The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [65]
Just after 2 p.m. a fierce wind whipped across the lake and snapped the rudder band on the boat as the helmsman tried to push the rudder in order to steer forward in the severe northwest gale. The rudderless boat was then adrift and floated directly at a cluster of large, jagged rocks near the shore of a small island. The boat, moving quickly with the wind, was about to be smashed to pieces when the breeze shifted at the last moment and sent the craft sailing harmlessly into a small cove. The men dropped anchor and decided to remain there, sleeping on deck. No one took a close look at the darkening sky. Rain began to fall just after the sun went down and continued, hard, all evening. The men were drenched.
Robbins and the sick men, all of them soaked from the torrents of rain they had endured all evening, managed to fix the rudder in the morning and rowed to Fort George. There, Robbins, whose health had been restored during his latest return to the front, came down with yet another fever. Despite his ailments, he visited every ward in the hospitals at Fort George and prayed with the men. The minister had been hardened by the war. He wrote in his journal that he had tended to the spiritual needs of three men as they died in their beds in front of him that day and yet felt no great sadness; the deaths he had been witnessing for months seemed to have made him immune to suffering.
There was no sermon by the Rev. Robbins the following Sunday. The fever and bad cold he had developed on the trip from Ticonderoga to Fort George had made him so sick he could not preach. He was emotionally and mentally distressed, and on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Dr. Potts had warned him that one more tour of duty at Ticonderoga would kill him, and now, perhaps, his fatal prophecy would come true. Robbins was finished and he knew it.
On Thursday, October 31, a week after the first snowfall on Lake Champlain, a very sick and despondent Rev. Ammi Robbins arrived home in Connecticut yet again. More than five thousand Americans, half the original force, had been lost—killed in battle or by smallpox, disease, and fever, or captured—in the ill-fated expedition to Canada. Among the dead in the mismanaged, ill-advised incursion into Canada were many doctors, chaplains, and musicians who never lifted a musket, drew a sword, or fired a cannon. Rev. Robbins had survived, though, he imagined, as he wrote on the day that he arrived home for the last time, thanks to “Divine mercy and favor.”
By the end of October, the smallpox scourge had faded. Arnold’s navy had inflicted far more damage on the British warships on Lake Champlain than was initially suspected and Governor Guy Carleton decided to return to Canada for the time being and abandon his pursuit of the reeling American army. Even though he lost the lake battles, Arnold’s ability to halt the British advance southward was critical to the war. If Carleton had moved south he might have been able to defeat the Americans at Ticonderoga and move on to join Howe in New York, splitting the colonies in two and perhaps winning the war in the spring of 1776.
This pause in the fighting gave Beebe and the other doctors inside the garrisons time to let the soldiers wounded in the summer campaign heal. Men who contracted typhus, the putrid fever, and other ailments slowly recovered. The hospital tents came down and the medical wards were soon emptied. With great bravado, General Horatio Gates, whom Congress had chosen to succeed Schuyler in that region, declared an end to the smallpox epidemic and pronounced the army in good health once again.
On December 4, Dr. Lewis Beebe—his enlistment ended and still alive despite another bout of fever—yearned to see girlfriend Margaret Kellog. Hopeful of resuming the life of a civilian, he began the long journey home to Sheffield, Massachusetts, a journey of one hundred fifty miles. He traveled with his regiment and on his own by wagon, horseback, and sleigh on a circuitous route down through New York, into Pennsylvania, east across New Jersey, north into