Washington chose to take a chance on him. The commander in chief had contemplated a similar expedition through Canada’s back door, and this pugnacious, enterprising, persuasive merchant—this fighter—seemed worth a gamble. In early September, he gave Arnold a Continental Army colonel’s commission and permission to recruit eleven hundred “active woodsmen” from the regiments in Cambridge for a mission that was “secret though known to everybody,” as one officer noted. “Not a moment’s time is to be lost,” Washington wrote. “The season will be considerably advanced.” He believed “that Quebec will fall into our hands a very easy prey.”
Few military expeditions would be more heroic or more heartbreaking. “The drums beat and away they go,” a rifleman in Cambridge wrote a friend, “to scale the walls of Quebec and spend the winter in joy and festivity among the sweet nuns.” The “active woodsmen” were mostly farmers, with a few adventurous oddballs like a wiry nineteen-year-old named Aaron Burr, grandson of the revivalist preacher Jonathan Edwards and son of the former president of the college in Princeton, New Jersey, where young Burr was admitted at age thirteen. Washington also provided three companies of riflemen from Virginia and Pennsylvania, partly to get them out of Cambridge; their acknowledged leader was a deep-chested teamster, sawyer, and “formidable border pugilist” named Daniel Morgan. Captain Morgan, known as “the Old Wagoner,” carried a turkey call made out of a conch shell. He also wore scars from a savage British flogging administered after he beat up an insolent regular in 1755 and from an Indian musket ball that perforated his cheek a year later.
After marching forty miles north to Newburyport, Arnold’s brigade paraded with flags unfurled near the Merrimack River, listened to a sermon drawn from Exodus in the First Presbyterian Church—“If thy presence go not with me, carry us not up hence”—then clambered onto eleven coasters stinking of fish. “Weighed anchor,” the soldier Ebenezer Wild told his journal, “with a pleasant gale, our colors flying, drums beating, fifes playing, and the hills all round covered with pretty girls weeping for their departing swains.” The men soon grew seasick—“indifferent whether I lived or died,” as one wrote—despite the two hundred pounds of ginger Arnold distributed as an antidote. But by September 22 they had traveled over one hundred miles up the Maine coast, past Honeywell Head and Merrymeeting Bay to Reuben Colburn’s shipyard on the banks of the Kennebec.
Here, on Washington’s orders, 220 flat-bottomed bateaux were under construction, with flaring sides, tapered ends, and more than 1,300 paddles, oars, and setting poles. One sniff told the men that unseasoned, green pine boards had been used. Not only were the boats cursedly heavy, but they leaked from the moment they touched water, requiring constant bailing. With seams opening faster than they could be caulked, casks of dried peas, salt fish, and beef swelled and spoiled; a hundred tons of provisions—the men ate three thousand pounds of food each day—dwindled at an alarming rate as the armada nosed north. Shallows scraped the bateaux bottoms, forcing men into the frigid river for miles on end, pushing from the stern, pulling by the painters, and cursing the boatbuilders as “infamous villains.” “You would have taken the men for amphibious animals,” Arnold wrote Washington, “as they were a great part of the time under water.” Surveyor John Pierce told his diary, “Every man’s teeth chattered in their heads.” They chattered more upon waking on the bitter night of September 29 to find wet clothing “frozen a pane of glass thick,” as another man wrote, “which proved very disagreeable, being obliged to lie in them.” Arnold urged them on with cries of “To Quebec and victory!”
Hemlock and spruce crowded the riverbanks, and autumn colors smeared the hillsides. But soon the land grew poor, with little game to be seen. Ticonic Falls was the first of four cataracts on the Kennebec, and the first of many portages that required lugging bateaux, supplies, and muskets for miles over terrain ever more vertical; from sea level they would climb fourteen hundred feet. “This place,” one officer wrote as they rigged ropes and pulleys, “is almost perpendicular.” Sickness set in—“a sad plight with the diarrhea,” noted Dr. Isaac Senter, the expedition surgeon—followed by the first deaths, from pneumonia, a falling tree, an errant gunshot.
