by Willis, Sam
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From Newburyport in Massachusetts Arnold took 1,050 men to the Kennebec River in Maine in a fleet of eleven schooners, by some margin the largest fleet of sizeable American ships yet assembled for a military operation. It was an obvious opportunity for the British to strike. The fleet was unarmed and unescorted, the ships slow and cumbersome, described by one soldier as nothing more than ‘dirty coasters and fish boats’.17 The passage, moreover, was nearly 100 miles and took five days.18 Through indifferent seamanship one transport ran aground soon after leaving, and her troops had to be transferred to other ships, worsening the overcrowding. Many of the soldiers were incapacitated by seasickness in the filthy weather that cursed the voyage. One ‘became very seasick and such a seasickness, making me feel so lifeless, so indifferent whether I lived or died!’19 A single British cruiser could have taken the entire fleet and Arnold’s operation would have been stillborn, but with Graves’s gaze firmly on Boston and such limited naval resources to hand, the British only found out about Arnold’s operation twenty-seven days after the fleet had sailed.*
Upriver in Gardinerstown, meanwhile, the shipwright Reuben Colburn had received an order to build 200 four-oared bateaux. The choice of boat type was sensible because bateaux were simple to build and maintain, but there was not enough money to build them properly. The boats were commissioned at £2 each, but we know that, in 1774, a civilian bateau cost £3 17s.20 Not only were the bateaux underfunded but the promised monies never arrived, perhaps something that Colburn suspected would happen.21
The next problem was the time available: he had just two weeks. Those 200 bateaux required 1,000 knees to be cut and shaped for frames; 16,000 feet of white pine boards; 10,000 nails to fasten them together; 800 oars, allowing four per boat; and 800 setting-poles.† It was a mammoth task, and the fact that it was completed within fourteen days has been seen by many historians as an achievement to celebrate. In reality, however, the necessary speed of their construction had a direct bearing on the quality of their finish. First, the shipwrights were forced to use unseasoned timber to meet such an order. Any wooden-boat builder will tell you that, depending on the species, green wood can be anywhere between 70 or even 100 per cent heavier than seasoned wood. Arnold’s boats, therefore, were exceptionally heavy; we think that each weighed around 400 pounds,22 roughly the same weight as a small piano. This was a crucial consideration because the boats would have to be carried as well as rowed. The second problem was that there were nowhere near enough nails to meet the order. The solution was not, as it could have been, to build fewer and stronger boats, but to use fewer nails per boat. It is particularly ironic that, among the artefacts that are still routinely discovered along the trail of Arnold’s march, there are often nails. In fact, from the artefacts alone one would assume that his men actually travelled with pockets full of nails.*
Another aspect of the construction that may have fatally weakened the bateaux was the method by which the oars were mounted. The most efficient way to mount an oar is between two thole-pins, set upright in the gunwales. To equip every bateau in this way, however, Arnold would have needed a total of 1,760 pins, assuming four oars per bateau. No doubt this taxed the already overloaded shipwrights. The quick and easy solution in this situation would be to abandon thole-pins and simply cut a hole in the top streak of the boat, a solution to the thole-pin problem but one that would have significantly weakened the boats.
And then, of course, there was the voyage. Historians have tended to gloss over the specific boatmanship problems of handling fleets of bateaux, but they are of course crucial to our understanding of Arnold’s mission.
Arnold finally left with 220 bateaux, each roughly four feet wide. Although they were dispatched upriver in three separate groups, the size of the groups was still large enough to cause problems. Each company consisted of between thirty-six and sixty-four boats. Consider first the problems of securing these bateaux to the shore. Ideally each bateau would be tethered to the shore at right angles and given enough room to swing with the current or wind without knocking into her neighbours. In reality that was impossible, but so too was it impossible to pack the boats perfectly at right angles to each other against a meandering shoreline.
