Lost in the Wilderness

A few years ago fortune smiled and I had an opportunity to fly to America and travel around a portion of the East Coast. It was wonderful for a number of reasons, one being that I had never been to the States before, and another, that it allowed sight of several locations I wanted to include in a novel I was trying to write. One location was the 1777 American War of Independence battlefield at Saratoga, where a surprised ranger in the ticket office said, 'Hey, we don't get many Brits here.' We lost the battle, you see. Surrendered, in fact. It was the beginning of the end, and in the end we lost America.
One component of Lt-General John Burgoyne's Army which confronted Horatio Gates' troops near the Hudson river at Saratoga, was Norfolk's 9th Regiment of Foot, forerunners of the Royal Norfolk Regiment, and raised in the east of the county around Great Yarmouth.
To say the situation was confusing is an understatement. Gates was English, not American, and many of his troops had earlier emigrated from Britain and settled in the States. On the other hand, some elements of the British Army were German, and their English comrades must have looked at their former fellow-countrymen - now called Patriots by the Americans - and wondered why they were fighting each other, because other than family most had nothing to return to in England. Yet in America they must have seen at least the possibility of land, and perhaps even a farm. And no pesky squire to deal with. So who should rule America, the King or the Americans? It must have provided much food for thought.
We went to Freeman's Farm, one of the sites in this elevated and beautiful landscape, where some of Norfolk's 9th were caught in a desperate fight, and heard how the battle flag of the 9th was smuggled off the battlefield and brought back to Norwich, where it is now part of the Regimental Museum's collection. We also heard how, after the surrender, some of the survivors deserted, hoping no doubt to start a new life in a new country. And we were also able to locate some of the surviving stretches of 'the old road to Albany,' along which Burgoyne's bedraggled soldiery limped towards a prison camp, and where some of the desertions occurred.
The officers evidently logged each successful deserter in the official records as 'lost in the wilderness.' Which may or may not have been the case. But how many Norfolkmen did actually flee? No-one knows, apparently, because the regimental records of the 9th were lost when the ship Ariadne sank in 1805.
Another source told me that after the return from America, and after several peaceful years in Ireland, the remainder of the 9th finally embarked on three transports at Cork for the voyage back to England, but the little convoy encountered very heavy weather in the English Channel. Two of the transports struggled to the English coast, and safety, while the Ariadne was driven on to the French coast and wrecked.
Aboard was the commanding officer, the headquarters staff, and 262 men. All of them were taken prisoner by the French. However, the Regiment's baggage and its records and plate were lost.
So we may never know how many Norfolkmen were 'lost in the wilderness.' But if you are ever in the Saratoga area, or the Finger Lakes, Albany, or even Boston or New York, and you hear a local speaking with a slight Norfolk accent, then you are at least at liberty to believe that some of them did actually make it.
PS. One of the officers of the 9th at Saratoga, so I believe, was Major John Money - estate owner, mercenary, pioneer balloonist, and a controversial figure in Norwich society at the time.