The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [57]
Île-aux-Noix was filled with fleeing Americans, healthy and sick, plus their equipment, baggage, and boats. At one point that month, it was estimated that a total of eight thousand American soldiers were living on the tiny spit of land. It was so jammed with military that those soldiers arriving later could not even find space to erect tents for the night and were forced to sleep outdoors, on the ground, at the edge of the water near their boats, the only piece of land left.1
The sick and their doctors did not remain at Île-aux-Noix long as the British force of nearly ten thousand men rapidly moved south in a relentless effort to destroy the entire American army. The American camp at St. John’s, twenty-five miles north of Île-aux-Noix, was burned and the troops there also evacuated toward the hopelessly overcrowded Île-aux-Noix. Beebe and others were afraid that the army would not be able to move quickly enough to escape the grasp of the hard-pressing British troops and the always-feared Indians. The next day it was determined that everyone should be taken from Île-aux-Noix to Crown Point, nearly one hundred miles south on Lake Champlain.
Beebe was as stunned by the scenes at Crown Point as he had been at Île-aux-Noix, Chambly, and Sorel. Boats carrying dozens of sick soldiers arrived hourly in a huge, watery traffic jam. It was now reported that between thirty and fifty men were dying of smallpox each day in hospitals at Crown Point. Many had died in the boats on their way to Crown Point, falling dead in the ships. Beebe quoted the Bible when he asked himself about the wisdom of his commanding officers and their decision to undertake this massive evacuation, “Oh fools, when will ye be wise?”
Back home, word of the smallpox frightened civilians and it would soon become difficult to recruit new soldiers, as Connecticut governor Jonathan Trumbull warned George Washington. He wrote, “The smallpox in our northern armies carries with it greater dread than our enemies.”2
Crown Point was a rather large frontier fortress. Its signature was a wide entrance protected by a pair of huge iron doors. Doctor Beebe toured the camp at Crown Point in exceedingly hot and humid weather and was crestfallen; he told friends there that his own headcount showed that about five hundred men had smallpox and hundreds of others were suffering from other diseases or recovering from wounds suffered at the battles of the Cedars and Three Rivers. Many with smallpox were developing abscesses in all parts of their bodies because there was no medicine to stop their illness from spreading.
“Death has now become a daily visitor to the camps,” he wrote, adding that so many were dying that doctors, chaplains, and soldiers alike had hardened themselves to it and showed little emotion at the passing of a friend. Every time that he left the hospitals, Beebe told others that he was frustrated that there was little he could do except offer comfort. He lamented, “I can effect greater cures by words than by medicine.”
By the end of June, the number of fatalities was so great—four a day in Beebe’s regiment alone and fifty a day at Crown Point’s hospitals—that most of the men who were healthy spent almost all their time digging the graves of those who were dying. One regiment buried one hundred men in just eight days. “Death visits us every hour,” the doctor wrote.
Many of the enlisted men who died were single, but some were married and had children. Beebe was an eyewitness to the passing of Captain Shortridge, a middle-aged man who had been accompanied in the service by his two young sons. The boys were there with Beebe at Shortridge’s deathbed as he expired.