As soon as the British forces had landed, fire was set to the houses not already destroyed by shells, while the sailors and marines went through them, smashing furniture, cutting open beds to feed the flames, insulting women, and spreading terror. One house only, filled with women, was spared after a special appeal to the Admiral. A church just outside of the town was gutted, farm-houses on the road to Baltimore were plundered, travellers were robbed, and bridges, furnaces, and mills were destroyed.
The little villages of Georgetown and Fredericktown, Maryland, were the next spoil of the Admiral, who led the ravaging party in person. But he did not succeed in landing till his men in the boats had suffered severely from the fire of a battery manned by thirty-five militiamen, which was kept up steadily for half an hour. Not a house was left standing in either of the villages, and the enemy enriched themselves with all the plunder they could carry away.
About this time Admiral Warren, who had issued { 172}from Bermuda a proclamation declaring New York, Charleston, Port Royal, Savannah, and the whole of the Mississippi River under blockade--a paper blockade, at which both Americans and neutrals laughed--joined Admiral Cockburn, in the Chesapeake, and they determined to extend as far as possible the pillaging and burning of towns on the coast.
The next one selected was Norfolk, Va. But the approach to the town was commanded by a battery on Craney Island, and this battery was promptly manned by a hundred American sailors, under command of Lieutenant Neale, of the navy, and fifty marines under Lieutenant Breckenridge. It was dawn of day on the 22d of June when four thousand British sailors and marines, in barges, came in sight of the island; and when they were fairly under the guns of the battery, it blazed out. The pieces were served rapidly and with such precision that many of the barges were cut clear in two, and their occupants would have been drowned had they not been promptly rescued by the others. The Admiral was in a boat fifty feet long, called the _Centipede_, and this was so riddled with shot that he and his crew had barely time to get out of it when it sank. Before this merciless and unremitting fire the squadron of barges at length retreated { 173}to the ships. At the same time, a body of eight hundred soldiers had been put ashore, to attack the town by land. But for them a force of Virginia volunteers, under Colonel Beatty, were waiting, with a well-placed battery of six guns. The enemy had not all landed when the battery opened upon them, with such effect that they retreated at once. A part of them took refuge in a house, from which they fired rockets at the battery-men; but an American gun-boat came up and sent a few twenty-four-pound balls crashing through the house, when the last of the enemy fled, making their way back to the fleet as speedily as possible.