On July 28, 1779, during the Penobscot Expedition, American forces led by the Marines stormed the western bluffs of the peninsula, but two weeks of virtual stalemate followed because the American land and naval forces could not agree on a plan of attack. On August 13, the combined American forces under General Solomon Lovell and Commodore Dudley Saltonstall finally moved against the British, but when an American ship signaled the imminent arrival of seven British warships, the attack was quickly canceled and the forces retreated. The entire American combined fleet of 40 vessels was then beached, blown up, or burned by American crews to avoid capture by the British, in what was called the greatest naval disaster in American history. Afterward, Lt. Col. Paul Revere was censured, and Saltonstall was court-martialed and dismissed from the Continental Navy. In 1895 and 1899, the sailing sloop Defender, winner of the America's Cup in 1895, was crewed by sailors from this region, with about 140 men from Stonington and Deer Isle selected by Captain Fred Weed to fill 40 crew positions plus alternates, reflecting the extraordinary skills of local mariners, many of whom honed those skills on Eggemoggin Reach. From 1900 to 1916, the Maine Ice Company harvested ice from Walker Pond for year-round distribution on four-masted and five-masted schooners to Baltimore, Washington, D.C., the Caribbean Islands, and South America, and its storage facilities on Eggemoggin Reach could hold 120,000 tons of ice; some historians consider it the largest natural ice-producing operation in the world.