On the morning of October 11, 1776, a British war fleet sailed south across Lake Champlain with enough firepower to end the American Revolution in a single day. The fleet numbered 25 warships and 400 transport vessels, carrying nearly 10,000 soldiers, sailors, and Indigenous warriors. At the head of the column, HMS Inflexible mounted eighteen 12-pounder guns, any one of them capable of punching through the hull of the largest ship America then had on the water. The British commander, General Guy Carleton, had spent months assembling this force for a single purpose: sail down the lake, crush whatever resistance remained, push toward the Hudson River, and split the rebellious colonies in two.
But on the western side of a small, heavily wooded island, hidden in a narrow channel that most British officers did not even know existed, a man who would one day become the most famous traitor in American history was about to perform an act 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 not yet a year old and already in serious trouble. The Continental Congress, in a desperate attempt to keep Britain from using Canada as a base for invasion, had authorized a bold and possibly reckless attack.
Two American columns marched north through frozen wilderness toward the city of Quebec. One was led by General Richard Montgomery, an experienced officer born in Ireland who had defected from the British army. The other was led by an ambitious, restless Connecticut merchant named Benedict Arnold. Arnold was not a professional soldier.
Before the war, he had earned his living as a merchant ship captain out of New Haven, Connecticut, running cargo vessels between New England and the Caribbean. He had spent years at sea, navigating coastal waterways, managing crews, and learning the hard way how ships handled rough seas and narrow channels. He knew ships the way a farmer knows his land. Beyond his seamanship, he was known for aggression bordering on recklessness, a trait that had gotten him into trouble more than once.
He had already helped Ethan Allen take Fort Ticonderoga in May 1775, storming the lightly guarded fort at dawn before the British garrison knew what was happening. The Quebec campaign tested every ounce of that aggression and more. On the last night of 1775, Montgomery and Arnold launched a desperate assault on the fortified walls of Quebec City in the middle of a vicious blizzard. Snow and freezing rain battered the attackers as they moved through the narrow streets of the lower town.
Montgomery was killed almost immediately, cut down by a volley of cannon fire from a concealed artillery position. Arnold was hit by a musket ball in his left leg early in the fighting, but he refused to leave the field until his men physically carried him to a field hospital. The attack failed disastrously. The surviving American forces spent the next 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 American Northern Army had withdrawn to Fort Ticonderoga and Fort Crown Point at the southern end of Lake Champlain. They were exhausted, ravaged by disease, and critically short of everything from gunpowder to shoes. But the strategic situation was 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. Combined 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. From 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 sufficiently large force through this waterway, they could cut New England off from the middle and southern colonies.
If that happened, the Revolution was over. The Continental Army, already struggling, could not survive being split in two. Everyone on both sides of the war understood this. 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 on the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia, General Philip Schuyler called a council of war at Crown Point to find out exactly that. In the room were Generals Horatio Gates and John Sullivan, along with the newly promoted brigadier general Benedict Arnold. His leg had still not fully healed from the Quebec wound.
Arnold presented an idea that seemed to most of the officers present completely mad. 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 inventive. 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 could not march their army south along the lake shore, because the roads on either side of the lake were terrible or nonexistent.
The British had to come by water. If the Americans could challenge them on the water, even with an inferior force, they might 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 effort.
Skenesborough turned out to be a strangely ideal location for what they needed. A Loyalist named Philip Skene had developed the settlement over the previous decade. It sat near a creek that emptied into the southern bay with access to the lake. More importantly, Skene had built two large sawmills and established an iron foundry that could produce some of the finest iron bars in the colonies.
Timber was available. Iron was available. 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 about 100 more came from Connecticut and Massachusetts. They joined Continental Army soldiers drafted to work as builders, most of whom had never touched a shipbuilding tool in their lives. The operation was chaotic from the start.
Smallpox swept through the workers almost immediately. Malaria followed closely behind. Morale collapsed. Supplies that had been promised arrived late, arrived damaged, or did not arrive at all.
General Schuyler had optimistically predicted a new gunboat could be launched every 6 days. This turned out to be wildly, almost laughably ambitious. But Arnold drove the work forward with the same relentless, harsh energy he brought to everything. He personally oversaw the design of some of the vessels, walked the shipyard constantly, and spent days traveling to procure supplies that the Continental Army supply chain had failed to deliver.
The main vessel they built was called a gundalow. It was a flat-bottomed, shallow-draft gunboat, about 54 feet long, fitted with a single mast and square sail, armed with cannons that a crew of about 45 men could load and fire. These were not beautiful ships. They were ugly, blocky, built from green timber that had not had time to dry before being nailed and bolted into place.
The planks warped and leaked water through the seams, but they could float, they could fire, and they were built in weeks rather than months. By early October 1776, Arnold had assembled a fleet of 16 vessels. One sloop called the 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 guns of various sizes.
