the store.) It included a building for storing hides (what the Native Americans had to trade), quarters for negro slaves, and a cow pen for several hundred cattle that were raised nearby. During the War of 1812, British troops ransacked the store and freed the slaves. Figures on the number of maroons who settled in the surrounding area range from 300 to 1,000. The blacks developed plantations extending up to 50 miles along the river. A report from 1812 mentions over 36 cleared acres and 1,200 cattle, and they lived in "large and well-built cabins". Their crops were peas, beans, corn, and rice. British Post (1814–15) The British launched an invasion of Pensacola during the War of 1812 and occupied it until General Andrew Jackson took the town on November 7, 1814. The British forces, over 100 officers and men led by a Brevet Captain of the Royal Marines, George Woodbine, made camp at the only community between Pensacola and St. Marks: the trading post of John Forbes and Company, surrounded by negro plantations. It was located at Prospect Bluff. Woodbine began to train local Native Americans as well as escaped slaves. Nicolls recruited the ex-slaves into the new (black) Corps of Colonial Marines. They were well-armed, well-equipped, and underwent drills; many had been in training for months. He also assembled and trained more than five hundred Creek and Seminole Indians by February 1815, but they came from a different culture, did not like being trained, and did not have the incentive of being protected from American re-enslavement. Nicolls found the ex-slaves superior as soldiers, reporting that his black recruits had enlisted "with the strictest good faith and conduct, so much so, that out of 1,500 of them I never had occasion to punish one of them". He added that in contrast with British soldiers, "they would not get drunk". They were preparing to attack Georgia when news arrived of the end of the war. The British paid off the Colonial Marines (at the same rate as the white Marines) and withdrew from Florida. Blacks and Native Americans under Nicolls' direction built two forts on the Apalachicola River. The larger and more important one was to be on the border of Georgia, at the juncture of the Flint and the Chattahoochee Rivers, in modern Chattahoochee, Florida, and was to serve as the base for a U.S. invasion. Time only permitted