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Valcour Island from Au Sable Point. 355 degrees North from 44.5727 x -79.4323. Watercolor and mixed media on paper. 3.5 x 10.5 inches. The body of water dead ahead was the scene of a naval battle fought on October 11, 1776 between a British fleet commanded by Sir Guy Carleton and an assortment of smaller vessels and gunboats led by Benedict Arnold.<\/p>\n
The shoreline of Lake Champlain is girded with various types of marine-fossil limestone. Further inland, this shifts to carboniferous rock from which iron was extracted further south at Moriah and at other locations along the Boquet and Au Sable Rivers.<\/p>\n
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\nLimestone outcroppings at Crown Point, New York<\/p>\n
Both of these formations stretch southward into the Alleghenies, from which coal and iron is mined in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Kentucky. Bearing a striking resemblance to outcroppings incorporated into His Majesty\u2019s Fort at Crown Point, portions of Civil War-era Fort Negley in Nashville, Tennessee are in fact distant traces of the same fossil-reef.<\/p>\n
More than 120 miles from its headwaters, the lower stretches of Lake Champlain reach their greatest width. Its waters are broken up by a number of islands forming a kind of delta in reverse. The outflow of the inland sea empties into the Richelieu River, which flows another eighty miles north-northeast, to its confluence with the Saint Lawrence. This system of lakes and rivers, which included Lake George and the Hudson Valley was, prior to the invention of mechanized transportation, one of the most strategic thoroughfares in North America. Indigenous Haudenosaunee, Abenaki, Mahican and Lenape had for centuries vied in bloody conflict to control these waterways. European colonials quickly saw it importance. In the summer of 1609 Samuel de Champlain and a handful of other Frenchmen accompanied a party of several hundred Abenaki, Montagnais and Wyandot warriors up the Richelieu River into the inland sea. Near the head of Lake Champlain they encountered a Haudenosaunee war-party. As the foes squared off against one another, Champlain stepped forward, lowered an arquebus loaded with buckshot and fired, killing with one shot three Iroquois war-chiefs. Terrified by this event, the Haudenosaunee scattered.<\/p>\n
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\nChamplain firing on the Haudeonsaunee war-party. July 29, 1609<\/p>\n
French intervention in the region culminated with the construction of two fortresses; one at Pointe de Chevelure (Scalp Point), the peninsula where the lower portion of the lake widens significantly. The other was constructed on the rocky heights above the site of Champlain\u2019s demonstration of firepower, at the mouth of river La Chute. Descending more than two hundred feet over the course of three miles, the outflow from Lake George was a major portage, or carrying-place linking the Saint Lawrence watershed with the Hudson Valley.<\/p>\n
Both fortresses fell to the British in 1759, as did Quebec, the capital of New France. Sixteen years later, an American force led by Ethan Allen and Benedict Arnold captured Ticonderoga and Crown Point, giving them control of the lakes and the backdoor to Canada. After capturing Montreal, the Americans failed to take Quebec, which was reinforced in the spring of 1776 with fresh troops from Britain and Germany. American forces defending Montreal and the Richelieu Valley were forced to retreat. Royal Governor Sir Guy Carleton poured over maps with General John Burgoyne, planning the recapture of the Champlain Valley before pressing south to take Albany.<\/p>\n
South of the border, an arms race was underway. The quarrelsome, jealous and litigious Benedict Arnold was put in charge of shipyards at Skenesboro (today\u2019s Whitehall, New York), building row galleys, gundalows and gunboats to augment ships captured at Crown Point during the previous year. British warships in the Saint Lawrence were dismantled, then transported in pieces up the Richelieu River to Saint-Jean, where they were reassembled, rigged and armed. The plan was to regain control of the lake and capture Crown Point and Ticonderoga. Both fortresses had been weakened by the removal of cannon (mostly from Crown Point), which were transported overland to Boston during the winter of 1775-1776. With the Gibraltar of the north once again in British hands, the capture of Albany would drive a wedge between New England and the middle-Atlantic colonies, forcing Washington\u2019s rebels to sue for peace.<\/p>\n
