and his Lieutenant Colonel, Israel Putnam, was made Colonel of the Connecticut soldiers in his stead.  This was the same Putnam who fought the wolf single-handed in its cave, and who was to take that breakneck ride a few years later to escape the very troops with whom he was now associated.  The entire force of 2,300 provincials under General Lyman’s command was not a mere bevy of raw militia.  Nearly all of them had seen service against the French in those well trained and active forces which were given the general name of “Rangers;” the officers especially, of whom Putnam was hardly more than a type, being men of extended experience.  The fact that so many men were willing to volunteer in this arduous and, as it turned out, desperate service for the King, speaks volumes for what could have been done with such men had Pitt and not Bute been at the head of the English nation at that time.  The advices from Havana showed that the army there was in great need of reinforcements, so by great efforts the regulars and provincials were stowed way in fourteen transports, and with an escort of a few frigates they set sail for the South about the middle of May.  There were the usual shouts of an admiring populace and the tears of sweethearts and wives; but it is easy to say that there would have been no rejoicing if the people of Connecticut, the Jerseys, and New York could have foreseen that hardly one of every fifty of their volunteers would see his home again.

Americans were wrecked.

Just before the arrival of these welcome reinforcements on July 20, some English merchantmen had come along with cargoes of cotton bags, which were pressed into immediate use for the lines which were now closing around Havana; and in the ships were also found several pilots.  Then the forces from the North came amidst general rejoicings, but without Putnam and 500 of his Yankees.  These, in a transport which was skirting the dangerous coast much too closely, were shipwrecked on one of the treacherous shoals thereabouts.  Putnam, with true New England fertility of resource, extemporized rafts from the fragments of the vessel and got all his men ashore without the loss of a life.  They landed near the City of Carthagena, threw up breastworks, and were found ready to repel a force of thousands of Spaniards when the ships from before Havana arrived for their rescue, their own companions wisely pressing on and sending aid back from the headquarters.

The American troops went bravely to work, engaging themselves chiefly with the undermining of one of the walls.  To reach this it was necessary for them to pass along a narrow eminence where they were in plain view and easy range of the Spaniards.  A number were lost in this dangerous enterprise, but their valor was dimmed neither by this nor by the still heavier losses which came upon them through the diseases prevalent in every portion of the British camp.  Though men of such hardiness that they must have been equal in resisting power to the British, their losses were comparatively much greater, proving that they occupied positions of greater danger, either from bullets or the fevers of the region.