The morning fog clung to Lake Champlain like a shroud, muffling the creak of oars and the nervous whispers of men who had never before stood on a ship’s deck. On October 11, 1776, a British armada of 25 warships and 400 transport vessels—carrying nearly 10,000 soldiers, sailors, and Native American warriors—sailed south toward what they believed would be the final blow to the American Revolution. At the head of the column, HMS Inflexible bore 18 twelve-pound cannons, any one of which could shatter the hull of the largest ship America had afloat. The British commander, General Guy Carleton, had spent months assembling this force for a single purpose: to sweep down the lake, crush any remaining resistance, and drive toward the Hudson River, splitting the rebellious colonies in two.
But on the western side of a small, densely wooded island, hidden in a narrow channel most British officers didn’t even know existed, a man who would one day become America’s most infamous traitor was about to do something that would save the country he later tried to destroy.
To understand how Benedict Arnold came to command a fleet of homemade warships on a lake in upstate New York, you have to go back ten months. In the winter of 1775, the American Revolution was barely a year old and already facing serious problems. The Continental Congress, in a desperate attempt to prevent Britain from using Canada as a base for invasion, had authorized a bold and perhaps reckless attack. Two American columns marched north through frozen wilderness toward Quebec City. One was led by General Richard Montgomery, an experienced officer born in Ireland who had deserted the British Army. The other was commanded by an ambitious and volatile merchant from Connecticut named Benedict Arnold.
Arnold was no professional soldier. Before the war, he made his living as a sea captain out of New Haven, Connecticut, running cargo ships between New England and the Caribbean. He had spent years at sea, navigating coastal passages, managing crews, and learning the hard way how ships handled rough water and narrow channels. He knew ships the way a farmer knows his land. And beyond his seamanship, he was known for a ferocity that bordered on recklessness—a trait that had landed him in trouble more than once. He had already helped Ethan Allen seize Fort Ticonderoga in May 1775, storming the lightly guarded fort at dawn before the British garrison knew what was happening.
The Quebec campaign was a test of every ounce of that aggression and more. On the final night of 1775, Montgomery and Arnold launched a desperate assault on the fortified walls of Quebec City in the middle of a raging snowstorm. Snow and sleet pelted the attackers as they moved through the narrow streets of the lower town. Montgomery was killed almost instantly, cut down by a volley of cannon fire from a hidden battery. Arnold was shot in the left leg early in the fight, but he refused to leave the field until his men physically carried him to a field hospital.
The attack failed disastrously. The surviving American troops spent the next several months camped outside Quebec in miserable conditions, dying of smallpox and frostbite before finally retreating south in the spring of 1776 as thousands of British reinforcements arrived by ship across the Atlantic. By June of that year, the entire Northern American Army had withdrawn to Fort Ticonderoga and Crown Point at the southern end of Lake Champlain. They were exhausted, riddled with disease, and critically short of everything from gunpowder to shoes.
But the strategic situation was actually far worse than the condition of the troops, because Lake Champlain was not just a lake. It was the key to the entire war. Lake Champlain stretches 145 miles from the Canadian border down into the wilderness of New York and Vermont. Together with Lake George and the Hudson River to the south, it forms a natural highway running from Montreal all the way to New York City. Since the earliest days of the colonial wars, through the French and Indian War, and now in the Revolution, whoever controlled this corridor controlled the fate of the continent. If the British could push a large enough force through this waterway, they could isolate New England from the middle and southern colonies. If that happened, the revolution would be over. The Continental Army, already suffering, would not survive being split in half.
Everyone on both sides of the war knew it. The question was not whether the British would try. The question was whether anyone could stop them. On July 7, 1776, just three days after the Continental Congress voted for independence in Philadelphia, General Philip Schuyler called a council of war at Crown Point to figure out exactly that. In the room were Generals Horatio Gates and John Sullivan, along with the newly promoted Brigadier General Benedict Arnold. His leg still hadn’t fully healed from the Quebec wound. And Arnold offered an idea that seemed to most of the officers present completely insane. He wanted to build a navy.
Not a real navy. The Continental Congress could barely afford to feed its army, let alone build warships from scratch. What Arnold proposed was something far more desperate and far more creative. He wanted to build a fleet of small, flat-bottomed gunboats—vessels designed specifically for the shallow waters of Lake Champlain. Fast enough to maneuver, sturdy enough to carry cannons. He knew the British couldn’t march their army south along the lakeshore, because the roads on either side of the lake were terrible if they existed at all. The British would have to come by water. And if the Americans could challenge them on the water, even with a smaller force, they might be able to delay the invasion long enough for the Continental Army to regroup and prepare a real defense.
