It’s a classic case of losing the battle but winning the war. On Oct. 11, 1776 — 247 years ago today — the British Royal Navy thrashed a cobbled-together American flotilla at Valcour Island in Lake Champlain. But the Americans inflicted enough damage upon the British that they were forced to retreat to Canada for the winter rather than press their invasion up the lake to take Fort Ticonderoga, as they almost surely would have, thereby stamping out the Americans’ rebellion and with it the United States, at that time barely 10 weeks old. That gave the Americans time to rebuild, repair and recruit, such that when the British tried the same strategy the next summer, they were repulsed at Saratoga. It’s no stretch to say defeat on Lake Champlain led to victory five years later.

All this is thoroughly recounted in Jack Kelly’s outstanding “Valcour: The 1776 Campaign That Saved the Cause of Liberty” (St. Martin’s Press, 2021). Kelly explains in precise detail how the inferior American force of farmers and tradesmen outsmarted the vaunted British Navy with its trained, experienced seamen, redoubtable ships and powerful cannon, and how they employed the island, other features of Lake Champlain, and its weather that they knew but the overconfident British didn’t bother considering. He recounts how the outclassed Americans held their own at great cost, until at night, through cover of darkness and fog, skillful sailing, British inattention, and a lot of luck, they squeezed the remnants of their battered fleet between the British ships and the shallow western shore, escaping southward. I was reminded that for three days the outfoxed, outraged British chased them nearly to Ticonderoga, some 40 miles up the lake, destroying the rest of the fleet and most of its crew; thus the alternative name “Battle of Lake Champlain.” But the tide had turned; the British lost their advantage and with it, their colonies.

Kelly explains the complicated strategies, maneuvers, personalities, political intrigues, blunders and successes in easily understandable language. He describes how, almost comically, the British wasted untold ordnance on what they thought was a fog-bound American gunboat until it dawned on them, when it refused to sink, that it was a rock, Petit Island on the accompanying map but thereafter known sarcastically as Carleton’s Prize to mock the confused British commander, and also more formally today as Garden Island.

Kelly addresses recent historians’ reconsideration of Benedict Arnold, Carleton’s fearless colonial counterpart. A brilliant and charismatic strategist, he was denied the men and materials he begged for, and was passed over for promotions as others stole credit for his successes (American creation myths notwithstanding, politicians in those days were no less self-aggrandizing than they are now). This, Kelly argues, is not an excuse for Arnold becoming an infamous turncoat, but a rational explanation.

Kelly describes in full color what a shrieking cannonball could do to a ship or a human body; of cruelty and heroism; of political back-stabbing; of the leadership jealousies that characterize all wars. He is a master of vivid imagery: “the sky’s angry face,” “marching battalions of choppy whitecaps,” “fangs of ice,” much more. And he gets the lake’s direction of flow right: “up” Champlain is south, because it flows north to the St. Lawrence.

Valcour Island today is little changed from 1776. Occupying the northeast extremity of the Adirondack Park, it hosts a historic lighthouse, a network of trails, a few primitive campsites, a couple of rock-framed harbors for pleasure craft, divers seeking artifacts. Its cedar forests still overlook the grand lake, mostly quiet unlike that long-ago October day of thundering cannon, flames, screams, the grotesque carnage of war.