ep ravine and swamps at the
back of the town. From the land it could on the west side be approached
by a road leading over marshes and easily defended, and on the east side
by solid ground about half a mile wide now protected by redoubts and
entrenchments with an outer and an inner parallel. Could Cornwallis hold
out? At New York, no longer in any danger, there was still a keen desire
to rescue him. By the end of September he received word from Clinton
that reinforcements had arrived from England and that, with a fleet of
twenty-six ships of the line carrying five thousand troops, he hoped to
sail on the 5th of October to the rescue of Yorktown. There was delay.
Later Clinton wrote that on the basis of assurances from Admiral Graves
he hoped to get away on the twelfth. A British officer in New York
describes the hopes with which the populace watched these preparations.
The fleet, however, did not sail until the 19th of October. A speaker in
Congress at the time said that the British Admiral should certainly hang
for this delay.

On the 5th of October, for some reason unexplained, Cornwallis abandoned
the outer parallel and withdrew behind the inner one. This left him in
Yorktown a space so narrow that nearly every part of it could be
swept by enemy artillery. By the 11th of October shells were dropping
incessantly from a distance of only three hundred yards, and before this
powerful fire the earthworks crumbled. On the fourteenth the French
and Americans carried by storm two redoubts on the second parallel. The
redoubtable Tarleton was in Yorktown, and he says that day and night
there was acute danger to any one showing himself and that every gun was
dismounted as soon as seen. He was for evacuating the place and marching
away, whither he hardly knew. Cornwallis still held Gloucester, on the
opposite side of the York River, and he now planned to cross to that
place with his best troops, leaving behind his sick and wounded. He
would try to reach Philadelphia by the route over which Washington had
just ridden. The feat was not impossible. Washington would have had a
stern chase in following Cornwallis, who might have been able to live
off the country. Clinton could help by attacking Philadelphia, which was
almost defenseless.

As it was, a storm prevented the crossing to Gloucester. The defenses
of Yorktown were weakening and in face of this new discouragement the
British leader made up his mind that the end was near. Ta