The Major Operations of the Navies in the War of American Independence | Page 9

his boats with thirty men, pulled through the
night, and at six o'clock on the following morning surprised the post, in
which were only a sergeant and a dozen men. He reaped the rewards of
celerity. The prisoners informed him that a considerable body of troops
was expected from Canada, on its way to Ticonderoga; and this force in
fact reached St. John's on the next day. When it arrived, Arnold was
gone, having carried off a sloop which he found there and destroyed
everything else that could float. By such trifling means two active
officers had secured the temporary control of the lake itself and of the
approaches to it from the south. There being no roads, the British,
debarred from the water line, were unable to advance. Sir Guy Carleton,
Governor and Commander-in-Chief in Canada, strengthened the works
at St. John's, and built a schooner; but his force was inadequate to meet
that of the Americans.
The seizure of the two posts, being an act of offensive war, was not at
once pleasing to the American Congress, which still clung to the hope
of reconciliation; but events were marching rapidly, and ere summer
was over the invasion of Canada was ordered. General Montgomery,
appointed to that enterprise, embarked at Crown Point with two
thousand men on September 4th, and soon afterwards appeared before
St. John's, which after prolonged operations capitulated on the 3d of
November. On the 13th Montgomery entered Montreal, and thence
pressed down the St. Lawrence to Pointe aux Trembles, twenty miles
above Quebec. There he joined Arnold, who in the month of October
had crossed the northern wilderness, between the head waters of the
Kennebec River and St. Lawrence. On the way he had endured
immense privations, losing five hundred men of the twelve hundred
with whom he started; and upon arriving opposite Quebec, on the 10th
of November, three days had been unavoidably spent in collecting
boats to pass the river. Crossing on the night of the 13th, this
adventurous soldier and his little command climbed the Heights of
Abraham by the same path that had served Wolfe so well sixteen years
before. With characteristic audacity he summoned the place. The
demand of course was refused; but that Carleton did not fall at once

upon the little band of seven hundred that bearded him shows by how
feeble a tenure Great Britain then held Canada. Immediately after the
junction Montgomery advanced on Quebec, where he appeared on the
5th of December. Winter having already begun, and neither his
numbers nor his equipments being adequate to regular siege operations,
he very properly decided to try the desperate chance of an assault upon
the strongest fortress in America. This was made on the night of
December 31st, 1775. Whatever possibility of success there may have
been vanished with the death of Montgomery, who fell at the head of
his men.
The American army retired three miles up the river, went into
winter-quarters, and established a land blockade of Quebec, which was
cut off from the sea by the ice. "For five months," wrote Carleton to the
Secretary for War, on the 14th of May, 1776, "this town has been
closely invested by the rebels." From this unpleasant position it was
relieved on the 6th of May, when signals were exchanged between it
and the Surprise, the advance ship of a squadron under Captain Charles
Douglas,[2] which had sailed from England on the 11th of March.
Arriving off the mouth of the St. Lawrence, on the morning of April
12th, Douglas found ice extending nearly twenty miles to sea, and
packed too closely to admit of working through it by dexterous steering.
The urgency of the case not admitting delay, he ran his ship, the Isis, 50,
with a speed of five knots, against a large piece of ice about ten or
twelve feet thick, to test the effect. The ice, probably softened by salt
water and salt air, went to pieces. "Encouraged by this experiment,"
continues Douglas, somewhat magnificently, "we thought it an
enterprise worthy an English ship of the line in our King and country's
sacred cause, and an effort due to the gallant defenders of Quebec, to
make the attempt of pressing her by force of sail, through the thick,
broad, and closely connected fields of ice, to which we saw no bounds
towards the western part of our horizon. Before night (when blowing a
snow-storm, we brought-to, or rather stopped), we had penetrated about
eight leagues into it, describing our path all the way with bits of the
sheathing of the ship's bottom, and sometimes pieces of the cutwater,
but none of the oak plank; and it was pleasant enough at times, when
we stuck fast, to see Lord Petersham exercising his troops on