to go to Williamsburg and fetch back four thousand pounds, an errand not much to my liking.
Unfortunately, the detail was made without my having the opportunity of choice, and proved very unfit, giving me much concern and anxiety. I do not know why there was delay in assembling this detail, but eight days passed after I got my order before I was given the men. I believe they would not have been eight seconds in dispersing if we had been attacked.
Captain Horatio Gates, of a New York Independent company, advised not to take regulars, who would obey only their own officers; but I had no choice, and so set out and was gone a fortnight. On my return I slept every night in the waggon, with my precious money about me and pistols loaded. The men were drunken and disobedient until I promised strappado on our reaching camp, and indeed I was glad to be rid of the money and the guard.
I saw during this ride and later that, as Orme had told me, the men of the Forty-fourth and Forty-eighth regiments were drunken, mutinous, and disorderly, so that it was not alone our own failures to provide
