The Champlain Valley Remembers the Battle of Valcour Island

October 11, 1776, dawned a crisp autumn day in the Champlain Valley, the hardwoods colored and snow on the high Adirondacks. A cold, brisk wind blew from the north on Lake Champlain, powering a ragtag band of American naval ships fleeing south. Behind them sailed ships of the mighty British Royal Navy, chasing the Americans from the Québec border.

The tiny American fleet commanded by Gen. Benedict Arnold was vastly outnumbered, outgunned and much slower than Gen. Guy Carleton’s advancing British ships. Arnold led just 15 vessels, half of them “gondolas” — essentially crudely built 50-foot open rafts with one sail, three cannons and 45 men each, according to Benedict Arnold’s Navy, an account by nautical historian James Nelson. The British counted 27 ships with 89 larger guns and a combined force of 1,000 soldiers.

More about the Battle of Valcour Island

Arnold, a crafty military tactician, ordered his fleet to hide in a mile-wide gap between Valcour Island and the New York mainland just south of Plattsburgh. And there they waited.

What happened next marked one turning point in the American Revolution. While not as famous as the Battles of Lexington and Concord or the Siege of Yorktown, the Battle of Valcour Island was a critical episode in America’s fight for independence from England. The importance of the battle was slow to be fully appreciated — perhaps in part because of the complicated legacy of Benedict Arnold, its central character. But earlier this year, Ken Burns devoted much of the third installment of his PBS docuseries “The American Revolution” to the Battle of Valcour Island. Meanwhile, efforts to preserve ships lost in the fighting have gained steam.

Next week marks the battle’s 250th anniversary. Among the commemorative events on both sides of the lake are scholarly talks, museum exhibits and historical tours, along with memorial services for those killed in the fighting; a full naval reenactment in Plattsburgh, near where the battle began; and another in what’s now Arnold’s Bay in Panton, where it ended. All pay tribute to a dramatic skirmish that captures the heart of the American Revolution: noble sacrifice, bravery in the face of impossible odds and a good bit of trickery.

The battle captures the heart of the American Revolution: noble sacrifice, bravery in the face of impossible odds and a good bit of trickery.

Shallow water and lack of room to maneuver made it impossible for the British to sail their larger ships directly into the narrow gap between the west side of Valcour and the shore, where the Americans hid in a line across the strait. Instead, Carleton’s fleet had to sail down the island’s east side. Then the Brits turned to starboard and beat into the wind up the island’s west side toward Arnold’s little fleet, guns ablaze. It was midmorning, and the wind was in the Americans’ favor.

Nevertheless, one of the first casualties was Royal Savage, a British schooner the Americans captured the year before at Fort Saint-Jean on the Richelieu River. Sunk at its dock by troops under Maj. Gen. Richard Montgomery, the ship had been raised, repaired and made Arnold’s flagship as he built an American navy from scratch in Whitehall, N.Y., at the southern end of the lake. Arnold, who had helped Ethan Allen capture Fort Ticonderoga the year before, was sent back to the fort in summer 1776 with orders to control Lake Champlain and prevent the British from splitting the colonies and advancing to the Hudson River and New York City.

But now, as the Royal Savage led the American fleet, British 12- and 24-pound cannonballs “slammed into her hull,” according to Benedict Arnold’s Navy, and one of the schooner’s two masts collapsed. With Arnold watching from the Congress, she was run aground on the southwestern tip of Valcour, and the crew “jumped overboard and splashed ashore.”

The battle, Arnold wrote later, became “general & very warm.” A British cannonball struck the gunboat Philadelphia in her bow, and she began to sink; her living crew was rescued by the American galley Washington. For the rest of the day, the two sides filled the air with screaming grapeshot, bar shot — spinning barbell-shaped, sail-shredding projectiles — and cannonballs. On the gunboat New York, every officer except the captain was killed. As one crewman lit a nine-pound cannon, it exploded. The man was cut to pieces, which his mates shoved into the water. The Philadelphia would sink out of sight an hour after the fighting ended, a bar shot still in her bow cannon.

As darkness fell, Arnold estimated that 60 Americans were dead. Modern estimates range from 60 to 80 killed or wounded with another 120 missing or captured, and between 20 and 40 British casualties. The British fleet withdrew just out of range of American guns and anchored a line of ships between New York and Valcour. A British crew set fire to the Royal Savage, its magazine exploded, and they watched her burn through the night. At daylight they expected to “complete the destruction of this ragged, dirty rabble that dares oppose the ruler of seas,” one historian would write.

A map of the attack and defeat of the American fleet Credit: Courtesy of Library of Congress Collection

Arnold saw an opportunity in the flames. He hatched a risky plan to sneak through a narrow space between the westernmost British ship and New York’s shoreline under the cover of a foggy, moonless night. His 10 remaining boats lined up single file, each carrying a shrouded lantern on the stern. The men muffled their oars.

Sailing south before a fading northerly wind and rowing like hell, Arnold’s fleet made it to Schuyler Island, just south of Port Kent, N.Y., where they anchored to rest and repair. The badly damaged Spitfire was abandoned and sank.

Meanwhile, exhausted British sailors, apparently deaf from the day’s gunfire and distracted by the burning Royal Savage, awoke the following morning to find the Americans gone. An outraged Carleton immediately ordered his fleet to give chase. But the wind veered southerly and picked up, slowing the Brits, along with Arnold’s hopes of reaching Crown Point, N.Y.

The battle resumed on October 13, when Carleton’s fleet caught up with the Americans in the Narrows between New York’s Split Rock Mountain and Ferrisburgh. Outgunned, Arnold sent four ships on to Crown Point and turned the remaining five into a small cove in Panton, now known as Arnold’s Bay. His crews ran the ships aground, took what they could and set them on fire, the Grand Union flag with its 13 red and white stripes still waving atop their masts. Arnold and 200 men walked 26 miles through the woods to Chimney Point in Addison and were rowed across the lake to the American outpost at Crown Point, which Arnold burned before retreating to the safety of Fort Ticonderoga.

“It was not a victory for the Americans, but it is one of the great slugfests of naval warfare, and it happens on a lake,” naval historian Nathaniel Philbrick told Ken Burns. “It convinced the British that it was going to be much more difficult to take Ticonderoga than they thought.”

The rest, as they say, is history. Facing winter — it was already snowing in the Adirondacks — as well as the likelihood of a long siege against American troops at Fort Ticonderoga, Carleton retreated to Canada with plans to return the next year. That delay allowed Arnold and Horatio Gates, commander of the Northern Department of Continental Army, to gather the cannons and the thousands of soldiers who would beat the British at Saratoga, N.Y., on October 17, 1777. And that victory persuaded the French to join the Americans, a partnership that would win the war at Yorktown on October 19, 1781. Two years later, the Treaty of Paris granted the United States its independence.

Many historians agree that Arnold’s American fleet lost Lake Champlain but helped win the war. ➆

The original print version of this article was headlined “Of Glory & Gunpowder | The Champlain Valley remembers the most important Revolutionary War fight you’ve never heard of: the Battle of Valcour Island”

About the author: Journalist, father, husband, sailor and banjo picker Jim Carrier wrote a million words for the likes of the New York Times, Denver Post and National Geographic before finding Vermont and Lake Champlain. Learn more at jimcarrier.com.