Grose, Collins and Ross and the taking of the Redoubt at Breed's Hill

Howe's plan was for the grenadiers of 5th and 52nd Battalions who had taken the worst of the previous two attacks against the rail fence, to wheel at the point where it would seem to the rebels they were almost committed . The 5th would overrun the three small fleches, the 52nd storm the northern part of the breastwork after it had been raked with grape by Howe's 6-pounders. The Light Infantry, now numbering only 150 to 200 men out of eleven companies, (including Grose in the 52nd), would protect the flank of the 6-pounders and in a feint against the fence, occupy the militia regiments stationed there. The marine battalions would take the breastwork and redoubt from the southern, Charlestown, side. Howe, impatient to begin less the mass of rebel reinforcements gathered on Bunker Hill came to the little fort's aid, ordered his attack before marines of the 2nd battalion were properly ready. As usual things did not quite go as planned. The men would not fight. 'The officers ... were observed to goad [them] forward ... with renewed exertion.' 1

The one hundred and fifty to two hundred officers and men left of the eleven light infantry companies approached the rail fence in a tight column. At 200 yards they deployed into a thin skirmish line meant to hold the New Hampshire and Connecticut rebels behind the rails should they try to help their comrades on the breastwork and in the redoubt. Howe's 6-pounders ripped into the breastwork forcing those militia behind it either to flee back to Bunker Hill or into the next door redoubt. A brief and savage artillery duel ensued between the British and two American cannon stationed at the gap between the breastwork. The British won by demolishing one of the Yankee's guns. The militia from the fence then took aim at the British gunnery, only to be distracted by a ragged volley from the light infantry which had advanced another fifty yards. Stark reduced their nuisance value by turning his long-range marksmen on their remaining officers. Again Grose was lucky and left unharmed, though not so all the British artillerymen. The rebels wounded all of their officers and nine of their men. The British gunnery's success was in no small measure due to the protection afforded them by the shattered band of light infantry. Young Francis Grose, near this battle's end, could finally hold his head up with some pride. And nothing would stop the rapid bayonet charge of the 5th Battalion on the breastwork, ditch and redoubt beyond.2

While the grenadiers attacked the breastwork and redoubt 'with great loss of men' from the right and rear, the marines advanced towards the redoubt from the left. In columns, with bayonets, under orders not to fire, a feat achieved 'with difficulty', they marched measuredly closer to the redoubt, the grenadiers to their left and both marine battalions formed into lines, the marine companies on the right of the line.Over the intervening fences, the line kept together. All the while the rebels, their 'ammunition being nearly exhausted, kept up a scattering fire.' Scattering it might have been, but for the British approaching the redoubt from whatever side, it was 'so heavy a fire that the oldest officers [said] they never saw such sharper action.' Man after man toppled to the ground. The marines were stopped briefly but the grenadiers grimly pressed on. Over the parapet and from the rear they burst into the redoubt. Ross's and Collins's companies were not in the forefront of the marine bayonet charge, begun again and gathering pace. First Lieutenant Jessie Adair of the Second Battalion led the charge up and over the parapet with a courage that inspired all. At his side, First Lieutenant John Shea, father of Captain John Shea of the yet-to-be-created New South Wales Marines, who would arrive in Boston the coming July as a Second Lieutenant, 'rece'd his mortal wound.' George Johnston's father, the deputy paymaster-adjutant, fell, 'much wounded.' Yelling, their brothers-in-arms followed, over the parapet and into the blinding smoke and dry dust of the redoubt that had allowed many of the rebels to flee. Experienced combatants though they were, many were shaken at 'the Horror within the Redoubt when [they] entered it. It was streaming with Blood and strewn with dead & dying men.' The marines, seamen used to hand-to-hand fighting as they boarded enemy ships or fired down from the tops of men-of-war, were appalled at the sight of 'the Soldiers stabbing some and dashing out the Brains of others, a sight too dreadful ... to dwell on.' Nowhere, though, is it stated that they did not join in the butchery.3

