[2] The greater part of the Corps was stationed at St. Augustine on the Atlantic coast, with a smaller body occupying the future Negro Fort, on the Apalachicola River in remote northwest Florida.

[3] Recruits were accepted from among escaped slaves who had already gained their freedom on coming into British hands and who were unwilling to join West India Regiments.

[4] The establishment of the force sparked controversy at the time, as the arming of former slaves was a psychological as well as military threat to the slave-owning society of the United States.

[14] Rear Admiral Sir Alexander Cochrane raised the first Corps of Colonial Marines in 1808 while commander-in-chief of British naval forces on the Leeward Islands station during the Napoleonic Wars.

[18][19] Cochrane, by now a Vice Admiral, assumed his position as Commander-in-Chief of British forces on the North Atlantic station in April 1814 and ordered the recruitment of a body of Colonial Marines as he had done six years earlier on Marie Galante.

[28] The Corps was embodied on 18 May 1814 and made its combat debut in the raid on Pungoteague Creek on 30 May 1814 where, in a skirmish known as the Battle of Rumley's Gut, it helped capture an American artillery battery.

[26] After this, the Corps participated in the Chesapeake campaign; in subsequent correspondence, Cockburn wrote that the recruits had behaved "unexpectedly well" in several engagements and had not committed any "improper outrages".

[33] Members of the Corps served alongside their shipborne Royal Marine counterparts from the Cockburn Chesapeake squadron (HM Ships Albion, Dragon, Loire, Jasseur and the schooner HMS St Lawrence), participating in a series of raids.

After the British failed to destroy the American Chesapeake Bay Flotilla at the Battle of St. Jerome Creek, they conducted coastal raids on the towns of Calverton, Huntingtown, Prince Frederick, Benedict and Lower Marlborough.

[34][37][38] The arrival on 19 July of a battalion of Royal Marines, which had left Bermuda on 30 June, enabled the squadron to mount further expeditions ashore.

One of the firing parties was led by Second Lieutenant Lewis Agassiz (1793–1866); for his part in the battle, his family was later granted a coat of arms depicting a torch.

George Woodbine and a detachment of Royal Marines were landed from HMS Orpheus in May 1814[51] with gifts, two thousand muskets and blankets for the Indians.

[2] They performed garrison duty at the Royal Naval Dockyard at Ireland Island, Bermuda and were carried from there in the transport Lord Eldon to be disbanded in Trinidad on 20 August 1816.

Near what is now known as Princes Town, the former Colonial Marines formed a free farming community, known as the Merikens (sometimes spelled Merikins), under the supervision of their former non-commissioned officers.

Southern plantation owners considered the presence of a group of armed fugitive slaves, even in a remote and sparsely-populated area of Spanish Florida, an unacceptable danger;[68] this led, under the leadership of General Andrew Jackson, to the Battle of Negro Fort in July 1816 and the beginning of the First Seminole War.

It is believed that former Colonial Marine refugees were among a group that escaped to the Bahamas in 1822 and founded, on the west coast of the island of Andros, Nicholls Town [sic], a community that retains its identity to the present day.