His total force numbered about 650 men, the vast majority of them soldiers who had learned the basics of sailing in a matter of weeks. Many had never been on a boat before, let alone fired a cannon from a pitching deck. They had no formal naval training, no experience in fleet tactics, and about three-quarters of the ammunition they would actually need for a sustained engagement. Meanwhile, the British had spent the same summer building something far more imposing at their shipyard in St.
Johns on the Richelieu River, north of Lake Champlain. Carleton had assembled a fleet that would have been impressive even by European standards of the time. The Royal Navy shipped prefabricated gunboat parts across the Atlantic from England, packed in crates, and delivered them to Canada. Carleton also ordered three fully built warships dismantled at Quebec City, loaded onto wagons, hauled 12 miles overland through muddy forest roads to St.
Johns, and reassembled from the hull up. The most imposing of these was the Inflexible, a three-masted warship displacing about 280 tons and carrying eighteen 12-pounder guns. British shipwrights rebuilt that vessel completely in just 28 days. In addition, they built the Thunderer, a massive flat-bottomed barge 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 numbered 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 more lightly 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 7 miles south of present-day Plattsburgh, New York. The channel was narrow, perhaps three-quarters of a mile wide in places. The high cliffs and dense trees on both shores created fickle, 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 mouth of the channel, with the eastern flank protected by the island and the 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 massive numerical advantage barely mattered. Waterbury argued strenuously for retreating toward Ticonderoga and fighting a tactical delaying action. Arnold rejected him.
He pointed out that their crews lacked the experience to execute the complex sailing maneuvers a fighting retreat required, 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 had never set foot on a boat 3 months earlier could do. Arnold wanted a battle on his terms, on his chosen ground, and he was willing to stake 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 had no idea the Americans were there. The island completely concealed the channel from their view, and Arnold had ordered his ships to stay hidden and silent behind the tree line. It was not until about ten in the morning that British lookouts on the Maria spotted the masts of the Royal Savage poking above the trees on the western side of the island.
Carleton immediately ordered his fleet to turn and attack, but the strong wind that had been pushing the British south now worked against them. Sailing back against the wind toward the narrow channel was painfully slow for the large warships. The Inflexible, the most dangerous ship in Carleton’s fleet, spent most of the day stuck outside effective cannon range, unable to beat its way upwind to join the fight. The battle began shortly before 11:00 in the morning.
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 fiercely, charging straight into the narrow passage with several gunboats behind it. But the maneuver cost the Americans their decoy. The Royal Savage came under heavy fire as it tried to withdraw, lost control in the shifting winds, and ran aground at the southwestern tip of Valcour Island.
Eventually British boarding parties set it on fire. Arnold transferred his command to the Congress and kept fighting. Over the next five or six hours, the two fleets exchanged fire at close range inside that narrow waterway. The British gunboats advanced in waves, pouring fire into the American crescent formation.
Arnold personally directed the guns of the Congress, moving between the cannons on the smoke-filled deck, aiming fire and issuing orders. The fighting was brutal, continuous, and incredibly loud, the kind of close-quarters naval combat where you could see the faces of the men shooting at you. The boom of cannon fire echoed off the cliffs on both shores and rolled across the water like thunder. Cannonballs tore through wooden hulls, sending clouds of splinters flying like shrapnel.
Masts snapped. Rigging and spars collapsed. Men were killed at their guns and replaced by whoever stood nearby. The British ship Carleton, which had led the attack so fiercely, was hit hard by concentrated American fire.
Most of its crew were killed or wounded. It nearly had to be abandoned before a boat crew managed to tow it out of the channel. One British gunboat exploded when a lucky American shot hit its powder magazine. At least two more sank.
But the Americans were taking far worse. A 24-pound shot struck the Philadelphia below the waterline, and it sank within about an hour, settling to the bottom of Lake Champlain. With its guns still loaded and the ball that destroyed it still embedded in its hull. By late afternoon, the Inflexible had managed to get close enough to fire five devastating broadsides that tore apart what remained of the American line.
When darkness finally ended the fighting at around five in the evening, the American fleet was shattered. Nearly every ship had suffered multiple holes. Masts had fallen, rigging and spars were shredded. About 80 men were killed or wounded, and the crews had used up three-quarters of their ammunition.
The British positioned their warships in a blockade line across the southern end of the channel, close enough to hear the Americans 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 trapped Arnold. He would finish the job at first light.
But Arnold had one final move. Around seven 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 run the British blockade in the dark. Colonel Edward Wigglesworth would lead the way in the Trumbull.
Every ship would hoist a single small lantern at its stern, shielded so it could only be seen from a distance of no more than 50 feet. Just enough light for the next ship to follow. The crews muffled the sound of their oars with strips of greased cloth, and slipped through the mile-wide gap between the southern end of the British line and the western shore, where Indian campfires burned on the sand. It was a moonless night.
