Valcour Island, 1776

In the summer of 1776 Benedict Arnold built a navy from nothing on Lake Champlain — gundalows and row galleys knocked together from green timber at Skenesborough, crewed by soldiers who had never handled a sail. The British were building a bigger fleet at the other end of the lake to carry an invasion south to Albany.

On October 11 Arnold anchored his fifteen vessels in the narrow channel behind Valcour Island and let the British come to him. The fight lasted until dark. His flagship Royal Savage ran aground and burned; the gundalow Philadelphia went down with an hour of daylight left.

That night the survivors slipped past the British line in the fog. Most were caught and burned two days later. But the season was gone, and the invasion waited a year — until Saratoga.

Most of the picture is sky — a high gray ceiling broken by a low sun that turns the water to brass. The battle sits in the bottom quarter: a ragged line of rowed gunboats, oars out, flags up, powder smoke drifting off toward the schooner in the middle distance. The near shore burns with autumn maple. It is a landscape first and a battle second, which is how the men in those boats would have seen it.