GENERAL AMHERST EMBARKS ON LAKE CHAMPLAIN.

While the general superintended the repairs of Ticonderoga, and the men were employed in preparing batteaux and other vessels, his scouting parties hovered in the neighbourhood of Crown-Point, in order to watch the motions of the enemy. From one of these detachments he received intelligence, on the first day of August, that the enemy had retired from Crown-Point. He immediately detached a body of rangers before him to take possession of the place: then he embarked with the rest of the army, and on the fourth day of the month landed at the fort, where the troops were immediately encamped. His next care was to lay the foundation of a new fort, to be maintained for the further security of the British dominions in that part of the country; and particularly for preventing the inroads of scalping parties, by whom the plantations had been dreadfully infested. Here information was received that the enemy had retired to the Isle aux Noix, at the other end of the lake Champlain, five leagues on the hither side of St. John’s; that their force encamped in that place, under the command of M. de Burlemaque, consisted of three battalions and five piquets of regular troops, with Canadians and marines, amounting in the whole to three thousand five hundred effective men, provided with a numerous artillery; and that the lake was occupied by four large vessels mounted with cannon, and manned with piquets of different regiments, under the command and direction of M. le Bras, a captain in the French navy, assisted by M. de Rigal, and other sea-officers. In consequence of this intimation, general Amherst, who had for some time employed captain Loring to superintend the building of vessels at Ticonderoga, being resolved to have the superiority on the lake, directed the captain to build with all possible expedition a sloop of sixteen guns, and a radeau eighty-four feet in length, capable of carrying six large cannon. These, together with a brigantine, being finished, victualled, and manned by the eleventh day of October, the general embarked with the whole of the troops in batteaux, in order to attack the enemy; but next day, the weather growing tempestuous, was obliged to take shelter in a bay on the western shore, where the men were landed for refreshment. In the meantime, captain Loring, with his small squadron, sailing down the lake, gave chase to a French schooner, and drove three of their ships into a bay, where two of them were sunk, and the third run aground by their own crew, who escaped; one, however, was repaired and brought away by captain Loring, so that now the French had but one schooner remaining. General Amherst, after having been some days wind-bound, re-embarked his forces, and proceeded down the lake; but the storm, which had abated, beginning to blow with redoubled fury, so as to swell the waves mountains high, the season for action being elapsed, and winter setting in with the most rigorous severity, he saw the impossibility of accomplishing his design, and was obliged to desist. Returning to the same bay where he had been sheltered, he landed the troops, and began his march for Crown-Point, where he arrived on the twenty-first day of October. Having secured a superiority on the lake, he now employed all his attention in rearing the new fortress at Crown-Point, together with three small outforts for its better defence; in opening roads of communication with Ticonderoga, and the governments of Massachusetts and New Hampshire; and in making dispositions for the winter-quarters of his troops, so as to protect the country from the inroads of the enemy.