In late summer, Arnold\u2019s fleet was ready. Sailing north, the force creeped down the Richelieu looking for any sign of the enemy. Receiving intelligence from his spies that British warship were preparing to depart, Arnold withdrew south to Isle la Motte, then Cumberland Bay, on whose waters in 1814 the U.S. Navy bested delivered the British a crushing defeat. Carleton\u2019s squadron sailed into Lake Champlain on October 9. Arnold moved his force into position across the southern mouth of Valcour Bay. The eponymous island\u2019s footprint provided cover, concealing Arnold\u2019s deployments from the southbound British vessels. Around noon on October 11, advance elements of Carleton\u2019s force cleared the southern tip of Valcour Island. Arnold\u2019s ships opened fire. Outgunned and outnumbered, Arnold\u2019s men fought into the evening.<\/p>\n By sundown, both combatants were running low on shot and gunpowder. Sometime after nightfall, Arnold\u2019s surviving vessels raised anchor. Hugging the shoreline they slipped silently past the British fleet. Rounding Au Sable Point they proceeded south to Corlaer Bay. On Schuyler Island Arnold\u2019s command regrouped, repairing whatever damage they could, scuttling two boats deemed beyond repair. At sunrise on October 12, the British were stunned to find open water where the American fleet rode at anchor the night before. Getting underway, Carleton doggedly pursued Arnold up the lake. Weather confounded both commanders. Arnold\u2019s fleet disintegrated as Carleton picked them off one-by-one. One of Arnold\u2019s subordinates ran his boat ashore and led his crew on foot to Ticonderoga. Arnold himself was pinned down in a small bay on the Vermont shore, but escaped to shore; hiking overland to the ferry that carried him to Crown Point. Abandoning that post, barracks and warehouses were put to the torch. What remained of Arnold\u2019s forced rendezvoused at Fort Ticonderoga, digging in with the garrison to receive the full fury of British arms. As the British landed at Crown Point, the first snow was falling. With limited rations and materiel, and winter approaching, with his force more than a hundred miles from its nearest base of supply, Sir Guy Carleton postponed the invasion and withdrew down the lake. Arnold\u2019s Fabian punch-and-run tactics had bought precious time for the American cause. Something else had been achieved. The newborn United States Navy had received its baptism of fire.<\/p>\n Valcour Island is uninhabited, except for an historic lighthouse on its western shore. Like much of the region Valcour Island is composed of marine fossil-reef limestone, in places rising twenty feet or more above the waterline. A peculiar feature of Lake Champlain is a mirage-like optical illusion that exaggerates the elevation of rocky cliffs girding its islands. Au Sable Point is formed by the sandy delta of the eponymous river. The south fork rises above Keene Valley, flowing through the town of Jay, once home to American painter and illustrator Rockwell Kent. The northern fork rises near North Elba, near the farmstead of Abolitionist John Brown, flowing eastward through Wilmington Notch at the foot of Whiteface Mountain. Both arms of the Au Sable River converge at Point of Rocks (today\u2019s Au Sable Forks), flowing past Keeseville\u2014where Louis Agassiz was given a hero\u2019s welcome in 1858, by a crowd that paid no attention to his dour companion, celebrated author Ralph Waldo Emerson.<\/p>\n Bending northward the Au Sable crashes over Rainbow Falls, carving a deep chasm through half a billion years of the ubiquitous regional limestone, before looping east to pour its waters into Lake Champlain, a hundred yards behind my point of view in this sketch. The area is protected by the State of New York, maintained as a public beach and campground at the northern end of the point, and as a wildlife management area<\/a> encompassing the delta wetlands to its south. Now available to own: Sketchbook Traveler: Hudson Valley Explore my Quaranteam Dispatches<\/a>, from April 1-June 8, 2020 Valcour Island from Au Sable Point. 355 degrees North from 44.5727 x -79.4323. Watercolor and mixed media on paper. 3.5 x 10.5 inches. The body of water dead ahead was the scene of a naval battle fought on October 11, 1776 between a British fleet commanded by Sir Guy Carleton and an assortment of smaller … Continue reading SKETCHBOOK TRAVELER: Dispatch #109: Valcour Island from Au Sable Point.<\/span> ![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.mcelhinneyart.com\/jlmcelhinney\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/Valcour_canadianarchive_c013202k.jpeg\")
\nBenedict Arnold’s fleet in a watercolor ca. 1776 by Charles Randle. Left to right: Royal Savage, Revenge, Lee, Trumble, Washington, Congress, Philadelphia, New York, Jersey, Connecticut, Providence, New Haven, Spitfire, Boston & Liberty.<\/em><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.mcelhinneyart.com\/jlmcelhinney\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/Battle_of_Valcour_Island_1776_RCIN_734022.jpeg\")
\nBattle of Valcour Island. Watercolor by Henry Gilder, ca 1776.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.mcelhinneyart.com\/jlmcelhinney\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/ValcourIslandMap1776Detail.jpeg\")
\nChart of the Battle at Valcour Bay. October 11, 1776. Au Sable Poiint is visible neat the bottom of the drawing.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.mcelhinneyart.com\/jlmcelhinney\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/IMG_6464-scaled.jpeg\")
\nKeeseville, New York. Once a manufacturing hub producing nails and farming implements, it was also the gateway to the High Peaks of the Adirondacks. Agassiz, Emerson, James Russell Lowell and other Saturday Club lumniaries passed this way en route to “Camp Maple” on Follensbee Pond in 1858, at the behest of artist and writer William JAMES Stillman.<\/p>\n
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\nMap of Au Sable Marsh Wildlife Management Area,. thge red dot marks my POV. The arrow \u00a0indicates my line of sight. Valcour Island is off the map to the north<\/p>\n
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