In order to live up to this encomium, Boyd sent Colonel Boerstler on the 24th of June, with four hundred infantry and two guns, to bombard and take an annoying stone house a day's march from Fort George. But two hundred hostile Indians so alarmed Boerstler that he attempted to retreat. Thirty hostile militia then caused him to halt the retreat and send for reinforcements. The reinforcements came to the number of a hundred and fifty, but the British also appeared with forty-seven more men. Colonel Boerstler thereupon surrendered his total of five hundred and forty soldiers. General Dearborn, still the nominal commander of the forces, sadly mentioned the disaster as "an unfortunate and unaccountable event." There is a better account to be given, however, of events at Sackett's Harbor in this same month of May. The operations on the Niagara front had stripped this American naval base of troops and of the protection of Chauncey's fleet. Sir George Prevost, the Governor in Chief of Canada, could not let the opportunity slip, although he was not notable for energy. He embarked with a force of regulars, eight hundred men, on Sir James Yeo's ships at Kingston and sailed across Lake Ontario. Sackett's Harbor was defended by only four hundred regulars of several regiments and about two hundred and fifty militia from Albany. Couriers rode through the countryside as soon as the British ships were sighted, and several hundred volunteers came straggling in from farm and shop and mill. In them was something of the old spirit of Lexington and Bunker Hill, and to lead them there was a real man and a soldier with his two feet under him, Jacob Brown, a brigadier general of the state militia, who consented to act in the emergency. He knew what to do and how to communicate to his men his own unshaken courage. On the beach of the beautiful little harbor he posted five hundred of his militia and volunteers to hamper the British landing. His second line was composed of regulars. In rear were the forts with the guns manned.