It is probably at this point, or soon afterwards, that Captain Robert Ross and Second Lieutenant David Collins lost their stomach for war. Collins would go into an administrative career, and Ross would, it has been suggested, lose his nerve. Here we see the origins of that Lieutenant-Governor Collins of Van Diemen's Land who stood for hours sniffing snuff, as close as he could be to convicts being lashed on the triangle, never leaving his post until each recreant had received his full measure of punishment. Here too, was planted that dark seed in the heart of Captain Ross, the New South wales Marine major renowned for his rage against his fellow men not of the marine service, masked only by a nervous garrulousness, the only saving graces in his life his bonding with fellow Scots and his love for his wife and children.4

Francise Grose at Bunker Hill

The British General William Howe's plan for the battle of Bunker Hill was simple. Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Pigot's division, including the First Battalion Marines to which Captain Robert Ross and Second Lieutenant David Collins belonged, would march against the redoubt and breastwork as a distraction from the attack of the Welch Fusiliers, and the Fifth and Fifty-Second Light Infantry against Stark's men at the low stone wall on the beach. These Light infantry companies would overrun Stark's barricade by bayonet and take the rail fence from the rear by which time the grenadiers would be taking the fence from the front, also in a bayonet charge. With the American left demolished, the redoubt and breastwork on Breed's Hill would be isolated and overwhelmed from all sides.¹ It did not work out that way.

The 52^nd Light Infantry marched from the small depression in front of Moulton's Hill onto the hill where the British force of near one and a half thousand nen had gathered. General Sir William Howe addressed the troops, assuring them he knew they would 'behave like Englishmen' by which he meant he was certain they would stand 'undaunted in the open field to be shot at.' Their courage encouraged, the eleven companies ordered to Mystic Beach advanced in that direction as the sixteen British six pounders began a bombardment of the entire rebel line as a prelude to the infantry advance. To this accompaniment young Francis Grose set out. His company formed in a column near the beach, the 52^nd after the King's Own, the formidable Royal Welch Fusiliers at its head. At the third round the British cannon fell silent. They had been given the wrong sized cannon balls in their side boxes. Fife and drum echoed over the battlefield, the slow tramp of feet muted by the soft grass. The light Infantry columns wheeled on to the narrow Mystic Beach. Ordered not to use their muskets, they were meant to take the small stone fence half a mile away by bayonet, a flying wedge four abreast that would make a concentrated mass assault But they were nervous, uncertain. Of all the companies on the battlefield this day, they alone were utterly untrained in the tactic of a frontal assault. They were skirmishers, not an assault force. Still, they quickened their pace to a run along the smooth flat beach, their charge hidden from the rebels at the rail fence above by the ten foot high embankment, who, in any case were focused on the slow, dreadful march of Howe's oncoming grenadiers across the fields. .² Francis Grose could smell the sudden swift victory in the tangy salt air as the column rushed faster and faster , bayonets thrust forward, along the narrow shore toward the felt-capped rebels huddled behind their low protective wall of stone.

Stark had formed his men in three ranks behind the stone wall so they could loose uninterrupted succeeding volleys at the oncoming redcoats. He ordered them 'not to fire until the front of the enemy reached ' a stake which he had driven into the ground at eight or ten rods distance' (about fifty yards). The British column rushed on 'with the coolness and precision of troops upon parade,' closer and closer. The New Hampshire men kept their discipline. Not a sound came from the American ranks until the first row of the Welch Fusiliers reached Stark's stake in the sand. With the crackling of musket fire, in a haze of blue smoke ball after relentless ball ripped into the British front. As each redcoat fell, another stepped forward to take his place, stepping over the body in front of him, only to be smashed bleeding to the sand himself.

