s vested with the power
of an officer commanding a detachment; and however conscientiously they
may endeavour to follow out a regimental system, every individual has
naturally a different manner of dealing with men, and a certain amount
of homogeneousness is lost to the regiment as a whole.

Endless correspondence is entailed, and sometimes questions have to
remain open for months, until answers can be received from distant
detachments. In small garrisons, also, drill becomes a mere farce; for,
after the clerks, employed men, and men on guard and in hospital are
deducted, there are perhaps only a dozen men or so left for parade. In
spite of all these drawbacks the regiments still maintain a wonderful
efficiency, and afford another proof of the soldierlike qualities of the
West India negro.

Another disadvantage is that a West India regiment is never seen in
England, the British public knows nothing of such regiments, has no
friends, relatives, or acquaintances in their ranks, and consequently
takes no interest in them. Yet they are a remarkably fine body of men,
and a picked battalion of the Guards would look small beside them if
brigaded with them in Hyde Park. So little is known, that I have
sometimes been asked if the officers of West India regiments are also
black, and it is with a view to making the regiment to which I have the
honour to belong better known to the public at large, that the following
history has been written. There has been no attempt at descriptive
writing, facts being merely collected from official documents, so that
the authenticity of the narrative may be unquestionable.

In order that the earlier chapters may be the more readily understood,
it may be as well to state that, with the 1st West India Regiment, which
was called into existence in the _London Gazette_ of the 2nd of May,
1795, were incorporated two other corps; of which one, the Carolina
Corps, had been in existence since 1779, while the other--Malcolm's, or
the Royal Rangers--had been raised in January or February, 1795. It is
from the Carolina Corps that the 1st West India Regiment derives the
Carolina laurel, borne on the crest of the regiment.

CHAPTER I.

THE ACTION AT BRIAR CREEK, 1779--THE ACTION AT STONO FERRY, 1779.

In the autumn of 1778, during the War of the American Independence, the
British commanders in North America determined to make another attempt
for the royal cause in the Southern States of Georgia an