Saltonstall was tried by court-martial and cashiered. Besides the humiliation and shame of this flight, the loss to Boston in its shipping was almost ruinous. Nineteen vessels of which the squadron consisted were destroyed or taken—a force, it is said, little inferior to that of the royal navy of England at the accession of Elizabeth. We must now for a moment return to the frontiers to see what is going on there, and taking Hildreth for our guide we shall receive a lucid summary of events. “George Rogers Clarke, still commanding in the newly-conquered Illinois, was giving fresh proofs of vigour and enterprise, and extending also the authority of Virginia. Hamilton, the British commandant of Detroit, descended the Wabash with eighty soldiers to watch Clarke, and organise an expedition against him, in which he expected to be greatly aided by the Indians. Informed of these facts by a French trader, Clarke mustered 170 men, and after sixteen days’ march, five of which were spent in wading the drowned lands on the Wabash, suddenly appeared before Vincennes, which the British had recaptured, and where Hamilton then was. The fort surrendered in a few days, and Hamilton was sent prisoner to Virginia on the charge of having instigated the Indians to cruelty against the colonial settlers. Security being thus given against the Indians north of the Ohio, the settlement of Kentucky began rapidly to increase, and in April of this year a log-erection formed the commencement of the present city of Lexington. By the Virginia land system, all who had settled west of the mountains before June of the preceding year were entitled to 400 acres, merely for the payment of the taxes on that quantity of land. The whole tract between the Green River and the Tennessee was reserved for military bounties. While Clarke was extending the domains of Virginia, the first settlements took place in Western Tennessee, under the guidance of James Robinson, who eleven years before had been the patriarch and founder of Eastern Tennessee. With a company of ten persons he followed the Oby to its junction with the Cumberland; some of his companions embarked there, while the rest pursued the riverbanks by land to the spot where now stands the city of Nashville. Here, planting a crop of corn, and leaving three persons to watch it, they returned for their families. Some travelled through the woods, driving their cattle before them; others embarked with the women and children on the head waters of the Tennessee, intending to descend that river to its mouth and then proceed up the Cumberland. But a severe winter delayed them by the way, and their destination was not reached till the following spring.