If the boats were given four feet of room on each side, the 220 boats would have taken up well over a quarter of a mile of riverbank. If tethered end to end, they would have stretched over a mile. Even the smallest of the flotillas, perhaps consisting of forty boats or so, would have taken up at least 320 feet if moored at right angles to the riverbank. Such a relatively short distance of clear riverbank would have been very difficult to find. It is likely, therefore, that the craft were moored as close together as the shoreline would allow, and – almost always overgrown – this would have necessitated the ships being tethered directly alongside each other, where they would chafe, rub and bang, generally working themselves loose.
Bateaux are also relatively cumbersome craft, particularly in strong currents. Waves, sometimes several feet high, are a continual curse on large rivers, and they buck anything from their back with the ease of an unbroken stallion. Large rivers that run through forests, moreover, regularly carry logs at several knots that act like battering-rams, while hidden dangers from branches and tree-roots, set at vicious angles like stakes to stop a cavalry charge, constantly lurk underwater.
To work such a craft in such conditions required boatmanship of the highest order and of a very particular type. Because of the cumbersome nature of oars and setting-poles, just one sailor working out of synch would cause absolute havoc in a small boat. Even the greenest of novices would soon realize that rowing at the edges of a straight but fast-flowing river is sensible because there is less stream, but knowing where to steer when faced with unforeseen obstacles requires much deeper knowledge of boatmanship in general and also of the particular river. It is something that can be acquired only through considerable experience.
It is also important to remember that Arnold was voyaging up the Kennebec. He was able to harness the tide as far as Fort Western at Augusta,* but thereafter every inch was hard won. Rowing or poling upstream is dispiriting and exhausting. When faced with rapids, there were three main options. In shallow water, though nothing greater than waist-deep, the crew could get out and wade alongside the boat, thus reducing the vessel’s draft and maintaining control. In deeper water the boats could be ‘lined’ – essentially pulled upstream by ropes running ashore. The last resort was to land all the boats, empty them, and carry them through the woods, but Arnold had no carriages and there were no roads. In this scenario, his men would have to put those enormously heavy boats on their shoulders and blunder through the undergrowth.
The subsequent catastrophes that beset Arnold’s expedition were the result of poor planning, poor boatmanship and bad luck.
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Between Kennebec and the Dead River they struggled against swift-flowing streams. It was a major problem for his men, many of whom, it was now clear, were inexperienced boatmen. Arnold soon wrote to George Washington, offering this as an excuse for his delay: ‘we have had a very fatiguing time, the Men in general not understanding Batteaus.’23 It is likely that many of them had lied about their experience to get on the expedition.
Many of the bateaux simply fell apart, and some were destroyed or lost downriver in accidents. At one stage the waters of the Dead River, so named for its usual passivity and almost total absence of current, rose eight feet in as many hours, possibly the result of the tail of a hurricane that had passed up the east coast from the Caribbean. All the bateaux leaked despite constant attempts to caulk them, and some shipped great quantities of water, easily enough to ruin or entirely wash away the crucial casks of provisions. Many of the casks themselves seem to have been entirely inadequate for such a maritime journey and were not even made to be waterproof.
Arnold’s men had to carry the boats further than they had ever imagined would be necessary, and it is certain that carr
ying them split the seams further, made the boats even more leaky and crippled the men.24 Their shoulders were rubbed to the bone. ‘I would heartily wish the infamous constructors who, to satisfy there [sic] avaricious temper, and fill there purses with the spoils of their country, may be obliged to trust to the mercy of others more treacherous than themselves, that they might judge the fear and undergo the just reward of their villainy,’25 spat one soldier, and another commented: ‘Could we have then come within reach of the villains who constructed these crazy things, they would have fully experienced the effects of our vengeance … Avarice or a desire to destroy us, perhaps both, must have been their motive.’26
Some of the companies got lost. The raised water meant that the edges of lakes and rivers merged, transforming a simple navigational challenge into a nightmare for the inexperienced. The rations ran out and the men ate their dogs, cartridge boxes and soap to survive, a diet augmented with tree sap.
