Like all such sorry offscourings, they held themselves superior to all other men in wit, wisdom and ability; and when the barracks and the huts were filled with them, there were perpetual howlings and riotings, and fights of terrible ferocity, which nobody seemed able to quell. I longed, often, to see Cap Huff’s hulking figure charge into a brawling, cursing mass of those ragged, uncontrollable creatures, but he had gone away to Ticonderoga to testify in a court-martial which General Arnold had demanded so that Colonel Hazen might be punished for refusing to accept the supplies seized in Montreal, as a result of which the supplies had been plundered.

The only genuine seamen to be sent to us, so far as I could see, came marching in through a thunderstorm one afternoon, headed by a quick-moving man with enormous arms: a man seemingly unable to look at anyone or anything without feeling the back of his neck and casting a quick glance at the sky. Nathaniel and I, working in the bow of our galley, found his appearance familiar. When he caught sight of us, he pawed at the back of his neck, and raised a long arm in greeting. I remembered, then, that the same gesture had been made to us from the battered rowboat we had picked up off Old York a mere three months ago.

It was David Hawley, the Connecticut privateersman who had escaped from the Halifax prison, and rowed five hundred miles in a week.

We were glad to see him; glad, too, to have the Connecticut sailors he had brought. Since all the other vessels had captains, Waterbury complimented him by putting him to work with Captain Warner, who was also from Connecticut, on the Trumbull galley, whose stocks were next to ours. Ours, being the largest, had been named the Congress by Arnold; the other three were named for the three mainstays of the Northern Army—General Washington, Governor Trumbull of Connecticut, and General Gates.

The galleys were growing rapidly, though not as rapidly as they would have grown if we had been free of the attacks of intermittent fever that laid workmen flat on their backs by scores, their teeth chattering and their faces as white and pinched as though the blood had been drained from their bodies.

There were times when, between our sick, the endless feuds among Pennsylvanians, Yorkers and New Englanders, and the heat and the mosquitoes, we were sure that none of the vessels would ever be finished.

Yet the little Lee galley, built from the timbers we had brought from St. John’s, was pushed into the water and went off to Ticonderoga, unballasted, unmasted, ungunned—a raw hulk, rowed by a mob of Yorkers who fouled their oars, cursed, and tumbled about the deck under the apparently unseeing eye of red-headed Captain Davis. Davis gave us a wink as his craft moved slowly northward—a wink that indicated he was less put-upon than he seemed.