At one time over four hundred transports, guarded by thirty-seven men-of-war, had gathered. Lord Howe on the land, and his brother, Admiral Howe, on the sea were in joint command. [Illustration: SECTION OF MAP OF BROOKLYN, 1776.] The patriot forces had carefully entrenched a line of defensive works, laid out by General Nathaniel Greene. The good judgment with which these forts were placed was attested by the deliberate adoption of almost the same line of redoubts and forts in the subsequent defences of Brooklyn by the engineers in the campaign of 1814, when Brooklyn was again prepared to resist British attack. The fortifications of Brooklyn in 1776 extended in an irregular line from Fort Defiance at Red Hook opposite Governor’s Island across to Fort Box on Bergen’s Hill near the corner of Court Street and First Place. At the junction of Clinton and Atlantic Streets, or a little easterly, was a steep conical hill called the Ponkiesburgh, and on top, surmounting a line of spiral trenches, a redoubt, called Corkscrew Fort. Between Atlantic, Pacific, Nevins, and Bond Streets was a redoubt mounting five guns called Fort Greene. Thence the line ran zigzag across the present Fulton Street, to the west of the junction of Flatbush and Fulton Avenues, along the hill slope to Fort Putnam, on the eminence now called Fort Greene Park, a commanding height where were mounted five guns. The number of guns mounted upon the works from Fort Putnam to Fort Defiance was thirty-five—mainly eighteen-pounders—an armament in part captured from Ticonderoga. [Illustration: BROWER’S MILL, GOWANUS. THE YELLOW MILL IS SEEN IN THE DISTANCE.] From this fort the line extended northwesterly to a spring at the verge of the Wallabout, near the corner of Flushing and Portland Avenues. This interior line of defence was nearly two miles long. Between these forts were lines of trenches further defended by trees and sharpened stakes, forming an abatis, in the construction of which the Continental woodsmen were always proficient. Within this line of defence was Fort Stirling, which was back near Columbia Heights. It is difficult after a century of grading and building to conceive that an extensive morass then covered nearly all the lands south of the present Hamilton Avenue, save about the small island height at Red Hook. Gowanus, with several large ponds raised by Brower’s Mill-dam, flooded and made impassable nearly all the area extending from Fourth Avenue to Smith Street. This was crossed by a narrow causeway along Freeke’s Mill-pond. On the higher lands beyond, extending from Greenwood along Prospect Park towards East New York, were dense woodlands, that were only practicable for an advancing army by certain passes or narrow wood-roads. The principal route from the Narrows to Brooklyn was along the site of Third Avenue by a good road then known as the Shore Road.