For nearly every sunlit moment of the past week, Capt. Hans Christian Febiger and I sat wherever the light was best, tracing copies of a map no one believed to be accurate. In a drawer of the Tory house being used as Col. Arnold’s headquarters, Capt. Febiger found fifteen sheets of remarkably thin, almost transparent foolscap and two magnificent silver bodied, gold-nibbed pens.

Over the course of the week, as we dipped our pens and blotted every mark we made on each copy of the map, I learned Hans Christian Febiger was born on an island off the coast of Denmark in 1749, lived for a time on St. Croix, an island in the Caribbean where his uncle was a Danish government official, and came to Massachusetts in 1772.

As our week wore on, he told me how he joined the Sons of Liberty and Mr. Samuel Adams’s Committee of Safety with some Harvard College students in 1774. When I asked if he knew my brother, he answered, “No, but we all knew of him being among the forty-nine killed by the Redcoat bastards on April 19th.”

He also shared, “The fight at Lexington and Concord was what motivated me to join the Massachusetts Militia just a few days later. I volunteered to join Lieutenant Colonel Arnold’s expedition to Ticonderoga but on Monday, May 1st, two days before he and his volunteers left to cross the Berkshires for Ticonderoga and link-up with Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys, a British patrol caught my militia unit fortifying Patriot houses and barricading streets in Charlestown. A Redcoat bayonet wounded me in my left calf and I was prevented from accompanying Colonel Arnold to Ticonderoga.

“On June 17th, when the British decided to break out of Boston, I was still on Charlestown Peninsula, on the southeastern slope of Bunker’s Hill, serving as Adjutant for Militia Col. Samuel Gerrish, commander of the 25th Massachusetts Militia Regiment—who revealed himself to be a less than bold leader.

“As the Naval bombardment increased and the Royal Marines and British infantry started coming ashore, Col. Gerrish sent me forward with a company of fifty men to the southwestern slopes of Breed’s Hill to discern whether the two companies of Massachusetts Militia—one from the 9th Regiment and the other from the 24th—would be able to protect the only six Patriot artillery field pieces on that side of the Charlestown peninsula.

“We took up positions to the left of Captain Nutting’s Company from the Massachusetts 9th. The Patriot artillery pieces were less than fifty yards to our left—and what is now known as ‘Warren’s Redoubt’ was less than 100 yards left of the artillery—which the British did everything in their power to destroy—and finally succeeded, only because we ran out of ammunition.”

“Is this the same ‘Doctor Warren,’ the medical teacher at Harvard, who was actually a Brigadier General, but who fought as a common soldier?” I asked.