The council agreed. Arnold was sent to Skenesborough, a small settlement at the southern end of Lake Champlain, to personally oversee the construction. Skenesborough turned out to be an oddly perfect location for what they needed to do. A loyalist named Philip Skene had developed the settlement over the previous decade. It sat near a stream that emptied into the southern bay with access to the lake. And most importantly, Skene had built two large sawmills and established an iron foundry that could produce some of the best iron bars in the colonies. Wood was available there. Iron was available there. What Arnold needed was men who knew how to turn those materials into ships, and he needed them immediately.
Calls went out across New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. Within weeks, about 30 shipwrights arrived from New York. Then came about 100 more from Connecticut and Massachusetts. They were joined by Continental Army soldiers who were recruited to work as builders, most of whom had never touched a shipbuilding tool in their lives. The process was chaotic from the start. Smallpox swept through the workers almost immediately. Malaria followed close behind. Morale collapsed. Supplies they had been promised arrived late, or arrived damaged, or didn’t arrive at all. General Schuyler had optimistically predicted the launch of a new gunboat every six days. That turned out to be wildly, almost comically ambitious.
But Arnold drove the work forward with the same relentless, unyielding energy he brought to everything he did. He personally supervised the design of some of the vessels, walked the shipyard constantly, and spent days traveling to secure supplies that the Continental Army’s supply chain had failed to deliver. The main vessel they built was called a gundalow—a flat-bottomed, shallow-draft gunboat about 54 feet long, rigged with a single mast and square sail, and armed with cannons that a crew of about 45 men could load and fire. These were not beautiful ships. They were ugly, boxy, and built from green wood that hadn’t had time to dry before it was nailed and bolted into place. The planks warped and water leaked through the seams, but they could float, they could shoot, and they could be built in weeks instead of months.
By early October 1776, Arnold had assembled a fleet of 16 vessels. One schooner called Enterprise, two schooners, four row galleys, and eight or nine gundalows. His flagship was the Congress, a row galley about 72 feet long and 20 feet wide, armed with 10 cannons of various sizes. His total force was about 650 men, the vast majority of them soldiers who had learned the basics of seamanship within weeks. Many had never been on a ship before, let alone fired a cannon from a sloping deck. They had no formal naval training, no experience in fleet tactics, and about three-quarters of the ammunition they actually needed for a sustained engagement.
Meanwhile, the British had spent the same summer building something far more formidable at their own shipyard at St. Johns on the Richelieu River, north of Lake Champlain. Carleton had assembled a fleet that would have been impressive even by the standards of Europe at the time. The British Navy shipped prefabricated warship parts across the Atlantic from England, packed them in crates, and delivered them to Canada. Carleton also ordered three complete warships dismantled in Quebec City, loaded onto wagons, hauled 12 miles overland through muddy forest roads to St. Johns, and reassembled from the keel up. The most formidable of these was the Inflexible, a three-masted warship displacing about 280 tons and carrying 18 twelve-pound cannons. British shipwrights rebuilt that ship completely in just 28 days. They also built the Thunderer, a massive flat-bottomed raft armed with six 24-pounders and six 12-pounders, capable of carrying 300 soldiers across the lake.
When Carleton finally sailed from St. Johns on October 4, his combined fleet included about 25 warships and 400 smaller transport and supply vessels carrying an invasion force of between 7,000 and 10,000 men. Arnold knew with absolute certainty that he could not win a battle in open water. His ships were slower, smaller, and less heavily armed, and his crews were amateurs facing the professional Royal Navy. So instead of sailing north to meet the British head-on, he did something his second-in-command, General David Waterbury, considered suicidal. He anchored his entire fleet in the narrow, rocky channel between Valcour Island and the western shore of Lake Champlain, about seven miles south of present-day Plattsburgh, New York.
The channel was narrow, perhaps three-quarters of a mile wide in places. The high bluffs and dense trees on both shores created shifting, unpredictable winds, and the shallow, rocky bottom prevented deep-draft warships from maneuvering freely. Arnold arranged his ships in a crescent formation facing south across the entrance to the channel, with his eastern flank protected by the island and his western flank by the mainland. If the British wanted to fight, they would have to come to him, one or two ships at a time, in a space where their huge numerical advantage barely mattered.
Waterbury argued strenuously for retreating toward Ticonderoga and fighting a tactical withdrawal. Arnold refused. He pointed out that their crews badly lacked the experience to execute the complex sailing maneuvers a fighting retreat would require, especially against seasoned Royal Navy crews who could outmaneuver them in open water. Inside this channel, the Americans could anchor, aim their guns, and fire. That was something even soldiers who hadn’t set foot on a boat three months earlier could do. Arnold wanted a battle on his terms, on his chosen ground, and he was willing to bet everything on it.
