The whole camp boiled with men, and for the first time I saw the specters that had lain hid in the huts and tents. Some crawled out on hands and knees; others were drawn out by men who looked near as sick as those they drew. They had the smallpox, and there were hundreds of them. For every well man, there was one with smallpox, lying on the hot sand in front of tent or hut from which he had been dragged.

They looked dead. Their ragged fragments of uniforms were loose on them, almost as though there were nothing inside but bones; their limbs, sprawled at odd angles, seemed lifeless. Flies and mosquitoes crawled on their unprotected faces, but they lay without moving—a dreadful festering host—an army barely alive.

… The things that were done by men called well on that sweltering fourteenth day of June were more than I can believe when I cast my mind back over them. Even if they had been in perfect health, their accomplishments would have been miracles. But the well were sick from scanty food, discouragement, exposure—so sick that if they had been aboard a ship of mine, I would have hesitated to let any one of them go aloft to hand a sail for fear he would have lost his hold from weakness.

Yet those men leveled the earthworks they had been weeks in building, and filled the trenches. They trundled cannon from embrasures and stowed them aboard the schooners; carried the sick to bateaux and placed them tenderly in the bows and sterns; took out powder, shot and supplies from rickety warehouses and loaded them in schooners and gundelos; packed up every last thing in tents, huts and headquarters—every entrenching tool, every shovel, every blanket, every kettle.

They struck and folded tents: crawled over that baking, mosquito-ridden, stinking marsh like fumbling human ants, weak, drenched with sweat, but tirelessly salvaging every usable thing.

The sun was a blazing ball in a leaden heat haze when the schooners and gundelos, loaded with guns, stores and men, set off upstream. The British fleet, crowded by now into the channel between the islands, was close. We could see the fighting-tops of the ships in the van, and riflemen in them, waiting to pick us off.

When there was nothing left in the camp but huts and warehouses and an expanse of foul and trampled sand, we set fire to everything burnable. The smoke rolled down over the throngs that wrestled with the bateaux at the river’s edge; and in the hot red light of the setting sun they looked like lost souls struggling on the fringes of hell.