“Is that how that works?” Valnor mocked to deflect the engineer’s playful jab. “They’re not all that big you know. Several only handle a four pound shot, and the mortars practically move themselves.”
“Sixty tons is what you task us to move. Surely you can’t expect us to drag 120,000 pounds of hardware three hundred miles amid snowdrifts and ice?” Mr. Knox asked.
“We’ve already moved them to Lake George. That’s almost forty miles; we’re practically there already,” Valnor chided back.
“One tenth of the total distance,” Mr. Knox amended, “and that was over paved roads. The going gets much tougher from here I expect.”
“Nonsense,” Valnor countered and pointed to the docks where his men labored to load the guns onto long, shallow-bottomed transport ships that could easily navigate the nearby rivers and lakes lining the rest of their journey. “Other than loading and unloading the ships to get from one body of water to the next, the boats will do most of the work for us the rest of the way to Boston.”
Valnor paused the discussion for a moment while he watched a team of oxen pull on a rope attached to a pulley system that lifted one of the twenty-four pounders onto the boat with ease. When the cannon’s profound weight came to rest on the deck, the vessel visibly sunk lower into the water. He held his breath for a moment as the water crept past a red line painted on the boat’s side. It was over capacity, but not by much. The going would be delicate, but it would still work.
“How did you manage to hire so many men and animals?” Valnor asked of Mr. Knox to move the conversation away from the concerning sight. “I expected that hiring enough muscle to move the guns would pose the biggest challenge.”
“We are hitting the winter months now. Other than feeding their animals until spring, the local farmers have nothing else to do with their time. Convincing them to earn some extra income while letting us bear the expense to feed their oxen wasn’t difficult in the least,” Mr. Knox answered.
“Well, there are three more boats to load. I trust you can oversee that effort while I sail ahead to Albany and work to round up boats for us to use floating down the Hudson River.”
“You can indeed. Barring any unforeseen happenstance, we should reach Albany the day after tomorrow with the entire flotilla.”
“Good, the weather is starting to turn on us. Any later and I might not be able to find sailors willing to navigate the river with so much ice forming,” Valnor admitted. “The day after tomorrow then.”
In Albany, Valnor had a much tougher time lining up transportation. Money was not the issue; he had plenty to spread around. The challenge was Mother Nature. Snow continued falling, and temperatures continued dropping. It took him three days, but he finally managed to hire enough boats for the task.
When he returned to the docks with his miniature navy, Valnor expected to find a train of cannons waiting to be loaded. Instead, he saw nothing but empty planks with snow starting to accumulate on them. Fifty-nine cannons did not just vanish.
Valnor went back to the shores of Lake George and still saw no sign of his guns. Near the docks, he found row upon row of boats dragged ashore for winter storage, with only two still in the water. One was a transport ship far too large to move ashore, but there was really no need as the boat’s mass was enough to withstand the rigors of the shifting ice testing its hull. The other was the small scout vessel that Valnor used to move ahead of the convoy a few days before. It was still for hire, so he paid the captain his nominal fee and set out to locate his missing ships.
It had only been three days since Valnor was last on these waters, but he saw a distinct difference in the lake’s condition. Ice from the shores was encroaching on the navigable waters from both sides. As the sheets of ice grew, the lake’s water level lowered, giving him even more concern for the over-weighted vessels pressed lower than was advisable in these waters by the heavy guns.
As his tiny boat approached the bend near Sabbath Day Point, Valnor spotted a commotion through the trees. Between the bare branches and underbrush he made out a long row of boats, his boats.
Valnor’s moment of relief and elation only lasted as long as it took his tiny vessel to round the bend. There he found the lead ship grounded out and listing to one side with water falling over the railing at a rate the men bailing with buckets could barely keep pace. It would ultimately be a losing battle if something did not happen soon.
“Great Christ, what happened?” Valnor shouted as he neared the foundering vessel.
“We thought the freezing water looked inviting so we all decided to go for a swim,” Mr. Knox answered with a sarcastic flail of his arms and shake of his head in disbelief. “What the hell do you think happened? The water level is too low. I tried to get the heaviest load through first, but she bottomed out.”
“We need to unload some of the cannons to get the boat higher in the water,” Valnor offered.
“That is a wonderful suggestion, but we can’t spare the manpower to do it without taking on more water and sinking the ship and her entire cargo,” Mr. Knox countered.
“I have an idea. I’ll be back shortly,” Valnor answered before turning to the captain of his tiny boat. “Take me back to Albany.”
A few hours later, Valnor returned to the scene at Sabbath Day Point in command of the much larger transport vessel he spotted earlier at the docks. Not only could the ship handle the weight of the cannons to be unloaded, the truly useful feature of the boat was its bilge pump.
Valnor marveled at the ability of two men operating the manual suction pump to pull more water out of the sinking ship than thirty men working bucket lines ever could. This freed the men to transfer half the boat’s cargo over to the rescue ship. It took time and a lot of effort, but eventually a loud groan preceded the ship’s release from its gravelly captivity.
