Bunker Hill

possible, even as they did everything in their power to prevent provincial reinforcements from crossing the Neck onto the Charlestown peninsula. Graves’s largest vessels, the
Boyne
and
Somerset
,
could not elevate their guns high enough to fire on the heights of Breed’s Hill, and they were too big to approach Charlestown Neck. This left the
Lively
, whose guns had begun the fighting, the
Glasgow
, the
Symmetry
, and the much smaller
Falcon
and
Spitfire
, which were all positioned around the southern and western sides of the peninsula. The causeway of a milldam provided a barrier to the vessels approaching the Neck from the Charles River, but with the aid of two raftlike gondolas, each equipped with a twelve-pound cannon, they should be able to make the Neck a very hot place for any provincial reinforcements.
    Gage would spend most of the day in Province House, but that morning he ventured out to inspect the American fort for himself. With the help of his spyglass he could see a man standing on the parapet of the redoubt, about a thousand yards away as the cannonball flies. Beside Gage was the loyalist Abijah Willard. Handing Willard his telescope, Gage asked if could recognize the man standing so promiscuously on the fort. The distance was probably too great to see his face, but the banyan may have tipped Willard off. By God, it was his brother-in-law, William Prescott.
    “Will he fight?” Gage asked.
    “Yes, sir,” Willard replied. “He is an old soldier and will fight as long as a drop of blood remains in his veins.”
    —
    Around 10:00 a.m. Major John Brooks arrived in Cambridge after the long walk from Charlestown. He immediately reported to General Ward at Hastings House. The ever-cautious commander in chief found himself in an impossible position. Prescott had disobeyed orders and built a fort within easy cannon shot of the British, and now he needed reinforcements in anticipation of a British attack. But who was to say the British were not going to stay with their original plan and move on Dorchester and Roxbury on the other side of Boston? And then there was the possibility of an amphibious assault not on Charlestown but on Cambridge. He must wait to see what the British were up to before he could send a sizable force to support Prescott.
    But no matter what the British did, the Americans had to face a most distressing reality. The army had very little gunpowder. The Committee of Safety was then in session at Hastings House, and they sent out a desperate plea to David Cheever on the Committee of Supplies. Although they had just received thirty-six half barrels of powder from Connecticut, there were only twenty-seven half barrels in the provincial magazine. There was apparently no more powder available from the towns. And as John Brooks had recently discovered, horses were also very difficult to come by. The Committee of Safety (the entity that functioned as the province’s executive body) was without the express riders required to communicate effectively with its own army, which was scattered across a ten-mile perimeter around Boston.
    Making matters even worse, the committee’s chairman, Dr. Joseph Warren, was nowhere to be found. The night before, Warren had frightened many of his colleagues with wild words about joining Prescott and his men on Bunker Hill. But that was before one of the headaches he had been known to suffer required him to retire to a darkened room and await the passing of the incapacitating pain. Warren had done a heroic job of holding the province together over the last two months, but even he, apparently, had his limits. Delegating responsibility had never been his forte, and with Warren out of commission, no one seemed willing to act.
    Finally, Committee of Safety member Richard Devens made a decision. They must reinforce Prescott. With Ward’s reluctant approval, they would send all, not just some, of the New Hampshire regiments led by James Reed and John Stark to the Charlestown peninsula. Reed’s men were housed near Charlestown Neck and Stark’s were in Medford, and with luck they would reach Prescott by the middle of the afternoon.
    —
    One of the few provincials with a horse was General Israel Putnam. Already, he had ridden at least twice from Bunker Hill to Cambridge and back. Having participated in the discussion the night before about where to build the redoubt, he was now obsessed with the need to build a fortification on Bunker Hill. Otherwise Prescott’s