Valcour by Jack Kelly

Author:Jack Kelly [Kelly, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

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British workmen and British ingenuity had accomplished a near miracle—the completion of the Inflexible, from the laying of her keel to sailing, had taken twenty-eight days. The feat astounded even her builders. The officers and men who guided her up the Richelieu had no time to get used to her sailing qualities or adjust her trim. As they approached a rain-drenched Lake Champlain on October 8, they stopped to mount her cannon. If the guns had been swung aboard at St. Johns, their weight would have risked sending her aground in the shallow river.

On October 10, the ship emerged onto the wider water, her three tiers of square sails magnificent against dark clouds. “It certainly was a noble sight,” a British lieutenant enthused, “to see such a vessel on a fresh water lake in the very heart of the Continent of America.” Captain Douglas, who would stay behind to command the British fleet still in the St. Lawrence, was confident that the lake flotilla was destined to prevail. “As the Inflexible is of the party,” he observed, “I am not uneasy about the event.”

General Carleton watched with Lieutenant Thomas Pringle from the deck of the Maria. The commander had appointed Pringle to serve under his direction as commodore of the fleet, coordinating the movements of all the vessels. In doing so, he was following the traditions of the Royal Navy, in which rank and the order in which officers were promoted dictated assignments. Pringle, a member of a venerable Scottish family and son of a West Indies planter, had been a lieutenant for sixteen years, which gave him precedence.

The white ensign, which featured a simple red St. George’s cross in its corner, flew from the major British vessels. The flags snapped against the austere lattice of bare lakeside trees. Fighting the choppy minuet of waves stirred by gales, British tenders brought more provisions to be loaded on the Inflexible as the fleet gathered at Point au Fer, two miles south of Windmill Point. Officers were encouraged when the rain diminished and the wind came around to blow from the north. Conditions boded well for an immediate advance up the lake. The Inflexible gave Carleton the confidence he had sought.

That evening, with a happy sunset glowing in the west, Commodore Pringle directed the fleet to take advantage of the breeze and sail seven miles up the lake to anchor for the night in sheltered coves at the south end of Isle La Motte.

Only one sour thought brewed in the back of General Carleton’s mind. His fleet had been ready to sail at the beginning of September. The month of delay that constructing the Inflexible had cost brought him that much closer to winter. He was familiar with the northern cold. He knew that the weather could turn suddenly sharp and send fangs of ice out from the lake’s edge. He knew that this entire body of water was destined to become a frozen plane over the next three months.

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