In those days, considering the means of transport, America was as far from England as at the present day is Australia.

Sometimes the voyage across the sea occupied two and even three months, and, with the relatively small ships of the time, it required a vast array of transports to carry an army of twenty or thirty thousand men.

In the spring of 1776 Great Britain had found it impossible to raise at home an army of even twenty thousand men for service in America, and she was forced to rely in large part upon mercenary soldiers.

This was nothing new.

Her island people did not like service abroad and this unwillingness was intensified in regard to war in remote America.