There’s one thing of which I’ve been certain since those days: no task is sufficiently difficult to baffle really determined men.

Carpenters fell from the stagings, toward the end of our labors, struck down by fever. It was a common sight to see two men carrying a plank, and for one to drop in mid-stride, as if sickness had leaped upon him. Those of us who were left were ragged skeletons, our clothes rotten from perpetual sweating: our bodies covered with the sores and bruises caused by over-speedy labor with poor materials and worse tools.

Workmen were so few that we were sure we couldn’t finish the last three galleys; and yet we finished two of them, if it was possible to call such hulks “finished.”

Truth to tell, anything that floated was considered “finished,” and the Congress and Washington floated beside the landing stages on the 18th of September, three months exactly from that sticky day when we nailed the barn door over the bow of our bateau at Isle aux Noix.

The Gates was a shell, still, with another week’s work to be done on her deck, bulwarks and bulkheads before she could take to the water; but the Washington and the Congress were ready to move; and from the urgency of the messages that Waterbury had from Gates, we knew they had to move fast.

Aboard the Congress Cap Huff had twenty marines—or so he called them—amidships. Tom Bickford, my first officer, was gentle with the ragged, noisy seamen who fumbled with the oars, slapping them clumsily in the water—gentle, even, when he wagged his forefinger at them and begged them to be more seamanlike and so spare him the pain of thrashing them.

It was dusk when we cast off. We were no better than a wreck, listed to starboard, ungunned, unpainted, unloaded; our masts mere stumps: the decks a litter of odds and ends.

Tom ran up and down, calling to the oarsmen, who pushed and grunted at the sweeps. I moved the tiller over, and her head swung slowly into the north.

Skene’s yellow house, a blur against the hillslope, moved backward to blot out the dark bulk of Wynkoop’s monstrosity of a fort. Smoke from the cabins lay in the valley of Wood Creek, a pale shroud for the havoc we had wrought. No admiring throng was gathered to see us slip away: only two commissaries, some farmers, and a little knot of Negroes.