On returning westward the crew of the _Adams_ were attacked by the scurvy. Several died and a considerable number were made unfit for duty, so Captain Morris headed for Portland, Maine. Off the Maine coast, while driving along at ten knots an hour through a fog at 4 o’clock on the morning of August 17th, the _Adams_ found land--rock, to speak accurately. She ran up on a ledge until her bow was six feet out of water, and when the sun came to clear the fog the crew found themselves only one hundred yards from a cliff near Mount Desert. The next tide floated the ship and she continued her course. A little later the British brig _Rifleman_ was seen and chased, but the strain of the press of canvas made the _Adams_ leak at the rate of nine feet of water into her hold per hour, so Captain Morris gave it up and ran into the Penobscot. As it happened, the _Rifleman_ was able to carry the news of the arrival of the _Adams_ to a British fleet, “consisting of two line-of-battle ships, three frigates, three sloops, and ten troop transports” which were lying in wait to descend on Machias. Captain Morris moored his ship at Hampden, twenty-seven miles up the river, where he intended to heave her down and repair the leaking bottom. When the British fleet came after him he made such preparations as were possible to fight. Of his original crew of two hundred and twenty, seventy had died or had been disabled by the scurvy. The others, including one hundred and thirty seamen and officers and twenty marines, many of them sick, were mustered on shore for the fight. Nine of the lighter guns of the _Adams_ were set up as a battery on the bluff overlooking the wharf, and these were put in charge of Lieutenant Wadsworth. Morris himself took charge of the wharf. The crew were joined by thirty (some say forty) experienced soldiers, and by a force of militia variously estimated at from three hundred to six hundred men. Whatever their number, they proved utterly worthless, for they had never been under fire. Anyway, they were but half armed, and the guns they had were the inferior fowling-pieces of that day.