon to reaching Charlestown around 8 P.M.
- on average, the soldiers who went to Concord marched about 36 miles.
- if we time that march as starting in Cambridge at 2 A.M. and ending in Charlestown, then the whole mission took 18 hours.
6 comments:
72 rounds per man? Last I knew, they were supposed to carry 36 rounds per man, depending upon what size cartridge pouch or waistbelt box they were carrying. They weren't anticipating a firefight, just carrying the standard load when on active duty.
Didn't realize it was that far. Not an expert in military history, but my impression is that's a long way--farther than the Boston Marathon, at a high speed for ground troops.
So far as I am aware, Donkin is the only source claiming the light infantry and grenadiers in the British column each carried 72 cartridges. If that were so, and if--as reported--the soldiers in the column had essentially exhausted their ammunition in the section of the retreat starting at Elm Brook Hill and ending at Lexington common, then that implies they expended something on the order of 56,000 rounds, or roughly 2,600 rounds for every known American casualty in this section of the day-long engagement. Is there any reason to believe Donkin is correct?
On this same page in his account, Donkin also asserts that the British soldiers all were returned to their quarters in Boston that same day. This appears to depart from other accounts that they were forced to encamp in Charlestown overnight, because of what would otherwise have been a difficult evacuation by boat at night.
Even though Donkin as aide-de-camp to General Gage, perhaps he was not so well acquainted with the actual details of the expedition on April 19, 1775?
On the question of the troops being back in their barracks by morning, I think we should read that to refer only to the soldiers sent out under Lt. Col. Smith. The evacuation from Charlestown was the wounded first, then those men (who had been away longest, marched longest, been under fire longest), and finally Percy’s troops. There may even have been fresh soldiers sent over to guard Bunker’s Hill. So there were redcoats on Bunker’s Hill all night, but not all the redcoats who reached Bunker’s Hill remained there all night.
Donkin was an aide de camp to Gage as of October 1775, but in April the general’s aides were Brehm, De Lancey, and Rooke.
We know that on this page Donkin was (a) trying to extol the performance of the British army, and (b) so imprecise with numbers that he left some blank. So if other sources say something else about the redcoats’ supply of bullets on the march, I think it’s safe to set this account aside.
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