Why Waterbury, Captain Thatcher and I didn’t become stark, staring lunatics in the week after her departure, I can’t say. Everything went wrong. The Gates galley had failed to join us, for every last ship carpenter in Skenesboro had fallen a victim to the flux and intermittent fever. Our own efforts to outfit our vessels seemed merely laughable, for most of the things we wanted couldn’t be located, while such things as could be found weren’t the right ones. Gates himself came down the hill to show us a despatch from Arnold, who had taken post on the western or inner side of Valcour Island. The galleys, he insisted to Gates, must be sent—they must be sent!

When we heard Arnold’s peremptory words, we knew we must make shift with anything we could get. We seized whatever we could lay hands on: shouted ourselves hoarse for rope and more rope: for rammers and hand-spikes: wads, priming-wires, tubes: worms, ladles, gun tackles: for cartridge paper, sponges, grape shot, round shot: for breeching-hooks, cartridge boxes, musket and pistol cartridges: for powder and more powder; for rum, provisions, extra spars, seizing, spun yarn, water-kegs.

On the 5th of October Wilkinson brought us word that Arnold could wait no longer: willy nilly we must sail as we were; so we worked all that night with blazing pine-knots lashed to the bulwarks, and at dawn we set sail for Valcour.

After the blinding sweat, the unending turmoil, the ceaseless labors of the past three months, the silent reaches of this narrow lake seemed a part of some new land—unreal, even, with the endless ragged wall of snow-clad mountains to the east, and the glaring colors with which the shores were painted—the bands of golden yellow, blazing orange, silvery greens and blues, patched here and there with furry browns that had the look of huge animals sprawled asleep among the rolling hills. Splattered on the browns and golds were gouts and smears of crimson and scarlet, as if a stricken giant had tramped, bleeding, high and low, hunting those who had come with guns and swords and axes to put the curse of war upon him.

I wished with all my heart that it might prove unreal indeed—that we might cruise on and on, out of these constricted waters and into the open sea, away from the raggedness, hunger, disease, cruelty, tumult and death that must come crowding up around us as soon as we ceased to sail.

… Valcour lies halfway between Ticonderoga and St. John’s, on the New York side of the lake; and by noon on that peaceful October Sunday we raised the high hogback of the island. It looked, from a distance, like a shaggy prehistoric buffalo, standing belly-deep off shore to feed.