The British Are Coming. Rick Atkinson

to comply would result in the squadron’s annihilation by 32-pounders, the Americans warned, though in truth they had no guns that large.

      The moment had arrived for desperate measures. On Thursday night, with help from Jean Baptiste Bouchette—a sloop captain known as the “Wild Pigeon” for his stealth and speed—Carleton disguised himself as a habitant in a tasseled wool cap, moccasins, and a blanket coat belted with a ceinture fléchée, the traditional peasant sash. Over the Gaspé’s rail he climbed, and into a waiting skiff with an orderly, an aide, and several crewmen. At Bouchette’s direction, they steered for the river’s narrow northern channel, shipping the muffled oars and paddling with cupped hands past American campfires and barking dogs for more than thirty miles to the trading town of Trois-Rivières. There an armed two-masted snow, the Fell, would carry him farther downstream.

      Behind them, their erstwhile comrades dumped most of the gunpowder and shot into the St. Lawrence, then struck their flags in surrender. Even without the powder, more spoils fell into American hands: 11 rivercraft, 760 barrels of flour, 675 barrels of beef, 8 chests of arms, entrenching tools, additional red coats, 200 pairs of shoes, and more than 100 prisoners, among them Brigadier General Richard Prescott. Carleton had again made good his escape, slipping into Fortress Quebec on November 19. “To the unspeakable joy of the friends of the government, & to the utter dismay of the abettors of sedition and rebellion, Gen. Carleton arrived,” a customs officer recorded. “We saw our salvation in his presence.”

      But as he stripped off his peasant disguise to reemerge as the king’s satrap in Canada, Carleton hardly felt like a savior. “We have so many enemies within,” he privately wrote Dartmouth from Château St. Louis, the governor’s palace. “I think our fate extremely doubtful, to say nothing worse.” Of even greater concern were enemies without. As a Quebec merchant had just written, “Intelligence has been received that one Arnold, with 1,500 woodsmen, marched from … New England the first of October on an expedition against this place. Their intention must be to enter the city by assault.”

      That was precisely Colonel Benedict Arnold’s intention. The former Connecticut apothecary, who had captured Ticonderoga in cahoots with the star-crossed Ethan Allen, was gathering strength twenty miles west of Quebec City, amid aspen and birch groves in Pointe-aux-Trembles, a riverine hamlet with a church, a nunnery, and a few farmhouses built of flint cobbles. His 675 emaciated men—less than two-thirds the number that had started north with him from Cambridge almost two months earlier—were recuperating from a grueling trek through the Maine wilderness, already lauded by one Canadian admirer as “an undertaking above the race of men in this debauched age.” The last miles along the St. Lawrence had been particularly painful. “Most of the soldiers were in constant misery,” a Connecticut private wrote, “as they were bare-footed, and the ground frozen and very uneven. We might have been tracked all the way by the blood from our shattered hoofs.” At Arnold’s request, all shoemakers around Pointe-aux-Trembles were now sewing moccasins for the men from badly tanned hides. Habitants brought hampers of roast beef, pork, potatoes, and turnips, despite a recent church edict that barred those disloyal to the Crown from receiving Holy Communion, baptism, or burial in sacred ground. Once his men regained their vigor and were reinforced by Montgomery’s troops from Montreal, Arnold planned to “knock up a dust with the garrison at Quebec, who are already panic-struck.” His only regret was not capturing the city already. “Had I been ten days sooner,” he wrote Washington on November 20, “Quebec must inevitably have fallen into our hands.”

      Even now, gaunt after his Maine anabasis, Arnold at thirty-four was muscular and graceful, with black hair, a swarthy complexion, and that long, beaky nose. He was adept at fencing, boxing, sailing, shooting, riding, and ice-skating. “There wasn’t any waste timber in him,” a subordinate observed. Restive and audacious, he was “as brave a man as ever lived,” in one comrade’s estimation, and as fine a battle captain as America would produce that century, a man born to lead other men in the dark of night. Yet he would forever be an enigma, beset with both a gnawing sense of grievance and the nattering enmity of lesser fellows. His destiny, as the historian James Kirby Martin later wrote, encompassed both “the luminescent hero and the serpentine villain.” His Christian name meant “blessed,” but that came to be a central irony in his life, for his was an unquiet soul.

