Boston on 16 June, 1775.

On morning of 16 June, 1775, though Charlestown was by now practically deserted, anyone glancing across the Charles River from Boston to the Charlestown Peninsula might have seen the owners of the fields around the village mowing and slashing the grass under the hot sun and piling it along a rail fence below Bunker Hill, as was the normal practice. Despite false rumours that the rebels had got some of the guns from the fort at Ticonderoga in upper New York, captured on 18 May, before Boston, the British in the garrison town were 'all in high spirits.' That afternoon each regiment in turn, including Grose's 52nd Light Infantry and the First Battalion Marines, had practice in marksmanship at 'fixed figures of men, as large as life, made of thin boards...' Each soldier fired six shots, the best receiving 'a Premium', though it is most unlikely many were dispensed on this particular day. An officer concluded after this unhappy exhibition that 'recruits and Drafts who never having seen service foolishly imagine that when danger is feard they secure themselves by discharging their muskets with or without aim.'.2 To the men, though, it was a clear sign that action was not long away.

General Thomas Gage, however, would not be the commander who determined the time and place of that action. Rather, at six in the evening up to twelve hundred rebels had assembled on Cambridge Common four miles to the west 'with one day's provisions and Blanket, ready to March somewhere but we knew not where.' Accompanied by a Massachusetts artillery regiment , commanded by Captain Thomas Gridley, made up of forty-nine men and two field pieces, they comprised three Massachusetts militia regiments, one of which was commanded by Colonel William Prescott. There were two hundred men from Colonel Israel Putnam's Connecticut regiment, making up a fatigue party tending wagons loaded with fascines and gabions (the latter were dirt-filled wicker baskets meant to absorb musket shot and cannon balls), entrenching tools and some empty barrels. Putnam was assisted by an able youngish militia captain, also from Connecticut, named Thomas Knowlton.
At Harvard College, now turned into a barracks for the rebels, its elderly President had delivered a lengthy sermon and bestowed blessings on the American enterprise.The army marched from Cambridge to the beat of drums, two sergeants with dark lanterns (lanterns enclosed on all sides except the rear) led Gridley and Prescott to the road running eastward which connected to the northward road to Bunker Hill. As the columns approached Charlestown Neck, the drum-taps ceased. There, the slow-moving wagons under the care of Thomas Knowlton, and probably Israel Putnam, reached them, piled high with barrels, gabions, fascines and entrenching tools, groaning and creaking their way past Prescott in his wide coat of military blue, 'lapped and faced', a three-cornered hat perched on his head. Behind them were the two hundred Connecticut men who now joined this motley army. An observer might have thought it an odd procession; old men carrying muskets from the time of Queen Anne, seventy years past, younger men with Spanish fusees and 'old French pieces' left to them by their fathers, and a few swords rough-hewn by local blacksmiths. There were few bayonets. Eleven barrels of powder was all there was to supply them all and last out against any concerted British attack. They crossed in silence onto the peninsula and marched on to Bunker Hill.5
Bunker Hill, the highest hill on the Charlestown Peninsula and furthest from Boston, which would be almost impregnable if properly fortified, was where Prescott and Gridley wanted to throw up 'some works on the north and south ends ...' before beginning work on the lower Breed's Hill, which Israel Putnam favoured, since a small cannon placed on that hill would threaten Boston and the Royal Navy in its harbour. It would certainly provoke an immediate attack by General Gage, as Putnam intended. After much time-wasting, Putnam prevailed. Breed's Hill was finally chosen as the place to make a stand.6
The digging was done by several hundred men, farmers inured to heavy labour, under the light of dark lanterns along the lines that Gridley had laid out by midnight. The redoubt was six feet high and eight rods (1 rod = c. 5 metres) square, strongest on the side facing Charlestown where a redan ( a v-shaped earthwork) projected outwards pointing at the village. To the north, facing Bunker Hill was an open entrance for ease of retreat. A small ditch 'was dug at [its] base' but would be 'in a rude or imperfect state' when the fighting began. Nobody expected to hold this place. The men 'worked undiscovered until about four in the morning' piling up the redoubt in the soft dry earth, but that they were undiscovered was more a matter of good luck, that good fortune that oft determines the course of a battle. Across the water in Boston sentries heard the scrabbling of shovels and picks on the hill 'without making report of it.' When the HMS Lively, (20 nine-pounders), moored in the Charles River at the Charlestown ferry way, discovered the redoubt at dawn and the first cannon-balls fell on the fort, these same sentries discussed over breakfast how they had heard noises in the night but thought nothing of them.Earlier that night General Sir Henry Clinton, who had come over on the Cerebus with Howe and Burgoyne, thought he too saw shapes across the water, but his report to Gage in the dead of night was dismissed. Clinton claimed Howe supported his urging of an immediate attack. 'The first knowledge the General [Gage] had of it was by hearing one of the ships firing at the workmen, and going to see what occasioned the firing,' Howe later insisted.7
That same pounding cannon from the Lively that caused the generals to cover their backs woke the town, shaking the white A-frame houses, and woke Ensign Francis Grose of the 52nd. Light Infantry, and Captain Robert Ross and Second Lieutenant David Collins of the First Battalion Marines with a start out of their tents in the breaking dawn on Boston Common.