Ahead of him all Grose could see was the column bunching up, man after man toppling under the ferocious American fire. All he could hear was the roar of never-ending musket volleys, agonising screams and shrill cries of wounded and dying men, foul-mouthed cursing of a few well-disciplined redcoats urging each other forward, the soft, trembling whine of men starting to lose their nerve. Almost all of the famed Welch Fusiliers had been wiped out. Now the King's Own stepped into the breach over the crowd of dead along the beach and on the river's edge. They too were decimated. It was the Fifty-Second's turn to step into the withering fire. Instead, they turned heel and ran back along the beach. Screaming officers beat at the running men with their swords. Grose was pwerless before the surge of panicked soldiers, a lone boy standing and yelling at the men to turn and fight, sword waving in one hand, clutching the colours in the other, ankle-deep in the shore-lapping river as Yankee bullets whizzed round his head. No order could hold back that fear or flight, no sword-point turn it. Howe's crucial flanking movement, his plan to sweep down on his enemy from the rear in a crushing blow as the rest of his forces pushed at them from the front was now a complete shambles. Ninety-six men, not counting the wounded, 'lay as thick as sheep in a fold' before Stark's stone wall. The rest fled back towards the boats on the beach. One civilian watching from Boston claimed they had pushed over each over to clamber into the boats, screaming at the tars to row them back to the safety of the North Battery. With the flanking movement driven back, Stark's men were left 'unassailed and unoccupied.'³

1Ward, The War of the Revolution, Vol. I, p.90; Fleming, Now We Are Enemies, p. 235.

2Official Account of General Gage, published by the London Gazette, in Frothingham, Siege of Boston ..., p.287; Ward, The War of the Revolution, Vol. I, pp. 89, 90-91, 94; Don Higginbotham, The war of American Independence. Military Attitudes, Policies, and Practice, 1763-1780, Boston, 1983, p. 73; Major Henry Dearborn, 'An Account of the Battle of Bunker Hill', in Coffin, (comp.) History of the Battle of Breed's Hill,p. 19; Middlekauff, The Glorious Cause, p. 285; Fleming, Now We Are Enemies, p. 156; Urban, Fusiliers,p. 38.

3Elting, The Battle of Bunker's Hill, p. 31; Maj. Gen. James Wilkinson, ' A rapid sketch of the Battle of Bunker Hill' in Coffin, (comp.) History of the Battle of Breed's Hill, pp. 12-13; Caleb Stark, Memoirs and Official Correspondence of Gen. John Stark, with notices of several other officers of the Revolution, also a biography of Capt. Phineas Stevens and of Col. Robert Rogers, with an account of his services in America during the 'Seven Year's War', Concord, 1860, p. 29, http://www.archive.org/details/memoirofficial00starrich ; Fleming, Now We are Enemies, pp. 246-249; French, The First Year of the American Revolution, pp. 237-238.

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.

Some Light on the Hidden Years of James Mario Matra

James Mario Matra is in general of little concern to anyone except Australian historians, who know him best either for his misbehaviour aboard James Cook's Endeavour in 1769-1770 where he was wrongly suspected of snipping of the earlobes of Cook's drunken and alcoholic clerk after stripping him naked while he was drunk, or for his recommendation that Britain should send American Loyalists and/or convicts to settle at Botany Bay in New South Wales. He pushed the latter plan partly because he had aspirations to become the first Governor of the new penal colony. Those aspirations were not shared by anybody in authority. [Alan Frost, The Precarious Life of James Mario Matra, Melbourne, 1995, pp. 5, 120]
Matra changed his name from Magra to Matra near the end of 1775. His biographer, Alan Frost, in 1995, noted that silence covered 'Matra's activities until March 1777', when he applied for leave from his post as consul at Teneriffe in the Canary Islands to deal with family matters in British occupied New York. He would later claim he had gone to New York 'to try if I could there be of any use to Government' [Frost, op. cit., p.84]; in fact he assiduously avoided volunteering for any Loyalist regiments that might be sent to fight the British.
Recent work by Wendy Moore on the life of Mary Eleanor Bowes has thrown some light on Matra's life from 1776 to 1777. With his brother, Perkins Magra, he seems to have been involved in the social set surrounding Britain's richest heiress, the 27 year old Mary Eleanor Bowes, the widowed Countess of Strathmore. [Wendy Moore, Wedlock. How Georgian Britain's Worst Husband Met His Match, London, 2009, p. 193.] Perkins would inherit most of the small family fortune that James would travel to New York to save in 1777/8. [Frost, op.cit., p. 84.] In 1776, however, James Matra and his brother appear to have been involved in a sordid confidence trick to trick the extremely wealthy Mary Bowes into marrying a penniless Irish ensign, Andrew Robinson Stoney. Stoney would succeed in entrapping Mary Bowes into a cruel and brutal marriage for eight years by pretending he was dying from a mortal wound as a result of a duel he had fought to protect Mary Bowes's honour. Perkins was supposed to have been Stoney's second in the duel, or so Mary Bowes believed, but he was nowhere to be seen when the duel allegedly took place. Matra had been part of an elaborate charade whereby Mary Bowes had been convinced to go to a well-known fortune teller, who would predict her marriage to Stoney. [Moore, op. cit., pp. 1-18; 145-6.]
Years later, Stoney would force Mary to describe Matra and his brother as 'people of such execrable and infamous principles' [Ibid., p. 193.], which was probably true. They did not compare, however, to Andrew Stoney, who within hours of his marriage to Mary turned into a violent controlling brute, adept at manipulative humiliation. Mary Bowes would eventually get redress from Stoney, and regain both her freedom and her fortune. Stoney himself would be perpetuated in the English language with the phrase 'stoney broke'. And Matra would languish in obscurity as consul at Tangier, Morocco, till his death in 1806, blind and toothless. He died before knowing the Pitt Government had awarded him a pension for having 'fill'd [his] situation for nearly thirty years [since 1787] with integrity and zeal.' [Frost, op. cit., p. 138.]
Ultimately, Matra's greatest claims to fame would be a maverick account of James Cook's first voyage to the Pacific, and his suggestions that the colony of New South Wales claimed by Cook for England should become a refuge for American Loyalists and British convicts.

