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Updated: June 29, 2025
It was humble enough in all its appointments, the walls quite bare, the few chairs fashioned from half-barrels, a packing box for a table, and the narrow bed on which I lay constructed from saplings lashed together, covered with a coarse ticking, packed with straw.
"And that is n't all, your honour," replied Joe, his face brightening and his self-importance evidently restored. "We are a forehanded lot, and we've got twenty half-barrels of powder laid in against trouble." After a few more words with Bagby, which put a pleased smile on his face, the officer wheeled his horse.
After cruising round Porto Rico and Hispaniola for two months, we bore up for the mole, where we found two sail of the line, a sixty-four and two sloops of war. In the course of our cruise we had sent in an American brig and a schooner laden with flour. The latter was condemned, half-barrels of gunpowder being found in the under flour casks.
Cabs use it, private carriages, freight-carts and wagons, all sorts of vehicles have it. In Munich I afterward saw it used on a long wagon laden with fifty-four half-barrels of beer; I had before noticed that the cabs in Heidelberg used it not new rope, but rope that had been in use since Abraham's time and I had felt nervous, sometimes, behind it when the cab was tearing down a hill.
Without delay, by means of lanterns which were screened from the foe by being carried in half-barrels, the engineering tapes were laid down, and with pick and shovel the fatigue party went to work, the eagerness of the men being such that, despite of orders, the men from the supporting regiments, leaving their muskets in charge of their fellow-soldiers, would join in the toil.
In the dead of the night preceding the 21st of April, 1775, a little less than a month, therefore, after the convention of Virginia had proclaimed the inevitable approach of a war with Great Britain, a detachment of marines from the armed schooner Magdalen, then lying in the James River, stealthily visited this storehouse, and, taking thence fifteen half-barrels of gunpowder, carried them off in Lord Dunmore's wagon to Burwell's Ferry, and put them on board their vessel.
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