1609 · 1870
The War Road
Before the railways there was no practical way to get an army between New York and Montreal that did not use this water. A hundred and ninety kilometers (120 miles) of it run almost due north; the divide at the southern end is a portage, not a mountain range. So everyone came this way — and the two most consequential naval battles ever fought on an American lake were fought here, thirty-eight years apart, both of them decided by the wind.
The timeline below runs from Champlain’s first shot to the end of the fighting. Open an entry and the map marks the places it names.
11 October 1776
The Battle of Valcour
The four wintered behind the boom at Ticonderoga and never sailed north again. When St Clair evacuated the fort on 5–6 July 1777, the armed vessels went up the lake to Skenesborough loaded with guns and stores, Burgoyne’s gunboats an hour behind them. None of Arnold’s fifteen was afloat by the end of that month.
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11 September 1814
The same weight of shot, thrown two different ways
The two squadrons carried almost the same weight of metal, but they were built to throw it in different ways. A long gun was accurate at a distance and could do damage well before an enemy had closed. A carronade was short and light for its bore, and the heavy ball it threw broke up a hull rather than punching through it, but it only did so at close quarters. Downie held the advantage in long guns and Macdonough in carronades, so a battle fought in the open water of the lake would have been decided by the British before the American guns were of much use.
Macdonough did not fight in open water. He anchored his four ships in a line across the mouth of Plattsburgh Bay and waited there, which left Downie no way to engage except to come inside the bay and take up a position well within carronade range. The reach of the long guns was given up at the moment the British squadron entered.
The wind settled the rest of it. On the morning of 11 September it fell away to a light air blowing out of the bay, into the faces of the ships trying to work their way in. The Confiance could not fetch the berth Downie had chosen for her and anchored short of it, where she lay under a raking fire she was unable to return. Two of the British sloops lost steerage altogether and one of them went aground. The American ships needed no wind. They stayed where they had been placed and turned in place, first on the springs rigged to their anchor cables and then, when the Saratoga had been beaten on one side and her springs shot away, by winding her end for end on a stern kedge to bring a fresh broadside to bear.