On one point, however, everybody was agreed.  The command of Lake Champlain was essential to whichever side would hold its own.  The American forces at Crown Point might be too weak for the time being.  But Arnold knew that even ten thousand British soldiers could not overrun the land without a naval force to help them.  So he got together a flotilla which had everything its own way during the time that Carleton was laboriously building a rival flotilla on the Richelieu with a very scanty supply of ship-wrights and materials.  Arnold, moreover, could devote his whole attention to the work, makeshift as it had to be; while Carleton was obliged to keep moving about the province in an effort to bring it into some sort of order after the late invasion.  Throughout the summer the British army held the line of the Richelieu all the way south as far as Isle-aux-Noix, very near the lake and the line.  But Carleton’s flotilla could not set sail from St Johns till October 5, by which time the main body of his army was concentrated round Pointe-au-Fer, at the northern end of the lake, ninety miles north of the American camp at Crown Point.

It was a curious situation for a civil and military governor to be hoisting his flag as a naval commander-in-chief, however small the fleet might be.  But it is commonly ignored that, down to the present day, the governor-general of Canada is appointed ’Vice-Admiral of the Same’ in his commissions from the Crown.  Carleton of course carried expert naval officers with him and had enough professional seamen to work the vessels and lay the guns.  But, though Captain Pringle manoeuvred the flotilla and Lieutenant Dacre handled the flagship Carleton, the actual command remained in Carleton’s own hands.  The capital ship (and the only real square-rigged ‘ship’) of this Lilliputian fleet was Pringle’s Inflexible, which had been taken up the Richelieu in sections and hauled past the portages with immense labour before reaching St Johns, whence there is a clear run upstream to Lake Champlain.  The Inflexible carried thirty guns, mostly 12-pounders, and was an overmatch for quite the half of Arnold’s decidedly weaker flotilla.  The Lady Maria was a sort of sister ship to the Carleton.  The little armada was completed by a ‘gondola’ with six 9-pounders, by twenty gunboats and four longboats, each carrying a single piece, and by many small craft used as transports.

On the 11th of October Carleton’s whole naval force was sailing south when one of Arnold’s vessels was seen making for Valcour Island, a few miles still farther south on the same, or western, side of Lake Champlain.  Presently the Yankee ran ashore on the southern end of the island, where she was immediately attacked by some British small craft while the Inflexible sailed on.  Then, to the intense disgust of the Inflexible’s crew, Arnold’s complete flotilla was suddenly discovered drawn up in a masterly position between