Only seven of the original 220 bateaux and less than half of Arnold’s men made it to Canada, and they were utterly ruined, both physically and psychologically, by their ordeal. They suffered from a range of debilitating symptoms and illnesses, including gout, rheumatism, dysentery, angina, distemper, diarrhoea, constipation, pneumonia, swollen limbs and ‘infestation’, though Arnold himself was relatively unscathed, having travelled most of the way in a fast, manoeuvrable, lightweight native birch-bark canoe paddled by Indians, which he later swapped for a pirogue – another type of light canoe that can easily be taken onto land.
To make matters worse, the British in Quebec, who had long since known that Arnold was coming as rumour dripped out of the forest,27 had removed every object that could float from the shore of the St Lawrence opposite Quebec where it was expected that Arnold would emerge. When he and his men finally limped and crawled out of the wilderness on 8 November, Arnold was thus presented with the same problem he and Allen had experienced at Ticonderoga that summer: how to get at his target across a large stretch of water. Guy Carleton, the governor of Quebec, had taken most of Quebec’s soldiers with him to meet the Americans near Montreal, and so Quebec was garrisoned by a tiny force and could have fallen with only the gentlest of pushes, but Arnold’s force was crippled and now stranded.
It took Arnold five days to find enough craft on the Chaudière, some forty canoes,28 to take his surviving men across the mile-wide St Lawrence, though each of the craft would have to make three trips there and back – that is to say, six actual crossings – and they would have to do so without being spotted by the Royal Navy vessels, the sloop Hunter and the frigate Lizard, which were now patrolling that stretch of water with their boats manned and their men armed.29
Between 11 p.m. and 4 a.m. in the early morning of 14 November Arnold transported just over half of his men across the water. At one stage they had to lie flat on their paddles to avoid being seen by a sentry boat. One of their canoes broke apart mid-stream.30 These dangers negotiated, the weather then turned and the operation had to be abandoned for the night. The rest of the force, leaving a rearguard of sixty, followed over the next couple of nights but were spotted by an armed British boat right at the very end of the operation.31 Impressively, the exhausted Americans fought off the subsequent attack by well-equipped British sailors. Some 675 men now stood outside the walls of Quebec, where they ‘Paraded & Marched up within ½ a Mile of the walls and gave them Cheers’.32
Although they had failed to prevent the Americans from crossing the St Lawrence, the presence of those British ships did prevent Arnold from leading his men in a mad dash to take Quebec. It was a crucial deflection. The horrors of his voyage through the wilderness, combined with the task with which he was now faced, caused him to pause for thought, and he came to the conclusion that his men were too few and too weak to try anything on their own. Arnold thus decided to postpone his attack until the arrival of the Americans making their way to Quebec from Montreal. This decision thus rendered Arnold’s entire expedition pointless: he and his men could have just come with the American fleet up Lake Champlain. The story survived, however, and it became inspirational. It was, in the words of one resident in Quebec, ‘an undertaking above the common race of men’, and Dr James Warren, then speaker of the Massachusetts General Court, wrote to Samuel Adams comparing Arnold’s march ‘to Hannibal’s or Xenophon’s’.33
In Montreal, meanwhile, the American army, now under the command of Brigadier General Richard Montgomery after Schuyler, being unwell, had returned to Ticonderoga, missed a clear opportunity to capture or kill Guy Carleton, governor of Quebec and a gifted and experienced soldier. To capture Carleton may very well have been to capture Quebec. Carleton, disguised as a farmer, slipped out of Montreal at night in a boat paddled by the oarsmen’s hands for silence, and they managed to slip through the American river blockade a few miles downstream.34 Safely back in Quebec, Carleton then roused the few British troops and made crucial preparations for the city’s defence. In doing so, he took sailors from ships to defend the walls and ordered the ships to unbend their sails to prevent any faint-hearted from escaping.35 The subsequent campaign was thus the earliest of the war’s numerous major land campaigns in which British sailors fought ashore.
