"The fortification at Hampton was but slight and guarded by only four
hundred and fifty militiamen. Feeling themselves too weak to repel an
attack by such overwhelming odds, they retired, and the town was given
up to pillage."
"Didn't they do any fighting at all, papa?" asked Lulu in a tone of
regret and mortification. "I know Americans often did fight when their
numbers were very much smaller than those of the enemy."
"That is quite true," he said, with a gleam of patriotic pride in his
eye, "and sometimes won the victory in spite of the odds against them.
That thing had happened only a few days previously at Craney Island, and
the British were doubtless smarting under a sense of humiliating defeat
when they proceeded to the attack of Hampton."
"How many of the British were there, Captain?" asked Evelyn Leland.
"I have forgotten, though I know they far outnumbered the Americans."
"Yes," he replied, "as I have said there were about four hundred and
fifty of the Americans, while Beckwith had twenty-five hundred men and
was assisted by the flotilla of Admiral Cockburn, consisting of armed
boats and barges, which appeared suddenly off Blackbeard's Point at the
mouth of Hampton Creek, at the same time that Beckwith's troops moved
stealthily forward through the woods under cover of the _Mohawk's_ guns.
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