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Today episode 157 British land at Head of Elk.

When we last left the Howe brothers back in episode 150, they had just loaded up their army

aboard hundreds of ships and sailed off from New York out into the Atlantic Ocean in July 1777.

For several weeks no one was quite sure where they were going until the British finally

landed at Head of Elk, Maryland, what we today call

Elkedon. To get there, the fleet had to sail to the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay,

down past Norfolk, Virginia, then back up through the Chesapeake Bay into the Elk River before finally landing.

The fleet, led by Admiral Richard Howe in the HMS Eagle, skipped the traditional landing areas,

moving up muddy-bottomed rivers to find a remote site as far up the waters as the ships would go. In the very pre-dawn hours of August 25, 1777,

the British Army began to disembark at Head of Elk.

In order to surprise the Americans,

Howell had avoided the well-defended Delaware Bay.

He had also avoided all the established ports in the Chesapeake that would have made landing much easier.

Head of Elk was a tiny hamlet without a large port.

The water in the area was shallow and muddy.

The British ships of the line, the larger ones especially, could not just pull up to a port and disembarked their soldiers.

The weary men who had been stuck aboard ship, some for six weeks, had to climb down onto smaller boats to row ashore.

Much of the army unloaded at Turkey Point, a small ferry on the Elk River.

The process of moving more than 15,000 soldiers ashore,

along with all their equipment, was a slow and tedious process.

The Howe brothers were fortunate that the Americans did not confront them at the landing site.

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