Bad luck dogged this enterprise from the first. The transports were overtaken by a storm and dispersed in all directions. All the cavalry horses perished, and one ship containing siege artillery was lost. It was not till the end of January that the ships, many of them badly battered, appeared at the appointed rendezvous, the Island of Tybee, off the coast of Georgia, having spent five weeks over a voyage generally reckoned to last ten days. The troop of the Seventeenth was sent with Tarleton’s legion to Port Royal, a little to the north of Savannah, where it was landed and quartered at Beaufort, at the head of the harbour. With great difficulty it procured forty or fifty inferior horses; and after a time was ordered to join some reinforcements that were marching up from Savannah, and advance up country with them to unite with Clinton’s army before Charleston. Meanwhile the people of the country, knowing that the British had lost their horses, equipped themselves as cavalry to harass the column on the march. Nothing could have suited Tarleton better. A charge by the troop of the Seventeenth sufficed to disperse these irregular horsemen, and ensure the capture not only of several prisoners, but, better still, of their horses. After twelve days’ march through a difficult country broken up by flooded rivers, and in the thick of a hostile population, the legion arrived at its destination on the Ashley with its strength in horses multiplied by four or five, and a good supply of forage to boot. Meanwhile General Clinton with the rest of the army had sailed to the river Edisto, a little to the south of Charleston, and advanced thence by slow marches upon the town. Charleston lies on a tongue of land which runs, roughly speaking, from north [Sidenote: 1780.] to south, being enclosed between the Cooper River on the east and the Ashley on the west. The British fleet having moved up to blockade it to the south or seaward, Clinton on the 30th March threw his army across the Ashley to the neck of the isthmus on which the town stands, and encamped over against the American entrenchments. As usual these were formidable enough, stretching across the isthmus from the Ashley to the Cooper, and strengthened by a deep canal, two rows of abattis, and other obstacles. Over and above the garrison of 6000 men within the town, the Americans kept a force of militia and three regiments of cavalry, under General Huger, on the upper forks and passes of the Cooper, whereby the communications between the town and the back country were kept open. The dislodgment of this corps of Huger’s was therefore indispensable to the complete investment of Charleston; and the execution of this task was intrusted to a picked force of 1400 men, including Tarleton’s legion and the detachment of the Seventeenth.