"[T]wo beautiful young men ... devoted themselves to death".

We are by now all familiar with the 'modern' terrorist tactic of the suicide attack in the Middle East. Suicide attacks, of course, are nothing new. All Australians are familiar with the stories of the Japanese kamikaze bombers in the Pacific War last century. In 1144, the Shi'ite splinter group known as the Assassins operated from the Nosairi mountains, their swift, secretive knife-wielding attacks the horror of the Franks. [Christopher Tyerman, God's War. A New History of the Crusades, London, 2007, p. 198ff. ] The British Army in the eighteenth and nineteenth century dubbed soldiers sent on suicide missions in the course of a battle, usually as a a last resort to achieve victory in the storming of a fort, as 'The Forlorn Hope.' So esteemed was the role of these volunteers, (and they were always volunteers) that officers would compete for a place in the squad. Sergeants fought as temporary privates. Soldiers offered their comrades as much as 20 pounds to take their place, so sought after was the honour. [Richard Holmes, Redcoats. The British Soldier in the Age of Horse and Musket, London, 2001, p. 383.] During the early stages of the siege of Boston in the early stages of the War for American Independence there was one such suicide attack by two young American Patriots. We have two accounts of it; one British, one American.
First, a bit of background, which will make this narrative a little easier to place. After the British defeat in the battle of Lexington-Concord on 19 April, 1775, the British in Boston were besieged on all sides by thousands of rebels. Boston was cut off on the north on the Charleston Neck on the Charleston peninsula and on the south, leading to Roxbury and Dorchester Heights, at the Boston Neck. Though, at a terrible cost, over a thousand dead, the British set up an outpost on Bunker Hill after the battle of that name on 17 June, 1775, the town's only relief was from the sea.
The American troops to the south of Boston, in the town of Roxbury, and around Jamaica Plain and Dorchester Heights, under the command of General Thomas, had not taken part in the Battle of Bunker Hill because they were committed to the defence of the commanding Dorchester Heights. Those soldiers who had were greeted with elation on their return to Cambridge, the rebel headquarters four miles northwest of Boston, more like victors than troops 'depressed with defeat.' The troops around Roxbury had not been ignored during the Bunker Hill attack, The British had shelled them vigorously, but they had not taken any real part in the action. [Margaret Wheeler Willard, Letters on the American Revolution, 1774-1776, Washington point, N.Y. 1968, p. 142.] A planned British attack on the three thousand odd troops there, expected after Bunker Hill, had been abandoned because the British simply did not have enough men to carry it out. [Ibid., p. 145.] perhaps it was this lack of opportunity for military glory that partly inspired these 'two beautiful young men, between 25 and 30 years of age ...' [Ibid., p. 152.] to undertake their suicidal mission. The provincial officer who recorded this event attributed the young men's mission to anger about a pompous and insulting proclamation written by General John Burgoyne, who considered himself a dab hand with a pen (he was a minor English playwright) for the British Commander-in-Chief. General Thomas Gage, which declared the Americans in rebellion. The day the proclamation was issued, the American rebels had it burnt by 'the common hangman at Cambridge,' [Ibid., pp. 149} Roxbury and Dorchester, though this was probably done more in insolence than rage.
The American source does not indicate whether their superior officers knew what they were about to do, or, if they did, whether they attempted to stop them. A report from the British lines of their action purportedly said the two young men had told the British soldiers at the outpost at Brown's House on the Boston Neck, just outside the British works on the Neck, '"the King's ministers had treated them as slaves, the King's officers had reported them as cowards, that they came to shew the falsity of both reports and the weakness of the proclamation, by sealing with their blood their firm belief in the justice of their cause, upon which they were ready immediately to appear before the presence of God."' [Ibid., pp. 152-153.] It is impossible to prove the young men did say this. The best that can be said about it is that it is entirely characteristic of the overblown revolutionary rhetoric of the time.
