During July and August, 1776, Skenesborough, at the head of Lake Champlain, was the scene of the greatest naval activity. Requisitions were made upon Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts for carpenters. Naval stores and munitions of war of all sorts, sail-cloth, cordage, anchors, cannon, and ammunition were sent to the Lakes from the seaboard, especially from New York and Connecticut. Seamen were hurried forward. On August 13 the Governor and Council of Safety of Connecticut voted £180 to Captain Seth Warner of Saybrook to enable him to raise a crew of forty seamen for the naval service on the Lakes. These men were “to receive a bounty of £6 for inlisting; and for finding themselves blankets, 12s; guns, 6s; and cartouch-box and belt and knapsack, 2s; and one month’s wages being 48s advanced, according to proclamation.” On August 16 the Governor and Council of Safety authorized two other companies to be raised.[80] In September Gates understood that two hundred seamen had been enlisted in New York city.[81]
On July 24, 1776, Arnold wrote from Skenesborough to Gates: “I arrived here last evening, and found three gondolas on the stocks; two will be completed in five or six days, the row galley in eight or ten days. Three other gondolas will be set up immediately, and may be completed in ten days. A company of twenty-seven carpenters from Middletown are cutting timber for a row-galley, on the Spanish construction, to mount six heavy pieces of cannon. One hundred carpenters from Pennsylvania and Massachusetts will be here this evening. I shall employ them on another row-galley. In two or three weeks, I think we shall have a formidable fleet. No canvass or cordage is yet arrived, though much wanted.”[82] Through strenuous exertions the American fleet on the Lakes was greatly increased and strengthened. By October it consisted of one sloop, three schooners, eight “gondolas,” and four galleys, mounting a total of 94 cannon, 2-pounders to 18-pounders. With a full complement, the fleet would have carried 856 men. It probably numbered about 700 officers and men, such as they were.[83] Arnold said that he had a “wretched motley crew in the fleet; the marines the refuse of every regiment, and the seamen few of them ever wet with salt water.” Many of his seamen and marines were almost naked.[84]
During the first days of October the naval superiority on the Lakes shifted to the British. General Sir Guy Carleton, the British commander, drawing upon superior naval resources, had outbuilt Arnold. Early in October Carleton’s fleet consisted of one ship, two schooners, one “radeau,” one large “gondola,” twenty gunboats, and four armed tenders. Some of these vessels and the material for others he had brought from the St. Lawrence up the Richelieu. The ship “Enterprise,” eighteen 12-pounders, 180 tons burden, whose construction had been begun at Quebec, he thus transported in pieces. She was set up at St. Johns, on the Richelieu, where the British shipyard was situated. This vessel in size and armament greatly exceeding any one craft of the Americans. A fleet of transports and ships of war in the St. Lawrence furnished Carleton with seven hundred experienced officers and seamen.[85]
The two fleets engaged each other on Lake Champlain on October 11, 12, and 13, 1776. Ten of the American vessels were captured or destroyed. General Waterbury, second in command, and 110 prisoners, were captured. In killed and wounded Arnold lost about eighty men; and the British forty. The British were left in command of the Lake; the Americans retreated to Ticonderoga.[86]
Although most decisively defeated in the battle upon the Lake, Arnold had delayed the advance of the British some two or three months, while they were obtaining a naval superiority. This delay had far-reaching consequences. Carleton now found the season too late to pursue his advantage, and to make, or attempt to make, a juncture with Howe to the southward. He therefore soon returned to winter quarters at Montreal. When Burgoyne, in 1777, repeated the attempt to penetrate to the Hudson, Howe’s removal of his army to the Chesapeake in his movement against Philadelphia, deprived Burgoyne’s army of the support on the Hudson, which it might have had in the fall of 1776. It has been strikingly said, by Captain Mahan, that Arnold’s and Carleton’s naval campaign on Lake Champlain was a “strife of pigmies for the prize of a continent.” Although the American flotilla was wiped out, “never had any force, big or small, lived to better purpose, or died more gloriously; for it had saved the Lake for that year.”[87]
FOOTNOTES:
[49] This chapter, which is presented here for chronological reasons, is not closely related to the main narrative, which will be resumed at the beginning of Chapter III.
[50] Force, American Archives, 4th, III, 633-34, Instructions to Broughton.
[51] Force, American Archives, 4th, III, 946.
[52] See Chapter I, The Naval Committee, page 37; Ford, Writings of Washington, III, 174-5.