As the bilge pump tandem continued pulling water from the boat, it rose higher in the waters and lifted the men’s spirits along with it.
“Hazzah,” the men cheered when the pump hose finally ran dry.
“Now then, where were we,” Valnor asked of his engineer.
“On our way to Albany, but we’re not going through that again. The harsh reality is that we are too deep into winter to use boats for transport any longer,” Mr. Knox cautioned. “We’ll either need to come up with a different plan, or find shelter in Albany until spring.”
“Well, that certainly won’t make General Washington very happy with us. I’ll think of something,” Valnor answered with his voice trailing off in deep thought amid the strengthening snowfall.
Chapter 31: A Noble Train of Artillery
as valnor sat next to the window, helplessly watching the snow continue to pile up outside, he contemplated if there truly was a higher power in the universe. Two feet and counting had fallen from the heavens over the last two days to trap him and his cannon caravan in Albany. It was almost enough to make him think a higher power was working against his efforts.
Throughout his countless lifetimes, Valnor had met hundreds of people who experienced a ‘divine moment’ in their lives that changed them. Some individuals started attending church on a regular basis after their moment, even if that meant facing persecution or ravenous lions in the Roman Colosseum. Others altered the course of their lives completely to become monks, nuns or priests. There were even those like Joan of Arc who undertook fanatical missions, tantamount to suicide, for their god.
It was not just people he observed make sudden changes; the weather seemed to play a part in fate’s plan at times. Back in 1281 when Kublai Khan sent four thousand ships from China to invade Japan, a great storm that witnesses named Kamikaze or ‘Divine Wind’, sank almost the entire fleet before reaching Japanese shores. In 1588, a great storm combined forces with the British navy to sink the invincible Spanish Armada before they could invade the British Isles.
Was this epic snowfall yet another example of fate playing favorites? Two days and counting caused Valnor to wonder if this
was his ‘divine moment’. How else could he explain so much snow on the ground obstructing his progress? This foul weather rendered the roads impassable by freezing solid the deep, jagged ruts cut into them earlier by wagons while they were softened mud.
His caravan could no longer navigate the waterways either, owing to the ice that was now several inches thick even in the middle. The only option left for Valnor now was to haul the cannons on sleds over that thickening ice. The perils of this plan were painfully obvious to all involved though.
A man could walk on the ice without fear of breaking through, that much was a given. However, if a five-thousand pound cannon along with a team of oxen pulling it were on the ice next to that man…well…that man tended to get a little nervous. Still, it was his only choice at this point to reach Boston in time to dislodge the British from the city before their reinforcements could arrive. Time was running out.
To haul the sleds over the ice, his crews constructed gigantic sleds of Mr. Knox’s design that dispersed the immense weight over a larger surface area. The idea was sound and grounded in the laws of physics, but venturing out onto that ice with those sleds was going to be a leap of faith for many of the men, Valnor included.
The next morning, Valnor found that the snowfall had finally dwindled to light flurries and clearing skies to the west. This was his chance and he took it; fate be damned.
Twenty men ventured out onto the icy river with shovels and brooms in hand to clear a twenty-foot wide trail near the shoreline for the sleds to follow. The ice was thickest along the shore and offered the best chance for success. Even if a sled did break through the ice, the water underneath would likely be shallow enough for them to salvage the gun. That was the theory at least.
Valnor gave the shoveling crew a two-mile head start before giving the order. “Well, let’s get this noble train of artillery moving again. Lead the first sled onto the ice.”
It carried the smallest cannon they had, but it still weighed upwards of a thousand pounds. The gun was broken down with the barrel lying flat on the sled with its axel and wheels piled on top with rope holding the bundle together. The sled had four, ten-foot long runners in contact with the ice to spread the weight evenly throughout.
All eyes were on the first team as it neared the frozen surface. The ice gave off a faint groan when the ox set hoof on it, but there were no snaps or cracks heard. The animal had surprisingly good traction, owing to the fierce scratching the shovel and broom workers gave it earlier.
The brave man leading the ox looked back with profound trepidation in his eyes as the sled carrying the gun reached the frozen waters. More groans came up from the ice and echoed among the trees lining the shore, but no cracks or snaps accompanied them.
“I’d say if the ice can support Sam’s fat ass without breaking, then the rest of us have nothing to fear,” a worker standing ready to lead the next cannon onto the river ice shouted, and earned a round of cheers and laughter from those waiting behind him. “I’ll see you on the other side, Sam.”
“Aye, I’ll have a cold one waiting for you,” the first man on the ice shouted back.
“Not if I get there first, you pokey bastard.”
That barb needed addressing Valnor realized as the first cannon sled ventured further down the path. “This is not a race! You will keep at least two hundred feet between you and the sled crew ahead of you. If they stop, you stop to keep that spacing. Understood?”
“Yes, sir,” the man responded.
“All of you,” Valnor yelled at the top of his lungs for those waiting behind him to hear. “Keep your spacing between the sled ahead of you no matter what. Understood?”
