Battle of Valcour
The Battle of Valcour ("Battle of Valcour Island", also "Battle of Valcour Bay") was a sea battle that took place on October 11, 1776 in the narrow point between the island of Valcour and the mainland of New York in Lake Champlain between British and American Naval forces was carried out.
It is widely considered to be the United States Navy's first naval battle . Although the result of the battle was the destruction of most of the American ships, it delayed the British attempt to split the Thirteen Colonies in two within a year and ultimately led to the British military defeat at the end of the Saratoga campaign in 1777 .
The strategic situation was that the British had to attack the colonial fortifications of Crown Point and Fort Ticonderoga first in order to attack the colonists in the Hudson River valley. This forced them to move their troops and supplies 150 kilometers away from the St. Lawrence River Valley. Because the condition of the roads varied between impassable and non-existent, the supplies had to be transported by water across Lake Champlain . The few small ships on Lake Champlain were all in the hands of the colonists; even if they were only lightly armed, they made it impossible for the British to transport troops and goods. So both sides began to build fleets. The British in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu and the Americans in Skenesborough, now Whitehall, New York . The British had sufficient supplies, skilled workers, and prefabricated ships that had been brought in from England. They also dismantled a 180-ton warship and reassembled it in the lake. All in all, the British fleet of 30 ships was roughly twice the size and twice as much firepower as the Americans, who had 16 ships.
The American commander Benedict Arnold came from a seafaring family from Connecticut . He made a wise decision to force the British to attack his inferior forces in a rocky bottleneck where the British fleet would struggle to exploit their superior firepower and where the inferior seafaring skills of his unskilled seafarers would not be unduly reflected. Even so, the battle did not go well for the Americans when the sun went down. Arnold ordered his fleet to slip past (and through) the British fleet during the night and go into the fire shelter of the coastal batteries of the American forts at the southern end of the lake. The weather didn't cooperate, however, and the Americans were overtaken shortly before their destination. Arnold drove his ships into the shallow waters of Buttonmold Bay , where the heavier British ships could not follow. Cannons, powder, and everything else that could be used were then removed from the ships, and Arnold's men withdrew to Crown Point on foot.
Although the British had cleared the lake of American ships, snow was falling when Arnold and his men set out for Crown Point. British commander Guy Carleton had no choice but to postpone the attacks on Crown Point and Fort Ticonderoga until next year.
literature
- Gardner W. Allen , A Naval History of the American Revolution ( Houghton Mifflin , 1913), chap. 6 (English)
- William M. Fowler, Jr. , Rebels Under Sail: The American navy during the Revolution ( Charles Scribner's Sons , 1976), chap. 10 (english)
This article is based on a translation of the article en: Battle of Valcour Island from the English Wikipedia in the version of January 21, 2005 .
Coordinates: 44 ° 36 ′ 37.8 " N , 73 ° 25 ′ 49.4" W.