On the morning of October 11, the British fleet sailed south along the eastern shore of Valcour Island with a strong north wind at their backs. They didn’t know the Americans were there. The island completely blocked their view of the channel, and Arnold had ordered his ships to stay hidden and silent behind the tree line. British lookouts aboard the Maria didn’t spot the masts of the Royal Savage poking above the trees on the island’s western side until about 10 a.m.
Carleton immediately ordered his fleet to turn and attack, but the strong winds that had been pushing the British south now worked against them. Sailing against the wind toward the narrow channel was agonizingly slow for the big warships. The Inflexible, the most dangerous ship in Carleton’s fleet, spent most of the day stuck out of effective cannon range, unable to beat her way upwind to join the fight.
The battle began just before 11 a.m. Arnold sent the Royal Savage and three of his fastest gunboats forward from the American line to lure the British deeper into the channel, and the plan worked brilliantly. The British ship Carleton led the attack aggressively, charging straight into the narrow passage with several gunboats behind her, but the maneuver cost the Americans their decoy ship. The Royal Savage took heavy fire while trying to withdraw, lost control in the shifting winds, and ran aground at the southwestern tip of Valcour Island. Eventually, British boarding parties set her on fire.
Arnold shifted his flag to the Congress and kept fighting. For the next five or six hours, the two fleets pounded each other at close range inside that narrow waterway. British gunboats advanced in waves, pouring fire into the American crescent formation. Arnold personally took charge of the Congress’s guns, moving from cannon to cannon on the smoke-filled deck, directing fire and shouting orders. The fighting was brutal, sustained, and deafening—the kind of close-quarters naval combat where you can see the faces of the men shooting at you.
Cannonballs tore through wooden hulls, sending clouds of splinters flying like shrapnel. Masts shattered. Rigging collapsed. Men were killed at their guns and replaced by anyone standing nearby. The British ship Carleton, which had led the attack so fiercely, was mauled by concentrated American fire. Most of her crew were killed or wounded. She was nearly abandoned before a boat crew managed to tow her out of the channel. One British gunboat exploded when a lucky American shot hit her powder magazine, and at least two others sank.
But the Americans were taking far worse. A 24-pound ball struck the Philadelphia below the waterline and she sank within about an hour, settling to the bottom of Lake Champlain with her guns still loaded and the cannonball that finished her still lodged in her hull. By late afternoon, the Inflexible had finally worked close enough to deliver five devastating broadsides that shattered what was left of the American line. When darkness finally ended the fighting around 5 p.m., the American fleet had been mauled. Nearly every ship had been holed multiple times. Masts were down, rigging was shredded. Nearly 80 men were killed or wounded, and the crews had used up three-quarters of their ammunition.
The British placed their warships in a blockade line across the southern end of the channel, close enough that the Americans could hear them making desperate repairs in the dark. The British also landed fighters on Valcour Island and the mainland shore to cut off any escape by land. Carleton was confident he had Arnold trapped. He would finish the job with the first light of dawn.
But Arnold had one last move. Around 7 p.m. that evening, he gathered his surviving commanders on the deck of the damaged Congress and told them what they were going to do. They were going to break through the British blockade in the dark. Colonel Edward Wigglesworth would lead the way in the Trumbull. Each ship would show a single small lantern at her stern, shielded so it could only be seen from no more than 50 feet away. Just enough light for the next ship to follow.
The crews muffled their oars with greased rags and slipped through the mile-wide gap between the southern end of the British line and the western shore, where Indian campfires glowed on the sand. It was a moonless night. A thick fog crawled over the surface of the lake, so thick that the British ships could barely see their own anchor lights. The sound of British carpenters repairing the battered Carleton helped cover the muffled oars. The glow of the still-burning Royal Savage at the southern tip of the island drew British attention north while the Americans crept south.
It was the kind of plan that either worked perfectly or got everyone killed. There was no middle ground. One by one, the damaged, leaking ships slipped south in a single line through the darkness, each following the faint glow of the ship ahead. Arnold, aboard the crippled Congress, was at the rear of the fleet. By dawn, the British discovered the channel was empty. Carleton was said to be shocked and furious.
The head start wasn’t enough. The retreating American fleet hit contrary winds the next day, slowing its progress to a crawl. By October 13, several fast British warships had caught Arnold’s rear guard near a stretch of shore called Split Rock. They pounded the Congress and the remaining American gunboats with relentless cannon fire for nearly five hours. Arnold’s crews fought with everything they had, but their ammunition was nearly gone, and about half of them were dead or wounded.
He realized he wouldn’t make it to Crown Point, still about 10 miles to the south. So Arnold made his final decision of the battle. Instead of striking his colors and surrendering to the British ships, he ordered the remaining vessels steered toward Ferris Bay on the eastern shore of the lake. Water so shallow that Carleton’s larger warships couldn’t follow. He ran the Congress and four gunboats hard aground in the muddy shallows and ordered every wounded man evacuated first, then set them all on fire. He made sure every ship burned with her Continental flag still flying from the mast. A deliberate act of defiance that told Carleton he might control the lake, but he would never take a single American ship as a prize.
