By half past one we had done a month’s work on her, and we tumbled back aboard the Congress with Arnold shouting to us to get up the anchor and put all hands on the sweeps. Like two Algerine pirates we stole around the headland of Schuyler’s Island and wallowed southward once more, against a dirty brown sea that slopped over our blunt bows and flooded the decks with water.

Behind us the Providence and the New York lay fifty fathoms deep, where the British could never get them; but the Jersey had foundered on a rock from which she wouldn’t budge; and when we tried to set her afire, she was too waterlogged to burn. Five vessels we had so far lost; so that somewhere ahead of us, struggling against that cruel wind and the thirty-four-mile stretch of angry water that lay between us and Crown Point, were the nine remaining vessels of our little fleet; and not one man aboard the nine was more certain of seeing the light of another day than were we.

… No galley convicts, chained to their oars and lashed by French slave-drivers until the skin curled from the bones, could have tugged and sweated as our men tugged and sweated through the afternoon of that 12th of October, and the long night that followed. Hail squalls stung us, striking like bullets through our ragged clothes. The monotonous thumping of the pumps beat at our ears until we drowsed at we worked.

Sometimes we rowed; sometimes we tacked and rowed together, striving to gain against the wind that puffed us backward, and seemed, in its puffing, to howl scornfully at our dry-throated efforts. Whether we rowed or whether we tacked, we might have been moored, almost; for we moved as slowly as a vessel dragging its anchor.

All through that endless night the men toiled on and on. Packed in between the guns, they swayed at the oars in a slow and staggering dance. They might have been animals, milling in a panting, clattering drove upon our hail-swept deck—a half-seen herd that had a skunklike reek, what with its weariness and hunger, its foulness and its sweat: a herd from which strange noises came: howls, coughs, groans, high-pitched laughs: prolonged and senseless mutterings.

The voices of the officers, from lack of sleep, were mere croakings. Cap Huff wheezed like a giant porpoise as he shoved at an oar here and an oar there. Steven Nason, Tom Bickford, Verrieul and Nathaniel went up and down between the rowers, waking those who slept on their feet, shaking them, promising rum to them, saying anything to keep them going.