The First Battle of Lake Champlain. 



129 



about thirty miles north of Crown Point, where the shore is a precip- 

 itous bluff. Crown Point also corresponds with Champlain's map. Take 

 the United States Coast Survey of the lake and reduce it to the scale 

 of Champlain's map, and Crown Point stands out as distinctly beyond 

 the general shore line as does the cape which is marked on Cham- 

 plain's map, as the location of the battle, and Crown Point also approx- 

 imates in position to this cape, marked on Champlain's map as between 

 Ticonderoga and the Boquet river. 



Again, all the old French maps marked Bullwagga Bay, the shore 

 of which terminates in Crown Point, as the head of Lake Champlain, 

 and that portion southward as Wood Creek. The lake above this 

 point certainly partakes more of the character of a river than a lake, 

 especially from Crown Point to Ticonderoga, being but a little over a 

 mile wide in the entire distance of fourteen miles, while at some points 

 it is only a third of a mile wide. Is it possible that so close an ob- 

 server as Champlain, acting under his king's command, would have 

 neglected to mention this remarkable change in the contour of the 

 lake, had he traversed this portion, or that he would not have called 

 it a river, as he called the outlet a river as far south as Rouses Point 

 or Windmill Point, although that outlet for thirty miles below Rouses 

 Point averages nearly or quite as wide as does this part of the lake 

 between Crown Point and Ticonderoga? 



The fact that on his map no indication appears of this remarkable 

 narrowing of the lake into a river certainly affords good basis for the 

 assumption that he never saw this portion of the lake, and that Crown 

 Poiut was the southern limit of his exploration of Lake Champlain. 

 Mark in this connection Champlain's language already quoted: " The 

 spot where this attack took place was in latitude 43° and some min- 

 utes, and the lake was called Lake Champlain." Thus the evidence of 

 the journal and the map and the battle picture indicate that Crown 

 Point, and not Ticonderoga, was the scene of the battle. 



What basis to rest upon, then, has the assumption, so universally 

 concurred in by historical authorities, that the battle was at Ticonde- 

 roga or above Crown Point? 



First, Champlain says, in his journal: ''The spot where this attack 

 took place is in latitude 43° and some minutes." Now, if the latitude 

 is correctly given by him there is an end of all controversy, as Crown 

 Point lies in latitude 44° 2', while the point where current history has 

 fixed the battle is in latitude 43° 51'. 



How did Champlain determine the latitude? He undoubtedly did 

 it with the astrolabe, and it is a remarkable circumstance that an in- 



