was no road through the dense forest by the shores of
Lake Champlain and Lake George to the upper Hudson. The British must go
down the lake in boats. This General Carleton had foreseen and he had
urged that with the fleet sent to Quebec should be sent from England,
in sections, boats which could be quickly carried past the rapids of the
Richelieu River and launched on Lake Champlain. They had not come and
the only thing for Carleton to do was to build a flotilla which could
carry an army up the lake and attack Crown Point. The thing was done
but skilled workmen were few and not until the 6th of October were the
little ships afloat on Lake Champlain. Arnold, too, spent the summer in
building boats to meet the attack and it was a strange turn in warfare
which now made him commander in a naval fight. There was a brisk
struggle on Lake Champlain. Carleton had a score or so of vessels;
Arnold not so many. But he delayed Carleton. When he was beaten on the
water he burned the ships not captured and took to the land. When he
could no longer hold Crown Point he burned that place and retreated to
Ticonderoga.

By this time it was late autumn. The British were far from their base
and the Americans were retreating into a friendly country. There is
little doubt that Carleton could have taken Fort Ticonderoga. It fell
quite easily less than a year later. Some of his officers urged him to
press on and do it. But the leaves had already fallen, the bleak winter
was near, and Carleton pictured to himself an army buried deeply in an
enemy country and separated from its base by many scores of miles of
lake and forest. He withdrew to Canada and left Lake Champlain to the
Americans.

CHAPTER III. INDEPENDENCE

Well-meaning people in England found it difficult to understand the
intensity of feeling in America. Britain had piled up a huge debt in
driving France from America. Landowners were paying in taxes no less
than twenty per cent of their incomes from land. The people who had
chiefly benefited by the humiliation of France were the colonists,
now freed from hostile menace and secure for extension over a whole
continent. Why should not they pay some share of the cost of their own
security? Certain facts tended to make Englishmen indignant with the
Americans. Every effort had failed to get them to pay willingly for
their defense. Before the Stamp Act had become law in 1765 the colonies
were given a whole year to devise the raising o