In 1776 Chief Justice Drayton and Turnbull sailed for London to seek redress and answer Tonyn’s charges. During Turnbull’s absence, the surviving New Smyrna colonists, who now numbered barely 600 out of the 1,400 who had left their Mediterranean homes, secretly sent a delegation to St. Augustine. They demanded release from their contracts and reported being cruelly treated by their overseers. Assured of Governor Tonyn’s sympathy and protection, all of the surviving colonists—men, women, and children—later marched in a body up the King’s Road to St. Augustine. Turnbull returned from London in the fall of 1777 to find himself and his New Smyrna colony ruined. At St. Augustine the refugees were assigned lands north of the City Gates, where they built crude shelters and managed to eke out a living by fishing, hunting, and gardening. Time proved them a self-reliant, industrious people, who gradually attained more comfortable circumstances. They and their descendants became a distinctive part of St. Augustine, and continued to live in the city down to the present day. [Illustration: _His Excellency, Patrick Tonyn, Governor of East Florida for ten years, from 1774 to 1784. From a portrait in the Division of Prints and Engravings, British Museum._] _During the Revolution_ Soon after Tonyn became governor of East Florida reports began to reach St. Augustine of unrest in the English colonies to the north, followed by news of bloodshed at Lexington and Bunker Hill. Tonyn suspected some in East Florida of being in sympathy with the rebel cause, including his old enemies, Drayton and Turnbull. Most of the inhabitants, however, had arrived too recently from England or other loyal colonies to desire independence. St. Augustine remained as faithful to its English rulers as it had been to its Spanish Kings. In 1775 two detachments of troops, comprising 160 men, were sent from St. Augustine to Williamsburg, Virginia, to support hard-pressed Governor Dunmore. During August of that year another incident brought the war home. The British brigantine _Betsy_ lay off St. Augustine’s inlet with a cargo of gunpowder for the garrison. A rebel sloop from Charleston swooped down and captured it within sight of people on shore. When the news of the signing of the Declaration of Independence reached this East Florida capital, there was no rejoicing. Instead angry Loyalists gathered in the Plaza to cheer the burning of straw-stuffed dummies, representing Samuel Adams and John Hancock. Expeditions left St. Augustine to attack the “traitorous neighbors” in Georgia and Carolina. They in turn organized forces to invade East Florida. These resulted in little more than border skirmishes. The _East Florida Rangers_, a militia organized by Tonyn, plundered the frontier of cattle, from the sale of which the governor is said to have profited. As the war progressed an increasing number of Loyalists fled from patriot wrath into East Florida.