A thick fog crept over the surface of the lake, so heavy that the British ships could barely see their own anchor lights. The sound of British carpenters repairing the heavily battered Carleton helped cover the noise of the muffled oars. The glow of the Royal Savage, still burning at the southern end of the island, drew British attention northward while the Americans slipped south. It was the kind of plan that either worked completely or got everyone killed.
There was no middle ground. One by one, the battered, leaking ships crept south in single file through the darkness, each vessel following the faint glow of the one ahead. Arnold, aboard the crippled Congress, was at the rear of the fleet. By dawn, the British discovered the channel was empty.
Carleton was reportedly stunned and furious. But the lead was not enough. The retreating American fleet hit contrary winds the next day, slowing its progress to a crawl. By October 13, several fast British warships caught up with Arnold’s rearguard near a stretch of shoreline called Split Rock.
They rained continuous cannon fire on the Congress and the remaining American gunboats for about 5 hours. Arnold’s crew fought with everything they had, but their ammunition was nearly gone and about half of them were dead or wounded. Arnold realized he would not 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 beached at Ferris Bay on the eastern shore of the lake, a place where the water was so shallow that Carleton’s larger warships could not follow. He ran the Congress and four gunboats hard aground on the muddy shore, ordered every wounded man evacuated first, then set them all on fire. He made sure every ship burned with its Continental flag still flying from the mast. A deliberate act of defiance that told Carleton he might control the lake, but he would never have the honor of capturing a single American vessel.
As British boarding parties approached and long-range cannon shots crashed into the shallows around them, Arnold stood on the shore watching his fleet burn to the waterline. Then he marched the 200 survivors overland through the forest to Crown Point. When Arnold’s men staggered into Crown Point, exhausted and many still bleeding, they found four American ships that had slipped away from the British fleet earlier and made it to Fort Ticonderoga. But Arnold knew control of the lake now rested entirely with the British.
He ordered the remaining installations at Crown Point burned and withdrew his surviving force to Ticonderoga. Carleton and his fleet reached the burning ruins of Crown Point on October 20. Snow was already falling over the Adirondack Mountains. The fierce, unexpected resistance of Arnold’s improvised fleet had clearly weighed on the British commander.
He pushed reconnaissance parties south to within 3 miles of Ticonderoga, but he did not attack. The campaigning season was over. His supply lines stretched back to Canada through a wilderness that would soon be buried under feet of snow. And the image of those amateur American sailors holding their guns for hours inside that channel gave him long pause.
On November 2, Carleton ordered his entire force back to Canada to winter camps, to 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 had been replaced as invasion commander by General John Burgoyne, a man more ambitious but far less cautious and far less familiar with the terrain. The Continental Army had spent the winter strengthening its positions, recruiting new troops, and stockpiling supplies.
When Burgoyne’s army finally pushed through the Lake Champlain corridor toward Albany, it ran into a force that was fully prepared, and the result was the Battle of Saratoga, fought over several weeks in September and October of 1777. Arnold fought at Saratoga with the same fierce energy he had shown at Valcour Island, charging into the heart of the heaviest fighting on horseback until another wound shattered his leg again. It was a decisive American victory, widely considered the turning point of the entire Revolutionary War. 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 eventually tipped the balance 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 had bought by building a fleet out of forest timber and raw iron in a remote shipyard, manning it with soldiers who barely knew the difference between a mast and a spar, and sailing it straight into the teeth of the Royal Navy.
A century after the battle, naval historian Alfred Thayer Mahan looked at what Arnold had accomplished on Lake Champlain and offered what may be the best summary ever written. He said: “The little American navy was annihilated, but no force, great or small, ever lived to a nobler purpose. ”
There is another part of this story that reaches across the centuries. Remember the Philadelphia, the 54-foot gunboat hit by a 24-pound cannonball in its hull, sinking in the afternoon of October 11, 1776.
The vessel settled directly into the bottom of Lake Champlain and stayed there for 159 years. In 1935, a salvage engineer named Lorenzo Haglund, who had grown up hearing stories of the battle, managed to locate the wreck 60 feet below the surface. He raised the entire vessel intact, and when they examined the hull, the iron 24-pound ball that had sunk it was still lodged in the timbers. For decades, the Philadelphia was displayed around the Champlain Valley, and during a stretch of the 1950s, it sat inside a rickety barn 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 in honor of the 250th anniversary of the United States. It is the oldest surviving American warship, a 54-foot wooden boat built by soldiers who did not know how to build boats, crewed by men who did not 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, undersupplied, and barely holding on. Benedict Arnold went on to betray the country he had fought to create, and history never forgave him.
But on that cold October morning on Lake Champlain, commanding a fleet built from the wilderness, he did something no amount of treason could erase. He gave the Revolution the one thing it needed most: another year of survival. General Horatio Gates later said that Arnold’s action on Lake Champlain had retarded the enemy’s advance more than words could describe.
He was right.
