To compensate his men for their check at Craney Island, Admiral Warren immediately afterward devised another movement, which proved, what the Craney Island affair suggested, that the large British force in the Chesapeake was either ill constructed or ill led. Opposite Craney Island, ten miles away on the north shore of James River, stood the village of Hampton, a place of no importance either military or commercial. Four or five hundred Virginia militia were camped there, covering a heavy battery on the water’s edge. The battery and its defenders invited attack, but Admiral Warren could have no military object to gain by attacking them. His official report[398] said “that the enemy having a post at Hampton defended by a considerable corps commanding the communication between the upper part of the country and Norfolk, I considered it advisable, and with a view to cut off their resources, to direct it to be attacked.” Hampton could not fairly be said to “command” communication with Norfolk, a place which lay beyond ten miles of water wholly commanded by the British fleet; but Warren was not obliged to excuse himself for attacking wherever he pleased, and Hampton served his object best. At dawn of June 25, Beckwith’s troops were set ashore about two miles above the village, and moved forward to the road, taking Hampton in the rear, while Cockburn’s launches made a feint from the front. The militia, after resistance costing Beckwith a total loss of nearly fifty men, escaped, and the British troops entered the town, where they were allowed to do what they pleased with property and persons. Lieutenant-Colonel Napier of the One Hundred-and-second regiment, who commanded Beckwith’s advance, wrote in his diary that Sir Sydney Beckwith “ought to have hanged several villains at Little Hampton; had he so done, the Americans would not have complained; but every horror was perpetrated with impunity,--rape, murder, pillage,--and not a man was punished.” The British officers in general shared Napier’s disgust, but alleged that the English troops took no part in the outrages, which were wholly the work of the French chasseurs. Warren made no attempt to hold the town; the troops returned two days afterward to their ships, and the Virginia militia resumed their station; but when the details of the Hampton affair became known, the story roused natural exasperation throughout the country, and gave in its turn incitement to more violence in Canada. Admiral Warren and Sir Sydney Beckwith did not deny the wrong; they dismissed their Frenchmen from the service, and the United States had no further reason to complain of that corps; but the double mortification seemed to lower the British officers even in their own eyes to the level of marauders.