Such being the conclusions that impartial history must draw, impressive was the spectacle presented, on the ninth of May, 1781, upon that hill now crowned by the monument to the Confederate dead. In a circle around Fort George the Spanish army stands in array. The roll of a drum breaks the stillness, followed by the sound of mustering in the Fort. Again as it beats to the fife’s stirring military air, the British commander, in the dress of a major-general, sword in hand, emerges from the breach, followed by his less than eight hundred heroes. Proudly does the gallant band step the five hundred paces; then successively come the orders to halt, fall into line, and stack arms. The scene would have thrilled the heart of every soldier whose memory is consecrated by the shaft that springs from that historic hill, then the centre of a landscape, whence, northward, the eye could rest on a limitless expanse of verdure; eastward and westward upon the far-sweeping curves of the shore; southward upon the glorious mirror of the Bay, with the hills of Santa Rosa rising out of the blue waters like snow-clad peaks above the azure of a distant horizon, and far beyond them upon the tremulous sky-line of the heaving gulf. The formal signing of the articles of capitulation in the Council Chamber of Fort George, which occurred on the ninth of May, immediately before the British marched out, was anticipated in a former page. On June the fourth the British troops sailed for Havana, where they arrived on the fourteenth of the same month; and thence the same vessels transported them to Brooklyn. A further addition was made to the strength of the British, by the garrisons of Baton Rouge and Fort Charlotte, which after many obstacles, and several voyages from point to point, finally reached Brooklyn about the time the Pensacola troops arrived there. And thus, in consequence of Galvez’s breach of faith, a force of 1,200 veterans, with their gallant officers, was added to the British army. It was doubtless this accession of British strength, at New York, in that rallying year, when each side required every available man, that caused de Grasse to complain to the Spanish government of the capitulation at Pensacola, and called forth the apology of Galvez referred to by General Washington in his letter to Rendon. ----- Footnote 37: Sparks, Vol. 8, p. 175. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XV. Political Aspect of the Capitulation—Treaty of Versailles—English Exodus—Widow of the White House.