On the twenty-seventh of September, General Gray surprised Colonel Baylor’s Light Horse at Tappan, on the Hudson, as completely as he had surprised Wayne at Paoli. Lieutenant-Colonel Campbell, accompanied by Lieutenant-Colonel Simcoe, confirmed their usual custom of warfare by forays which brought little plunder and less intrinsic credit. Cornwallis with five thousand men made an incursion into New Jersey, between the Hudson and the Hackensack; and Lieutenant-General Knyphausen, with three thousand men, operated in Westchester County, between the Bronx and the Hudson, but with small acquisition of provisions or other supplies. On the eighth of October General Clinton, in writing to Lord Germaine, says: “With an army so much diminished, at New York, nothing important can be done, especially as it is weakened by sending seven hundred men to Halifax, and three hundred to Bermuda.” On the fifteenth of October, Captain Ferguson of the Seventieth British Foot, with three thousand regulars and the Third New Jersey Volunteers (royalists) made a descent upon Little Neck, N.J., where many privateers were equipped; surprised a detachment of Count Pulaski’s American Brigade, and inflicted a loss of fifty killed, but none wounded, including Lieutenant-Colonel the Baron de Bose, and Lieutenant de la Borderie. Ferguson says, in his official report: “It being a night attack, little _quarter_, of course, could be given; so that there were only five prisoners.” Count Pulaski vigorously pursued the party, inflicting some loss. This Ferguson was one of the partisan leaders who was merciless in slaughter, as too many of the auxiliary leaders of that period proved themselves to be when upon irresponsible marauding expeditions. Meanwhile, Indian massacres in Wyoming Valley, during July, and that of Cherry Valley, on the eleventh of November, afterwards to be avenged, multiplied the embarrassments of the prosecution of the war, and kept the Commander-in-Chief constantly on the alert. The condition of Clinton, in New York, had indeed become critical. The position of the American army so restricted even his food-supplies, that he had to depend largely upon England; and on the second day of December he wrote again, and even more despondently, to the British Secretary of State: “I do not complain; but, my lord, do not let anything be expected of me, circumstanced as I am.” The British Cabinet had already indicated its purpose to abandon further extensive operations in the Northern States, and to utilize the few troops remaining in America, in regions where less organized resistance would be met, and where their fleets could control the chief points to be occupied. As early as November twenty-seventh, Commodore Hyde Parker had convoyed a fleet of transports to Savannah, with a total land force of thirty-five hundred men; and on the twenty-ninth of December, Savannah had been captured.