We do know that according to Lieutenant John Barker of the King's Own Regiment, who, though a bit tetchy at times, and occasionally careless with his dates, is generally a thoroughly reliable source, that probably on the nineteenth of June, [Ibid., p. 152] (recorded on the 23rd in Barker's diary) two days after Bunker Hill, 'two Men came in as far as Brown's House, when a Serjt. and a Party was sent to meet them, as it was thought they wanted to deliver themselves up, but when the party got near, the 2 men fired and run away, but were shot by the Party and their Arms brought in.' [The British in Boston. The Diary of Lt. John Barker, Cambridge, Mass, 1924, p. 63.]
The American account, a letter eventually published in the London Morning Post and Daily Advertiser, which usually supported the British parliamentary faction opposed to the Lord North ministry, gives a somewhat more detailed and bloodthirsty account. The young men 'fired and killed two of the enemy; they were immediately fired at again, and one was instantly killed and the other desperately wounded, but he told the King's troops he did not desire to live and demanded they should kill him also, which was soon complied with.' [Wheeler, op. cit., p.153.] Essentially, though it is not explicit, the American version accuses the British soldiers of committing a war crime, something that would have been immediately obvious to most of the Morning Post's readers. It is unclear from the sources if the young Americans pretended to surrender, then fired at the British soldiers coming to greet them. If they had behaved that way, it would have been considered a breach of the code of honour. But then again, the Regulars did not expect the rebels to behave honourably.
To place this in its context, claims of war atrocities flew thick and thin during the Boston campaign. The Americans were accused of scalping British soldiers: (they did not) ;of tarring and feathering loyalists and generally treating any suspected loyalists who fell into their hands with savagery (which they did, sometimes); the British were accused of desecrating the body of the revolutionary leader, Dr. John Warren, killed at Bunker Hill: (they probably did); of mistreating American prisoners kept in captivity in Boston after Bunker Hill (which they certainly did). The British too were deeply suspicious of rebel drafting of the Christianised Stockbridge Indians (though, in this instance, without good reason; they always behaved "honorably", that is according to the British code of honour, rather than the more horrific Indian one, during the Boston campaign). Despite their Christianisation, the British feared the Stockbridge Indians might fight with what they saw as Indian barbarity. [Colin G. Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country:Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities, New York, 1995, pp. 91-92.}
In conclusion, the surprising thing about this incident is that two young men went on a suicide mission, inspired by their belief in American revolutionary ideals, knowing they would kill only two of the enemy at the most, knowing, in the words of their chronicler they had 'devoted themselves to death.' [Wheeler, op. cit., p. 152.] Barker says nothing of the impact of the young men's mission on the morale of his comrades, though this is not entirely surprising. Though he was rarely complimentary about the rebels, he tended to reserve most of his spleen for the shortcomings of his commanders. As to why the British soldiers shot the surviving American soldier, many in Boston were still angered by the carnage of Bunker Hill. Most had lost comrades. A war crime, or simply a sordid fact of war? I leave it to the reader to decide.

