A fundamental difference existed, however, between Arnold’s task and that of Wolfe.  Wolfe’s army had been carried to Quebec in ships; Arnold’s was to advance by land.  He chose the shortest route to Quebec from the New England seaboard.  It lay through the untrodden wilderness and its difficulties were terrible.  Half of it was up the Kennebec river along whose shallow upper reaches the men would have to drag their boats on chill autumn days in water sometimes to their waists; then they must take them over the steep watershed dividing the waters flowing northward to the St. Lawrence from those flowing southward to the Atlantic.  Even when they embarked on the upper waters of the Chaudiere, which flows into the St. Lawrence near Quebec, the hardships were killing.  The numerous rapids and falls on that swift and turbulent river would wreck their boats.  At the time no fleet defended Quebec.  If, instead of advancing by this land route, the Americans had been able to bring, by sea, an adequate force as Wolfe had done, the later history of Canada might indeed have been different.

Arnold set out in the middle of September with 1100 or 1200 men,—­“the very flower of the colonial youth” they have been called.  Many were hardy frontier men trained in Indian wars, who knew well the difficulties of the wilderness.  But now they were face to face with something more difficult than they had ever before encountered.  When one Parson Emerson had committed the enterprise to the divine care in a prayer that, tradition says, lasted for one hour and three-quarters, the army began its struggle across the dreadful three hundred miles of forest.  The swollen rivers swept away much ammunition and food, until upon the army settled down the horror of starvation.  The boats proved to be badly built; their crews were always wet and shivering.  At night the men had sometimes to gather on a narrow footing of dry land in the midst of a swamp and huddled over a fire that at any moment rain might extinguish.  The cold became terrible.  Many lay down by the trail to die.  When the journey was half over, Colonel Enos, deeming it useless to lead the force farther amid such conditions, turned back.  With him went some hundreds of men; but Arnold held on grimly.  He pushed ahead to get succour for his starving force from the Canadian settlements near Quebec.  With a few boats and canoes his party committed themselves to the Chaudiere river.  In two hours Arnold was swept down twenty miles, steering as best he could through the rapids, and avoiding the rocks, in the angry river.  At one place all his boats and canoes were carried over a fall and capsized, the occupants struggling to land.  But this reckless courage did wonders.  By October 30th, after more than a month of unspeakable hardship, Arnold had reached the borderland of civilization in Canada, and was sending back provisions to his men.  It is little short of marvellous that at Point Levi on November 9th he could muster six hundred men, five hundred of whom were fit for duty.