[SIEBERT] REFUGEE LOYALISTS OF CONNECTICUT 85 
Little York, Virginia! By one of the articles of surrender the Bonetta 
ship-of-war had been left at the disposal of Cornwallis, who sent Colonel 
Simcoe aboard and with him as many Rangers and men of other 
Loyalist corps of those remaining within the lines as the vessel could 
hold. On their arrival at New York, Sir Henry Clinton permitted 
Simcoe to sail for England, while the part of the regiment that had 
come in the Bonetta was placed under the command of Captain 
Saunders, who had just returned from Charleston. Of those held as 
prisoners in the South a large number soon escaped, and made their 
way safely. to New York. At a muster of February 24, 1782, the 
infantry of the Queen’s Rangers was credited with 342 persons, the 
cavalry with 236, or together 578. That these figures included the 
women and children is shown by the authorization issued to Colonel 
Edward Winslow, April 15, 1783, by Major R. Armstrong of the 
corps to obtain grants and locate lands in Nova Scotia for the Rangers, 
agreeable to a return, or enumeration, of 575 persons, of whom 305 
were privates, sixty, women, and seventy, children. However, accord- 
ing to the muster held only nine days later (April 24), the total number 
had dropped to 448, 280 of these being connected with the infantry 
and 168 with the cavalry? The sudden decline in numbers of the 
Queen’s Rangers and the King’s American Regiment before the 
Loyalist corps left New York for Nova Scotia was due to the fact that 
those who preferred to take their discharge and run the risk of remain- 
ing in the States were permitted to do so, while many of the officers 
hastened to England, once hostilities had ceased, to urge their claims 
for half-pay and seek compensation from the government for their 
losses in the war. It need scarcely be added that numerous American 
provincial regiments experienced similar drops in numbers. 
Meantime, a community of refugees chiefly from Connecticut, 
but with smaller groups from Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and 
Dutchess County in New York State, had grown up on Eaton’s 
Neck, Long Island, a little eastward of Lloyd’s Neck. Walter Bates 

1 Captain Saunders’ troop and the Bucks County Light Dragoons did not share 
in the capitulation, because they were on duty during this period at the Quarter 
House, South Carolina, and the German Hussars are not mentioned as having been 
present at Yorktown. At the muster of December 24, 1781, Saunders’ troop num- 
bered twenty-three and the Bucks County troop, fifty-one. The last figures avail- 
able for the German Hussars date back a year earlier, when this troop was at New 
York and numbered sixty-four men. 
2 Simcoe’s Journal, 138, 143, 149, 150, 153, 159, 212, 252, 254, 255; MS. Muster 
’ Rolls of Colonel Edward Winslow, Abstracts of the Muster Rolls by Rev. W. O. 
‘ Raymond (unpublished;) Raymond, Winslow Papers, 120, n.; Rev. W. O. Ray- 
mond’s “Early Days of Woodstock”’ in The Dispatch of Woodstock, N.B., Jan. 23, 
1907. 