David Collins and Robert Ross

David Collins, who rose from second lieutenant to adjutant and deputy paymaster for the 2nd Marine Battalion, entirely through his family connections during the time he was enduring the siege of Boston (1775-1776) initially got on well with his Scottish marine comrade, Captain Robert Ross. Ross was a comrade of Collins's father, Lt. General Tooker Collins, by whose side he'd fought at Louisburg in 1758. He appears, at that time, to have been a friend of the Collins family. Young David records sociable times with him when they were garrisoning Charleston Heights across from Boston in the weeks after the Battle of Bunker Hill. In 1775, Ross was not yet the 'social monster' he was to become.
Events during the siege of Boston may indicate why Ross eventually turned into the curmudgeon renowned to Australian historians. One English officer records that there was great discontent in Boston among the corps at 'the advancement, insolence and self-sufficiency of a number of Scotch officers'. '[S]everal common soldiers were reprimanded, and threatened with the most exemplary punishment, for swearing they ought to be commanded by Englishmen, and that they would not sacrifice their lives in an attempt to butcher their friends and fellow subjects for any interested North Briton on earth.' [Margaret Wheeler Willard, Letters on the American Revolution, 1774-1776, New York, 1968, p. 190.]
Even as late as 1775, some 30 years after the Jacobite Rebellion, there was still a deep 'Scotophobia' within English society, probably not as intense as it had been in the early years of George III's reign, when the Stuart Lord Bute had been the King's first Minister, and the radical John Wilkes was stirring up popular resentment against the Scots, and Bute in particular, across London, but lingering, still. The American revolutionaries used an empty boot hanging from a tree as a symbol of their discontent with the home government. Colonial Governors, like Gage in Boston, and later Phillip in New South Wales, before they took office had to swear the Oath of Abjuration, wherein they affirmed their belief that no descendants of the Stuart James II who claimed to be the Prince of Wales had title to the British throne. This was followed by a further Oath of Assurance which was yet another declaration against the descendants of the Pretender. [John Currey, David Collins. A Colonial Life, Melbourne. 2000, p. 50.]
For loyal Scots like Robert Ross, who had spent their whole lives in service of the Crown, such anti-Scots feeling no doubt rankled. It is not surprising, then, that Scots officers tended to stick together. Ross's career path, and that of his compatriot, Captain William Campbell, after the American Revolution, was to a great extent dependent on the patronage of the English Tooker Collins. They were friends of the family both and owed their advancement to Tooker Collin's benevolence. Senior British officers in the latter quarter of the 18th century frequently looked kindly on recruits from Scotland, who were recognised for their fighting qualities. General Gage had gone out of his way to recruit Scots migrants straight off the ship from New York and had them brought back to Boston to fight for the British. [General Thomas Gage to Captain Duncan campbell and LieutenantSymes, Boston, 18 July, 1775 in William Bell Clark (ed.) Naval Documents of the American Revolution, Vol. I, washington, 1964, p.912.] Such consideration was not always returned
It is not my intention to outline all the reasons why David Collins fell out with Robert Ross in this post. They are many and various ranging from professional jealousy and hurt pride at the favour shown to Collins by Governor Phillip to sheer bloody-mindedness on Ross's part. [cf. Currey, op. cit, chs. 3,4,5, and 8] David Collins believed Ross no longer paid him due deference, as he had got all he could out of Tooker Collins now that he had been appointed Lieutenant Govertnor of New South Wales. (Collins was mistaken; Ross's appointment had been made by Evan Nepean, under-secretary at the Home Office and Tooker Collins had had nothing to do with it. [Currey, p.39 and 323.]) Beyond these personal reasons , there was also, I would contend, on Ross's side, a simmering resentment at the way he was treated, as a Scot, in the Royal Marines, possibly reaching back as far as the siege of Boston at the beginning of the War of American Independence, and possibly even as far back as the Seven Years' War. Such rancour ate into his soul changing him into the bitter, obstreperous man familiar from First Fleet documents and journals.
In modern parlance, while we do not know the specific occasions when, or for that matter where Robert Ross was taunted about his Scottishness, we can safely conclude it is highly likely he was a victim of a peculiar kind of English racism. Like many victims of racism he was angered and soured by that experience of racism, to the point that it was detrimental to his army career.