Captain william delaplace biography

At 5 o’clock on the morning of May 10, 1775, Ethan Allen decided it was time to act. In the storm-tossed hours since midnight, only two waterlogged boatloads bearing some eighty-nine of Allen’s men had made it across the narrow neck of wind-whipped Lake Champlain.

Now the protective darkness was quickly fading to a glowing white morning fog.

Captain william delaplace biography

Soon that would burn off, exposing his meager amateur assault force to any British sentinel patrolling Fort Ticonderoga’s towering ramparts. Allen could wait no longer for boats to ferry across the rest of the Green Mountain Boys he’d left less than a mile from the fort, hidden behind a screen of spruces at Hand’s Cove on the Vermont shore.

Some three hundred miles to the south, the Second Continental Congress would convene at 11 that morning in the Pennsylvania State House in Philadelphia.

Delegates from the British colonies up and down the Atlantic Coast were meeting to decide what, if anything, to do about the surprise British attack on Mass