Montgomery rendezvoused with Arnold under the walls of Quebec and they attacked on New Year’s Eve. Montgomery led the attack and was killed, Arnold was wounded, and Quebec held. Not all was yet lost, however. The Americans were still at the walls of Quebec and the British inside were nervously looking to the ice-bound horizon for relief from ships that might never come. The only news they received had come from Howe, who, writing from Boston in early October, had warned that the season was far too advanced for naval relief.36
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As soon as news had arrived in London of the American attack on Canada, however, a scheme had been adopted to relieve Quebec. A driving force in the scheme was George Germain, an experienced politician who had taken over from Lord Dartmouth as Secretary of State for the American Department in early November. He would go on to direct the British war effort for most of the war.37 The contributions of Hugh Palliser, then a Lord of the Admiralty, were particularly valuable to Germain because Palliser had taken part in the 1759 capture of Quebec and had subsequently been governor and commander-in-chief of Newfoundland.38 If anyone understood the logistical and seamanship challenges of sending a naval relief into the St Lawrence, which would be frozen until the beginning of May at the very earliest, it was Palliser. Sandwich also buzzed with energy.39 The relief, led by Captain Charles Douglas in the Isis, set sail from the Nore on 22 February 1776, the departure delayed by ice. Every day that the ships were delayed caused Sandwich untold grief: ‘For God’s sake get the Isis down to Blackstakes the next spring tide … your being ready to leave the land early in February is of the utmost importance to the publick service, I think the fate of Quebec depends on it.’40
Douglas had made something of a name for himself in the late 1760s by conducting a series of experiments off the coast of Lapland to investigate deep-sea temperatures. When he wasn’t inventing thermometers to measure temperature at depths of 260 fathoms – so deep it took over thirteen minutes to pull the thermometer back up again – he investigated local rumours of the Kraken, giant sea-worms and a huge mythical Dutch whirlpool. His official record of the time he spent off Lapland makes fascinating reading.41 He had witnessed the 1759 capture of Quebec as a commander, and therefore knew the St Lawrence first-hand, and had served as a flag officer in the Russian navy, based in St Petersburg in the frequently frozen Baltic, in 1764–5. He had also served on the frozen coasts of Newfoundland in the 1760s.42 Douglas was not just another sea officer, therefore, but – like Palliser, the brains behind the operation – one carefully chosen to fit the challenge posed.
And what a challenge it was. Entire books have been written about the difficulties of sailing ships through pack ice,43 but suffice it to say here that you have to be able to cope with the numerous optical illusions that are caused by
ice and which have grave effects on navigation; you have to be able to identify the type of ice you are sailing through – floes, blocks or pancakes, made of salt or fresh water; you have to be able to identify the age of the ice, which affects its intrinsic strength; you have to be able to predict if the ice will compact or expand, freeze or melt, all of which it can do with little notice; you have to understand that, when working in ice, your ship will always move in the direction of least resistance, not in the direction chosen by the helmsman; you have to maintain momentum at all times, especially when working in convoy. In short, the challenge of getting anywhere near Quebec was immense, a battle in its own right.
The British fleet split into two, the Isis leading a frigate and a sloop, with the transports and another sloop following. The going was excruciatingly slow and the ships had to force their way through 100 miles of dangerous floating ice even to get to the St Lawrence. Unsurprisingly, they fixed fenders on the sides to protect the hull. Once there, they discovered that twenty more miles of heavily packed ice protected the estuary. Douglas refused to accept that he was beaten and simply rammed his ship into a wall of ice, ‘ten or twelve feet thick’, to see what happened. Luckily for Douglas and his crew, and also for the British in Quebec, the ice, rather than the bow of his ship, disintegrated. ‘Encouraged by this experiment,’ wrote Douglas,