The control of the operations was now entrusted to Colonel Walpole, who at once hastened to Trelawney with all speed. He found the troops sickly and dispirited, and worn out with incessant duty. It was pretty clear that the idea of confining the Maroons by a cordon was an absurdity, and that the destruction of their provision ground only drove them oftener afield to massacre, plunder, and destroy. After weeks of hard work the small British force had lost two field officers and seventy men killed in action alone, to say nothing of wounded, and men dead from sickness and fatigue, while not a single Maroon was certainly known to have been killed. The situation was becoming serious: the negroes had begun to join the Maroons; the French might come at any moment; and then there would be every likelihood of a general revolt of the blacks against the whites, such as had already taken place in the Windward Islands. Walpole soon altered the whole plan of operations. He began by redistributing his posts, so as to command the mouths of the cockpits, employing negroes to clear away the jungle from the approaches and from the heights above them. [Sidenote: 1795.] He then set to work to train some of his men in the tactics of Maroon warfare, the essence of which was that men should work together in pairs or groups, one man taking charge of another’s arms when he required both hands for climbing, and that above all they should take advantage of cover. Walpole had three infantry regiments with him; but the men that he chose for this work were the 17th Light Dragoons, and he did not regret his choice. So the two troops of the Seventeenth were dismounted and turned into mountaineer marksmen.