As British boarding parties approached and long-range cannonballs splashed into the shallows around them, Arnold stood on the shore watching his fleet burn down to the waterline. Then he marched the 200 survivors through the woods overland to Crown Point.
When Arnold’s men stumbled into Crown Point, exhausted and many still bleeding, they were surprised to find four American ships that had managed to slip past the British fleet earlier and reach Fort Ticonderoga. But Arnold knew control of the lake was now entirely in British hands. He ordered the remaining facilities at Crown Point burned and withdrew his surviving forces to Ticonderoga.
Carleton and his fleet reached the smoldering ruins of Crown Point on October 20. Snow was already falling over the Adirondacks. The fierce, unexpected resistance put up by Arnold’s improvised fleet had clearly weighed heavily on the British commander. He pushed scouting parties south to within three miles of Ticonderoga, but he did not attack. The campaigning season was over. His supply lines stretched back to Canada through wilderness that would soon be buried under feet of snow. And the image of those amateur American sailors standing to their guns for hours inside that channel made him pause.
On November 2, Carleton ordered his entire force back to Canada to establish winter quarters and wait for spring.
Arnold had lost the battle. He had lost his fleet. He had lost more than 200 men killed, wounded, and captured. But he had won the one thing that mattered more than all of it: time.
When the British came south again the following year, in 1777, everything had changed. Guy Carleton was replaced as commander of the invasion by General John Burgoyne, a man who was more ambitious but far less cautious and far less familiar with the terrain. The Continental Army spent the winter fortifying its positions, recruiting new troops, and stockpiling supplies. And when Burgoyne’s army finally pushed through the Lake Champlain corridor toward Albany, they ran into a force that was ready for them, and the result was the Battle of Saratoga, fought over several weeks in September and October 1777.
Arnold himself fought at Saratoga with the same ferocious energy he had shown at Valcour Island, charging into the thick of the fighting on horseback until he took another wound that shattered his leg again. It was a decisive American victory, and it is widely considered the turning point of the entire War of Independence. The victory at Saratoga convinced the French government that the Americans could actually win, and France formally entered the war on the American side. That alliance changed everything. French troops, French warships, and French money ultimately helped tip the scales toward independence.
None of that would have happened without the Battle of Valcour Island. None of it would have happened without the months of delay Arnold bought by building a fleet out of forest wood and raw iron in a remote shipyard, manning it with soldiers who barely knew a mast from a spar, and sailing it straight into the face of the Royal Navy.
A hundred years after the battle, naval historian Alfred Thayer Mahan looked at what Arnold accomplished on Lake Champlain and offered what may be the best summary ever written. He said: “The little American navy was wiped out, but no force, large or small, ever lived for a nobler purpose.”
And there is another part of this story that stretches across the centuries. Remember the Philadelphia, the 54-foot gunboat struck by a 24-pound cannonball in her hull and sunk on the afternoon of October 11, 1776. The ship settled straight to the bottom of Lake Champlain and stayed there for 159 years. In 1935, a salvage engineer named Lorenzo Hagglund, who had grown up hearing stories about the battle, managed to locate the wreck 60 feet below the surface. He raised the entire ship intact, and when they examined the hull, the 24-pound iron ball that had sunk her was still lodged in the wood.
For decades, the Philadelphia was displayed around the Champlain Valley, and at one point in the 1950s, it was housed in a dilapidated shed on Route 22 in Essex County, New York, where you could see it for 50 cents. In 1964, it was donated to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, where it remains today, currently undergoing restoration for the 250th anniversary of the United States. It is the oldest surviving American warship, a 54-foot wooden boat built by soldiers who didn’t know how to build boats, manned by men who didn’t know how to sail, and sent into battle against the greatest naval power the world had ever seen. It is the embodiment of what the American Revolution was when it was on the verge of failure: desperate, improvised, under-equipped, and barely enough to survive.
Benedict Arnold went on to betray the country he had fought to create, and history has never forgiven him for it. But on that cold October morning on Lake Champlain, commanding a fleet built from the forest, he did something no amount of treason could erase. He gave the Revolution the one thing it needed most: another year to live.
General Horatio Gates later said that Arnold’s actions on Lake Champlain had retarded the enemy’s progress more than words could describe, and he was right.
So here’s the question for you: If you had been in Benedict Arnold’s shoes—knowing your fleet would be destroyed, knowing you’d lose the battle—would you still have fought? Or would you have retreated to save your men and your ships? Let us know in the comments below.
