By the end of February 1776, Washington had decided to try to end the siege of Boston by seizing Dorchester Heights and placing his artillery there in a position to bombard the town. General Howe believed it was time to leave, and the British evacuated on March 17. As the Continental Army moved into Boston, there was an outcry that the British had poisoned a supply of drugs left behind. On April 15 the _Boston Gazette_ reported that "it is absolutely fact that the Doctors of the diabolical ministerial butcher when they evacuated Boston, intermixed and left 26 weight of Arsenick with the medicines which they left in the Alms House."[33] Then, a week later, on April 22, appeared a series of testimonials that had been made by Joseph Warren, Daniel Scott, and Frederick Ridgley at Watertown on April 3d "by order of the Director-General of the Continental Hospital." Warren swore under oath that on or about March 29 he had gone into the workhouse [almshouse] "lately improved as an hospital by the British troops stationed in said town" and upon examining the state of "a large quantity of Medicine" left in the medicinal storeroom had found about 12 or 14 pounds of arsenic intermixed with the drugs, which were found "to be chiefly capital articles and those most generally in demand."[34] Despite this incident, we have the word of Morgan that "a large, though unassorted stock of medicines" was collected in Boston when the British evacuated.[35] Hospital Surgeons Ebenezer Crosby and Frederick Ridgley reported that "at the evacuation of Boston ... all the Mates of the Hospital that could be spared from Cambridge ... were employed in packing up and sending off [to Cambridge] drugs, medicines and other hospital stores, collected by order of Dr. Morgan, the quantity of which appeared great."[36] Inasmuch as few medicines were listed in the inventory of stores left by the British on the wharfs and in the scuttled ships in the harbor,[37] it appears that most of these drugs obtained in Boston were confiscated from the homes, offices, and shops of the Loyalists who fled when the British evacuated. Morgan reported that he had taken possession of the medicines and furniture of Dr. Sylvester Gardiner's shop, and a small stock of drugs from the office of Dr. William Perkins, a private practitioner.[38] No inventory of these supplies has been located thus far, but a contemporary biographer of Sylvester Gardiner records that the confiscated drugs from his shop "filled from 20 to 25 wagons."[39] This is not unlikely because Gardiner's apothecary shop was one of the largest and most prosperous in the Colonies prior to the Revolution.[40]