e engineer, Mackellar, wrote that the works were incapable
of defence; and Colonel Mercer, the commandant, reported general
discontent in the garrison.[409] Captain John Vicars, an invalid officer
of Shirley's regiment, arrived at Albany with yet more deplorable
accounts. He had passed the winter at Oswego, where he declared the
dearth of food to have been such that several councils of war had been
held on the question of abandoning the place from sheer starvation. More
than half his regiment died of hunger or disease; and, in his own words,
"had the poor fellows lived they must have eaten one another." Some of
the men were lodged in barracks, though without beds, while many lay all
winter in huts on the bare ground. Scurvy and dysentery made frightful
havoc. "In January," says Vicars, "we were informed by the Indians that
we were to be attacked. The garrison was then so weak that the strongest
guard we proposed to mount was a subaltern and twenty men; but we were
seldom able to mount more than sixteen or eighteen, and half of those
were obliged to have sticks in their hands to support them. The men were
so weak that the sentries often fell down on their posts, and lay there
till the relief came and lifted them up." His own company of fifty was
reduced to ten. The other regiment of the garrison, Pepperell's, or the
fifty-first, was quartered at Fort Ontario, on the other side of the
river; and being better sheltered, suffered less.

[Footnote 409: _Mackellar to Shirley, June, 1756. Mercer to Shirley, 2
July, 1756._]

The account given by Vicars of the state of the defences was scarcely
more flattering. He reported that the principal fort had no cannon on
the side most exposed to attack. Two pieces had been mounted on the
trading-house in the centre; but as the concussion shook down the stones
from the wall whenever they were fired, they had since been removed. The
second work, called Fort Ontario, he had not seen since it was finished,
having been too ill to cross the river. Of the third, called New Oswego,
or "Fort Rascal," he testifies thus: "It never was finished, and there
were no loopholes in the stockades; so that they could not fire out of
the fort but by opening the gate and firing out of that."[410]

[Footnote 410: _Information of Captain John Vicars, of the Fiftieth
(Shirley's) Regiment,_ enclosed with a despatch of Lord Loudon. Vicars
was a veteran British officer who left Oswego with Bradstreet on the
thir