Pigeon Hill Redoubt

From the British perspective, they had good interior lines and as long as their resupply route via sea remained open with the Royal Navy, they could hold out for months in such a siege. However, when the French Navy drove the Royal Navy off station at the Battle of the Capes on 5 September, the British position immediately became precarious. Sergeant Joseph Plumb Martin, Corps of Sappers and Miners, quipped that, “I doubt not but that their [the British] wish was not to have so many of us come at once, as their accommodations were rather scanty. They thought ‘The fewer the better cheer.’ We thought, ‘The more the merrier.’”