54 ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 
was not without its effect upon the morale of the army. Bancroft even 
attributes the failure to crush Washington at Valley Forge in the fol- 
lowing winter, to the eager pursuit of pleasure which distinguished 
Howe’s command. 
Meanwhile the Revolution ran its course. The singular incapacity 
which marked the conduct of the English arms almost throughout, was 
responsible for reverse after reverse. Spasmodic efforts to reinforce 
the army in America were made, and as the result of one of these, 
Robert Rogers arrived at New York in 1779 with instructions from 
home that he was to be again employed. 
On May ist, 1779, he was commissioned by Sir Henry Clinton, 
Howe’s successor in the command-in-chief, to raise a regiment of two 
battalions to be known as the King’s Rangers. One battalion seems 
to have been destined for service in the Province of Quebec ; the other 
for Halifax. 
In this regiment his brother James was gazetted major. A docu- 
ment in the War Office Correspondence shows that James Rogers’s ap- 
pointment dated June 2nd, 1779, although there was a still earlier 
commission to the same rank dated May 1st, 1778. 
Recruiting parties were sent out into the northern colonies and a 
ship was chartered by government for the conveyance to Quebec of 
Major James Rogers and eleven officers' gazetted to the new corps. 
This vessel, the Brigantine ‘“‘ Hawke,”—Capt. Slaitor,—arrived at 
Quebec in September, 1779. The colonel, Robert Rogers, with a staff 
of officers, was conveyed in H.M.S. “ Blond” to Penobscot. There he 
was present at the naval engagement in which the rebel fleet was 
destroyed, August 13th, 1779. 
Meanwhile, with the accustomed mismanagement at headquarters, 
no definite instructions were sent to General Haldimand, Commander- 
in-chief in Canada, as to the embodiment of the new corps. So early 
as May 24th, 1779, Lord Rawdon—afterwards Lord Hastings, Goy- 
ernor-General of India—then acting as adjutant-general to Clinton, 
wrote to Haldimand, indicating the probable appearance of Col. Rogers 
within the latter’s command. With official dread of exceeding his 
instructions, and fearful of provoking animosities regarding recruiting 
in the other corps in the province, Haldimand hesitated how to act. 
Meanwhile, the numerous recruits coming in by the overland route, 
consigned to the King’s Rangers, had to be subsisted as best they might 
out of the unfortunate major’s own pocket. 

1 Most of these were from one or other of the five battalions of Gen. Skinner’s 
brigade. Two are described as from the Queen’s Rangers. 