“Aye,” came a chorus of replies.
The drama of each sled venturing onto the ice declined with each success, even though the loads got progressively more heavy and dangerous as they went on. Valnor even found himself losing interest with the whole process until the first Big Bertha drew near the ice. This would be the real test of strength for the ice.
While a single ox and handler pulled the lighter sleds, a team of four oxen was necessary to lug the far heavier burdens along. In addition to the cannons weighing over five-thousand pounds each, the sleds themselves were far more robust. Each featured a dozen runners measuring twenty feet long and took up the full twenty-foot width of the path. These were the grand mother of all sleds, and there were twelve of them making the venture onto the ice.
The going was much slower for these crews, and they worked in almost complete silence to allow the ice surface to talk to them. It sang a woeful tune of moans and groans, but the song had no percussion accompaniment. No sharp snaps, strikes or crackles came as crew after crew took their faith-filled first steps onto the icy river.
Valnor followed the last sled on foot for several hours before hastening his pace to reach the middle of the pack by the time night began to fall. There he came across Mr. Knox moving the opposite direction, telling each crew to stop for the night. The animals were unhitched and led ashore where the crews made their fires and set up tents to keep the elements at bay until morning when they performed the reverse and got moving again.
Their progress was maddeningly slow as every hundred feet or so there was yet another crew sent into a panic by a crackle under their feet. Each time, the sleds behind them came to a stop until the drama could be addressed.
This gave the entire caravan an almost accordion like movement as different parts were constantly starting, stopping, widening and contracting the gaps between them. They were lucky to make three miles per day at first, and transitioning from one river or lake to the next slowed even that glacial pace. Still, they were making progress and the crews gained more confidence in the ice beneath their feet with every passing day and were eventually able to move quicker.
The last moment of concern for Valnor came when they needed to venture away from the shoreline and cross the Connecticut River to the other side. There were no bridges within fifty miles of where they needed to cross, which meant testing the thickness of the ice in the middle.
The lighter sleds made it safely across without issue. The moment of real truth came when the first four-oxen team began moving across the middle with their mammoth cargo in tow. The men were so quiet as the team moved closer to the middle of the river that even a mouse farting in the weeds would have been audible to all.
As they ventured further from shore, the sound of runners scrapping along the ice picked up an accompanying creak from the ice. That faint creaking of protest grew into a groan, then an apologetic moan before the ice gave out a resounding crack.
“Whoa, stop!” the worker leading the team yelled as the loud crackle emanated outward from underneath his feet.
Even from the shoreline, Valnor could see cracks and fissures in the ice radiating away from the heavy sled toward shore. Before he could formulate a plan of action, Valnor heard a snap loud enough to rival a lightning strike. An instant later, the sled’s back end collapsed into the water.
The team of oxen stumbled backward several steps before regaining their footing to strain against the immense weight attempting to drag them into the depths below. They managed to hold their ground, but that would soon be a losing battle against gravity.
Valnor wasted no time shifting into damage control mode. If they lost even one of the twenty-four pounders, it would be a severe blow to their ability to take Boston from the British.
“Unhitch eight oxen that have already made it across,” Valnor commanded as he sprinted out onto the fractured ice. “Hook them up to the team out on the ice with ropes thick enough to handle the strain. While that happens, I need four men to break down one of those sleds and bring the timbers out here behind the sinking sled.”
It took less than five minutes before Valnor had six long, thick timbers at his disposal with twelve men waiting for his order. “Wedge each of these behind the sled and brace them against the edge of the ice. When the other oxen are hooked up and start pulling, w
e will pry on these planks to give them extra leverage to heave the cannon free to safety. Understood?”
“Yes, sir,” the men answered while looking at one another for reassurance, but found precious little. Five minutes later, a chain of eight oxen tethered together by rope stretching halfway across the river to reach the sinking sled was ready.
“Go, and take it slow,” Valnor ordered.
To avoid snapping the rope with a sudden jerk, the handlers led the oxen teams forward and took up the extra slack before applying their whips to motivate the beasts of burden forward at full strength. While that took place, Valnor joined the men with their levered planks behind the sled.
Most tried pulling down on the planks with all their might, but Valnor took a different approach. He leapt as high as he could into the air, grabbed hold of the plank’s end, and let gravity do the work for him. The others followed his lead, and eventually twelve full-grown men were suspended in air holding onto the planks to apply much needed lift to the back end of the sled. It worked.
The sunken sled came loose from the ice, and slid up the broken sheet like a ramp. More creaks and cracks reverberated, sending the workers scampering for the shore. Meanwhile, the oxen teams kept the sled’s momentum moving forward until it reached the friendly shores on the far side of the river.
Hoots and hollers of elation from the men were heard, but Valnor was in no mood to celebrate as he reached the shore where there were still eleven gigantic cannons waiting to make the crossing. He found Mr. Knox waiting for him with a smile and extended hand of congratulation.
“Well done, sir.”
“More like nice recovery,” Valnor demurred. “I don’t plan on doing that eleven more times.”
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