More than 130 miles upriver they left the Kennebec in mid-October and crossed the Great Carrying Place—a thirteen-mile, five-day portage, much of it ascending—to reach the Dead River, a dark, reedy stream that slithered like a black snake toward the Canadian uplands. A terrible storm on October 21, perhaps the tail of an Atlantic hurricane, caused the Dead to rise eight feet in nine hours, sweeping away bedrolls, guns, and food. With “trees tumbling on all quarters,” the brigade clung to hilltops and ridgelines. Six inches of snow fell three nights later. More men grew sick, or worse, in what Dr. Senter described as “a direful, howling wilderness.” Jemima Warner, among the few women camp followers, tended her sick husband until he died; a comrade recorded that lacking a shovel, “she covered him with leaves, and then took his gun and other implements, and left him with a heavy heart.” In late October Arnold learned that his rear battalion, under Lieutenant Colonel Roger Enos, had turned back without permission, taking three hundred troops and much of the expedition’s reserve food supply. “Our men made a general prayer,” Captain Henry Dearborn wrote in his diary, “that Colonel Enos and all his men might die by the way, or meet with some disaster.” Back in Cambridge, Enos would be arrested, court-martialed, and acquitted; those who could testify to his venality were in Canada.
“We are in an absolute danger of starving,” a Rhode Island captain wrote. By the time Enos’s betrayal was discovered, their food stocks had dwindled to five pints of flour and less than an ounce of salt pork per man. “Dollars were offered for bits of bread as big as the palm of one’s hand,” Ebenezer Wild recorded. Then even that was gone. A dozen hunters “killed one partridge and divided it into 12 parts,” John Pierce wrote on October 29. John Joseph Henry, a sixteen-year-old Pennsylvania rifleman, described how a small duck was shot and carved by his comrades “most fairly into ten shares, each one eyeing the integrity of the division.”
Stews were boiled from rawhide thongs, moose-skin breeches, and the rough hides that lined the bateaux floors. Men gnawed on shaving soap, tree sap, birch bark, and lip balm. “This day I roasted my shot pouch and eat it,” wrote rifleman George Morison. “It was now four days since I had eat anything save the skin of a squirrel.” Young John Henry was offered a greenish broth said to be bear stew, but “this was instantly known to be untrue. It was that of a dog. He was a large black Newfoundland dog” that had belonged to Captain Dearborn, a New Hampshire physician who had fought at Bunker Hill. Men also gobbled down the feet and skin. Jeremiah Greenman described adding “the head of a squirrel with a parcel of candlewicks boiled up together, which made a very fine soup without salt.… Thinking it was the best that I ever eat.”
They trudged on, across a snowy plateau known as the Height of Land, then skirted Lac-Mégantic before starting down the wild, shallow Chaudière—the word meant “boiler”—which tumbled north a hundred miles to the St. Lawrence. More men died, fell behind, or wandered into the trackless forest, never to be seen again. “I must confess that I began to be concerned about our situation,” Lieutenant William Humphrey told his journal. “There was no sign of any humane being.” By early November, a rifleman wrote, “many of the company were so weak that they could hardly stand.… They reeled about like drunken men.”
Salvation appeared as a bovine apparition: at midday on Thursday, November 2, forty miles north of Lac-Mégantic, a small herd of horned cattle ambled up the riverbank, driven by several French Canadians. “It was the joyfulest sight that I ever saw,” Jeremiah Greenman wrote. “Some could not refrain from crying for joy.” Ravenous men slashed open a heifer and threw skin, entrails, “and everything that could be eat” on an open fire. Engorged, they sliced “savage shoes” from the hide for their ruined feet. “Blessed our stars,” Dr. Senter noted in his diary.
They also