Only December 21, two days after the British reconnaissance, was an American picket of eight men and a sergeant placed at the fishermen’s village,[499] where they remained thirty-six hours without learning that British officers had been on the spot, or that the fishermen were all away, acting as pilots for the approaching British boats. Meanwhile the troops at Isle aux Poix were ready to move almost as soon as Lieutenant Peddie could return to show them the way. At ten o’clock on the morning of December 22 the light brigade--sixteen hundred and eighty-eight rank-and-file,[500] under Colonel Thornton, who had led the advance at Bladensburg--embarked in boats, and after a day on the lake arrived the next morning, December 23, at daylight, without giving alarm, at the fishermen’s village, where they surprised and captured the picket, and then passing up the bayou five miles, landed at a point about three miles from the Mississippi River. No attempt at concealment was made.[501] The troops were formed in column, and found no obstacles to their march except the soft ground and the ditches. Through reeds and cypress swamp they made their way about three miles, when their advance suddenly entered open fields skirted by an orange-grove, with the broad Mississippi beyond. They were on the Villeré plantation; and they surprised and captured Major Villeré and his militia company, in his own house at noon-day, after a march of three miles with sixteen hundred men, from a point which had been recognized by Jackson as one of two or three necessary avenues of approach. The record of American generalship offered many examples of misfortune, but none so complete as this. Neither Hull nor Harrison, neither Winder nor Samuel Smith, had allowed a large British army, heralded long in advance, to arrive within seven miles unseen and unsuspected, and without so much as an earthwork, a man, or a gun between them and their object. The disaster was unprecedented, and could be repaired only by desperate measures. CHAPTER XIII.