Bunker Hill

formidable. Instead of mounting an assault, “we ought immediately to embark” and leave Boston. “The fate of this whole army and the town is at stake,” he wrote in his diary at four that afternoon, “not to say the fate of America.” After communicating his concerns to every superior officer he could find, he went to Province House, where at 7:00 p.m. Howe and his generals were in the midst of a council of war. Robertson waited outside the door for more than an hour until his commanding officer, the engineer Captain John Montresor, stepped out of the room. Montresor also believed that they had no choice but to evacuate, and he told Robertson that he had said as much during the council of war. He also recounted how “Lord Percy and some others seconded him,” and only then did Howe confess that evacuation had been “his own sentiment from the first” and that it was “the honor of the troops” that had moved him to order an attack. Howe had “agreed immediately,” Montresor continued, “to embark everything.” As Washington’s council of war had done three weeks before, Howe’s officers had prevented their commander from making a decision that might have destroyed both his army and Boston.
    If Howe had any lingering doubts when he went to bed that night, the weather decided the matter for all of them. A storm that some judged to be a hurricane blew up out of the south, knocking down buildings and blowing two of the troop transports moored off the Castle onto the shore of nearby Governors Island. Even if Howe had wanted to, he could not have launched an attack on Dorchester Heights.
    At eleven the next morning, Howe called together the army’s commanding officers and “acquainted them with his intentions of evacuating this place and going to Halifax.” Washington did not get the chance to attack Boston. Signals had been prepared at the meetinghouse in Roxbury to mark the moment when the amphibious assault was to be launched. “But kind heaven,” William Heath wrote, “which more than once saved the Americans when they would have destroyed themselves, did not allow the signals to be made.”
    —
    On March 8, a British officer bearing a letter from the Boston town selectmen approached the American lines at Roxbury under a flag of truce. General Howe, the selectmen indicated, would not burn the town if the Americans allowed the British to evacuate. This was hopeful news to be sure, but Washington remained fearful that Howe was in fact stalling for time so that he could launch one final thrust against the American forces. As the days passed and Howe’s army remained in Boston, Washington attempted to hurry the British along by building a fortification at Dorchester Heights that was even closer to Boston. Howe responded to each new move on the Americans’ part with artillery fire (in one instance killing several Continental soldiers), and as the day of departure approached, the British general was terrifyingly close to torching the town, a prospect that kept the Bostonians in an unremitting state of apprehension and alarm.
    All the while, chaos reigned in the city as the British soldiers struggled to collect as many of their stores as possible for transportation to Halifax. Due to the Admiralty’s almost criminal undermanning of the naval vessels, there was a severe lack of sailors to operate the evacuation fleet. This wasn’t the only problem thrust upon General Howe by his superiors in London. “When the transports came to be examined,” an officer wrote, “they were void of both provisions and forage. . . . Never troops in so disgraceful a situation, and that not in the least to their own fault or owing to any want of skill or discretion in our commanders, but entirely owing to Great Britain being fast asleep. I pity General Howe from my soul.” Dozens of perfectly serviceable sailing vessels were tied up to the wharves, but without the needed sailors and provisions Howe was unable to use them.
    The departing British army had no choice but to leave behind a vast amount of heavy armaments and other supplies. To prevent the artillery pieces from being used against them, the soldiers hammered metal rods into the cannons’ touchholes, a procedure known as spiking the guns. As preparations to leave extended into the second week, marauding gangs of soldiers and sailors plundered stores and houses. Howe issued orders that looters be shot on sight, but the stealing continued.
    For the