      His father was a drunk merchant who had started life as a cooper’s apprentice, rising high only to tumble low, from the owner of a fine house and a prominent pew in the First Church of Norwich to arrest for public inebriation and debt. Young Benedict was forced to leave school, abandoning the family plan for him to attend Yale. Instead he was apprenticed in 1756 to two brothers who ran a successful pharmacy and trading firm; the boy would later describe himself as a coward until forced to head his household at fifteen. “Be dutiful to superiors, obliging to equals, and affable to inferiors, if any such there be,” his mother had told him before her death three years later, adding, “Don’t neglect your precious soul, which once lost can never be regained.”

      His masters were generous and trusting. They sent him on trading voyages to the West Indies and London and, when he turned twenty-one, provided him with a handsome grubstake of £500. He set up his own emporium in the growing seaport of New Haven, selling Bateman’s Pectoral Drops, Francis’s Female Elixir, and tincture of valerian, an aphrodisiac, as well as earrings, rosewater, surgical instruments, and books ranging from Paradise Lost to Practical Farrier. His black-and-gold storefront sign proclaimed, SIBI TOTIQUE—for himself and for everyone—and he did not correct customers who called him “Dr. Arnold from London.”

      His ambitions grew with his business. He bought a forty-ton sloop, the Fortune, running her from Montreal to the Bay of Honduras, trading livestock, furs, Spanish gold, cheese, slaves, cotton, and salt. By 1766, at twenty-five, “Captain Arnold” owned three ships and was an adept smuggler of contraband rum and Central American mahogany. More than once he ran afoul of associates, who accused him of jackleg business practices; in that same year he was briefly arrested after failing to pay £1,700 to his London creditors. Even so, as one of New Haven’s most prosperous merchants, he married, had three sons, joined the Freemasons to widen his social and business circles, and built a house overlooking the harbor, with a gambrel roof, marble fireplaces, wainscoting, and an orchard with a hundred fruit trees. But British commercial repression pinched him; he grew political, then radical, and in March 1775 was elected captain of a militia company, the Foot Guards, by comrades who saw him as a stalwart, worldly leader.

      With the seizure of Ticonderoga and Crown Point, Arnold burst into American history, never to leave. After securing both forts in May 1775, wearing a scarlet militia uniform coat with buff facings and big epaulettes, he led three dozen men on a brief raid across Lake Champlain into Canada to capture thirteen prisoners and a sloop—the George, which he renamed Enterprise—in what the biographer Willard Sterne Randall would call the first American naval assault as well as the first American attack of a foreign country. In a long letter to the Continental Congress, Arnold was also among the first to urge an invasion of Canada via St. Johns, Chambly, and Montreal, offering to lead the expedition himself “with the smiles of heaven.” Congress approved the plan but not the planner, selecting Schuyler and Montgomery instead. A few weeks later, Arnold rode into Cambridge to settle his financial accounts with the provincial congress, which had subsidized the Ticonderoga escapade. He took the opportunity to convince Washington that he was the right man to lead a second invasion force directly to Quebec along a rugged trace used in the past century by Indian raiders, Jesuit missionaries, and French trappers. His proposed route followed the Kennebec and Chaudière Rivers from the coast of the Eastern Country—still part of Massachusetts, but later to become Maine—to the St. Lawrence valley.

      The boy in the shop apron had made good. Yet throughout his remarkable ascent he was bedeviled by episodes that suggested a trajectory forever wobbling between shadow and bright light. An accusation in 1770 that he was a drunken whoremonger who had contracted a venereal disease in the West Indies led to a lawsuit, depositions from business colleagues “in regard to my being in perfect health,” and a duel. In another incident, Arnold allegedly dragged a sailor from a tavern and administered forty lashes for gossiping about his smuggling activities. Success at Ticonderoga was followed