The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777 (The Revolution Trilogy Book 1)

by Rick Atkinson

Simply getting horses to New York was proving to be an ordeal. At Howe’s request, twenty-one equestrian transports had been leased, some of them Dutch vessels with scuttled decks to allow greater air circulation. Each ship typically carried several dozen animals in narrow stalls, their legs sometimes padded with straw trusses, their hooves hobbled, and their bodies guyed to overhead hooks to prevent toppling when the transport rolled. Of 950 horses shipped to Howe this summer, 412 would die in transit, the carcasses hoisted with slings from the stinking holds and pitched into the sea. Scores more were so enfeebled by the crossing that they died soon after arrival. Some transports proved particularly lethal, like the Jonge Pieter, which had embarked seventy-two horses—typically costing sixteen guineas each—and delivered just sixteen alive. The French ambassador in London, who carefully tracked Britain’s war exertions, calculated that these equestrian shipping costs alone exceeded £10,000. “This ruinous and mad war,” he wrote in a secret dispatch to Versailles, “is the reverse of the philosopher’s stone for England.”