The Young Robert Ross

Robert Ross, a Scot, was probably born in 1740. By his late teens he had migrated to England and at seventeen had purchased himself a commission in the 80^th company of the Marines at Chatham. Ross was always conscious that the Marines were looked upon as a lesser arm of the British armed services. (Marine lieutenants, for example, were not allowed to use the wardroom quarter galley latrines, but had to use the heads [the crews' latrines], like common sailors, surgeons, pursers and chaplains.) As he had remarked in 1787 to one of his patrons, Evan Nepean, Undersecretary for the Home Department, they moved in 'subordinate obscurity.' His first service abroad was during the Seven Years' War at the siege of Louisbourg in June 1758 when he was aged about eighteen.¹

At Louisbourg Ross first met Captain Arthur Tooker Collins. Bonded by a three week siege where 'the cannon balls passed very fast on us ... yet could do no more than come ... very near' and where they spent more than three weeks without sleep and in unwashed uniforms, Ross would go on to take part in the siege of Quebec. Tooker Collins would be part of a force that assaulted Belle Ile off the southwest coast of Brittany in April 1761. He would come to the notice of Admiral Howe at the 1762 siege of Havana, and go on to a very successful administrative career with the Plymouth Marines. A lieutenant-colonel by 1765, Collins moved his family of two sons and a daughter to Exeter, Devon, about forty miles northeast of Plymouth.

At the Collins house in Grundy Lane, Ross was apparently a frequent visitor. There he met the nine-year old David Collins. The passing years made David so convinced of Ross's reliance on Tooker Collins's patronage that he incorrectly believed Tooker Collins was responsible for Ross gaining the post of Lieutenant-Governor of New South Wales in 1787. (He owed it to Nepean and Sir John Jervis, with whom he would serve in the American War.)

His low status as a marine may have rankled Ross, and he would discover a deep Scotophobia among his comrades to nourish bitterness and resentment while he was in Boston. He had not yet met the wife whom he would dearly love, and deeply lament being separated from while in the Antipodes. Nor did he have any of the 'very small tho' numerous family,' the worry about whose welfare so plagued him in his late forties and early fifties. He appeared quite personable and as yet showed no signs of being the 'social monster' he would eventually become.²

1Mollie Gillen, The Founders of Australia. A Biographical Dictionary of the First Fleet, Sydney, 1989, p. 319; David S. MacMillen, 'Ross, Robert, (1740?-1794)' in Australian Dictionary of Biography Online Edition, http://adbonline.anu.edu.au/adbonline.htm; N. A. M. Rodger, The Wooden World. An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy, New York, 1996, p. 67; Major Ross to Under Secretary Nepean, Portsmouth, 27^th April, 1787 in A Britten (ed.) Historical Records of New South Wales, Vol. I, Pt.2, Mona Vale, 1978, p. 93; Francis Parkman, The Battle for North America, (ed. John Tebbel), london, 1948, pp. 619 ff.

2Tooker Collins, cited in Currey, David Collins, p.11; ibid., pp. 13, 22, 39; McMillen, 'Ross, Robert, (1740-1794), ADB Online; Major Ross to Under Secretary Nepean, Portsmouth, 27^th April, 1787 in HRNSW, Vol. I, Pt. 2, p. 92;Inga Clendinnen, Dancing with Strangers, Melbourne, 2003, p. 17.