The battle of August 27, 1776, was fought almost entirely outside this line of fortifications. Knowing that the British forces had been moving towards Brooklyn from the Narrows, General Putnam had posted troops in detachments in order to check the hostile columns as they should come through the wood-roads and passes. It was natural to expect the principal British advance by the Shore Road, as there they would be at all times within supporting distance of the fleet. On August 26th the Hessians under de Heister had occupied Flatbush, and Lord Cornwallis had reached nearly to Flatlands. In the forenoon of the 27th, Stirling commanded the patriot right, extending from the shore near the foot of Twenty-third Street up Greenwood Heights about to the corner of Fifth Avenue and Third Street. This position was to repel the expected attack by the route of the Shore Road. Sullivan commanded the centre, which was an irregular congeries of militia posted along the summits of hills in Prospect Park and across the Flatbush Road. Colonel Miles with the 1st Pennsylvania regiment occupied the hills near the Clove Road to the south of Bedford, with some Connecticut levies continuing the line still further eastward. Instead of a co-ordinated supporting line of battle, these dispositions were intended as little more than a body of skirmishers, too widely strung-out to be opposed to an actual attack. The beginning of a movement of British troops at daylight on the Shore Road, and the evident efforts of the fleet to sail up the Bay, which the light wind and ebb tide prevented, indicated that the hardest fighting would be by the right under Stirling. The entire patriot force inside and without the entrenchments was 5500. The British force was over 16,000 men. While the troops were facing each other along this position, a strong flanking column under Sir Henry Clinton, with Lord Howe the commander-in-chief, had stealthily marched from Flatbush to East New York, during the night, and had followed a sunken road through the present Cemetery of the Evergreens, called the Jamaica Pass. This was about five miles to the east of Sullivan’s position. Before daylight, at about a mile from the Pass, the column halted and sent forward a force which captured the American patrol and officers, and soon after a detachment secured the Pass. The light infantry advanced at the first appearance of day, and occupied the heights of Bushwick, followed by the guards with the field-pieces under Lord Percy, and the 49th regiment with four guns and the baggage brought up the rear. After breakfasting, the flanking column marched along the turnpike to Bedford, where they arrived at half-past eight o’clock; thence they advanced along the rear of Miles’s troops, who were unconscious that they were being surrounded.