02:54 PM EDT on Thursday, June 8, 2006

BY GERALD M. CARBONE
Journal Staff Writer

In early December 1776, the Kentish Guards' assessment that Nathanael Greene did not have the health and military bearing to be an officer looked accurate.

Greene had been sick in bed on Manhattan Island when the British attacked his posts on Long Island, and he had given General Washington the disasterous advice to hold Fort Washington.

On Dec. 4, after a depressing retreat of nearly 80 miles across the muddy roads of New Jersey, Greene wrote to his wife, Caty from Trenton:

I hope to God you have not set forward for this place. Continue at home my Dear if you wish to enjoy the least share of Happiness. Seventy sail of the Enemies fleet saild a few days past, their destination unknown; but tis suggested by many they were bound for Rhode Island; but I rather suppose them to be going to the Southward.

I am hearty and well amidst all the fatigues and hardships I endure. Be of good courage; don't be distressd. All things will turn out for the best.

Nathanel Greene was wrong. The fleet of British ships that he supposed to be going southward was, in fact, heading for his home state of Rhode Island. And the fleet could not have picked a nicer time to sail.

In his diary, the British Lt. Frederick Mackenzie kept a log of the cruise. On Dec. 7, 1776 -- a day that should live in infamy for Rhode Islanders -- Mackenzie noted:

A fair wind all last night, and good weather; which continuing this morning, at 4 o'Clock the signal was made for the fleet to weigh, and at 5 the whole was under way, with a fresh wind at S.W. At 8 o'Clock saw Block Island, at 10 Point Judith and at 12 made the Light House on Conanicut Island [Jamestown] at the entrance of Rhode Island Harbor.

Mackenzie found Narragansett and Mount Hope bays to be studded with many fine and well cultivated Islands, and the beautiful bays and inlets, with the distant view of towns, farms, and cultivated lands intermixed with Woods make this (even at this bleak season of the year) the finest, most diversified, and extensive prospect I have yet seen in America.

The appearance of a British fleet off Rhode Island caused alarm throughout the state. Sentries hoisted a kettle of burning pitch atop a pole on South Kingstown's Tower Hill, its black smoke sending up a signal; a similar signal fire was lit on Newport, another on East Greenwich's Signal Rock, and so on up the Bay. The war had come to Rhode Island, and its people felt a justifiable fear.