Mortified by his failure, Balcarres hurried up reinforcements of militia and stores, the conveyance of the latter proving, from the difficulty of the country, to be a frightful task. On the 18th August he reoccupied the new town, unopposed, and on the 23rd moved with three columns under Colonels Fitch, Incledon, and Hull, against the old town. The march was made at daybreak and in profound silence; and the old town was duly captured, as Balcarres fondly imagined, by surprise. The real fact was that the Maroons, disliking the insecurity of the towns, had evacuated them a week before and withdrawn into the cockpits, leaving only a small alarm-post outside. These Maroon sentries fired a few shots and wounded three men, two of them troopers of the Seventeenth, and quietly retired upon their main body. Balcarres then established a post and a block-house on the site of the new town, occupied every approach, and set himself to destroy all the Maroon provision grounds, with the idea of cooping them up and starving them out. He might as well have tried to pen a swarm of mosquitoes in a lion’s cage. The Maroons quietly passed out and burnt and plundered an estate house six miles in rear of Balcarres’s headquarters. At the end of August the rainy season set in, and transport became a matter of extreme difficulty. Balcarres himself returned to Port Royal, and left to Colonel Fitch the duty of completing the cordon round the Maroon district. Fresh obstacles cropped up at every moment. The principal planters to the south-west of the Maroon district, by which side access to it was easiest, were relations of Major James, who took up his grievances warmly and laid themselves out to thwart the Governor. [Sidenote: 1795.] One of these, a local Major-General, eighty years of age, and recently married to a wife of twenty, took offence because Balcarres appointed a regular Major-General to command the field force over his head. Another local Major-General suddenly abandoned operations with his militia in the middle of a concerted movement, on the remarkable ground that he had promised his wife to return to her in a week, and had already been absent ten days. It was only with the greatest difficulty that the troops, exposed to most arduous service and every possible hardship, could be kept supplied with food. Frequently they passed the whole day without a morsel to eat. To discourage them still further, the militia went home and left the regulars to do all the work; and, finally, the climax came when the commanding officer, Colonel Fitch himself, [Sidenote: 12th Sept.] was caught in an ambuscade, and with two other officers shot dead.