Sailing from Portsmouth on the 5th of July, 1738, with the rest of his regiment,—numbering, with the women, children, and supernumeraries who accompanied, between six and seven hundred souls,—in five transports convoyed by the men of war Blandford and Hector, General Oglethorpe arrived safely in Jekyll sound on the 18th of the following September.[64] The next day the troops were landed at the Soldiers Fort, on the south end of St. Simon’s island. This arrival was welcomed by an artillery salute from the battery, and by shouts from the garrison. Upon coming within soundings off the Georgia coast on the 13th, Sir Yelverton Peyton, in the Hector, parted company and sailed for Virginia. Until the 21st, the General encamped near the Fort, superintending the disembarcation and issuing necessary orders. His regiment was now concentrated, and every officer is represented to have been at his post. Frederica was visited on the 21st, and there Oglethorpe was saluted with fifteen guns from the fort. The Magistrates and towns-people waited upon him in a body, tendering their congratulations upon his return. Several Indians were present who assured him that the Upper and Lower Creeks were in readiness to come and see him so soon as they should be notified of his presence.[65] In a letter[66] to Sir Joseph Jekyll, under date 19th September, 1738, General Oglethorpe, alluding to the fact that the Spaniards, although having fifteen hundred men at St. Augustine,—there being nothing but the militia in Georgia,—had delayed their contemplated attack until the arrival of the Regular Troops, acknowledges that God had thus given “the greatest marks of his visible Protection to the Colony.” He advises Sir Joseph that the passage had been fine,—but one soldier having died,—and that the inhabitants who had hitherto been so harrassed by Spanish threats were now cheerful, believing that the worst was over, and that,—relieved from the constant guard duty which they had been compelled to perform, some times two days out of five, to the neglect of their crops and improvements,—they might now prosecute their labors and make comfortable provision for the future. Realizing the necessity of opening direct communication between Frederica and the Soldiers Fort at the south end of the island, on the 25th General Oglethorpe set every male to work cutting a road to connect those points. So energetically was the labor prosecuted, that although the woods were thick and the distance nearly six miles, the task was compassed in three days.