And even if it is General Montcalm and his Abenakis allies about to wreak havoc on the British soldiers and massacre their prisoners on the plain in front of the fort, there’s no need to worry because as well as Hawkeye and Chingachcook, Strawberry Moose is there ready to repel all boarders – and a few … "you said that yesterday" – ed .
Where I am is at the infamous Fort William Henry, another one of those humiliating episodes in British Military History in North America where, due to an insufficient lookout and picket, Lt-Col Munro allowed the fort to be enircled by Montcalm’s French troops and Iroquois allies and whose superior artillery (which should never have been allowed to land if the look-out had been up to much) battered the fort into submission.
Although the story of the subsequent massacre of the captive women and children was grossly exaggerated by Fenimore Cooper in The Last of the Mohicans, there was certainly a considerable slaughter here outside the fort as the Iroquois, drunk on the rum looted from the fort and having been denied any say in the peace process thus feeling cheated of their right to obtain scalps and other booty from the occupants of the fort, were determined to seek redress.
So this morning after my relaxing stay at the camp site at Schaghticoke last night, I hit the road.
First stop was at Schuylerville, the old “Saratoga” and a pretty place it is too. But this sign isn’t so pretty. The ground is so polluted by PCBs that it’s against the law to dig in the soil – no use trying to grow potatoes and the like here, even if not a couple of hundred yards from where I’m standing there are corn fields and all kinds of things.
But tha corn is not of course intended for human consumption – it’s for animal feed (and humans will then eat the animals)and so that’s ok. But it’s frightening all the same, what’s happening to the world’s food supplies.
Yesterday I showed you a photo of a lock on the Champlain Canal. Before the modernisation of the Hudson navigation, there was an “Old Champlain Canal” that was on a much smaller scale. I’ve been following that today too, and I reckoned that I would show you a photo of a lock on here. This is in fact Lock 12 and it’s a little different, isn’t it?
Still, for a canal that was built in 1832 the masonry is in surprisingly good condition although the amount of neglect of the canal and the amount of route that has been lost means that it will never be opened again, which is a shame.
A little further up the road is a town called Glen Falls and while there is nothing to see here (the falls have, like many on the Hudson, been oveebuilt with barrages for hydro-electric power) it has its own excitement. On Lap Three of the circuit of trying to find my way out of the town , I noticed a place called “Mailing Made Easy” – a kind-of boutique which guarantees to find the cheapest method of mailing parcels. Too good an opportunity to miss and so I took the Roland amp that I had bought. They told me the price and, picking myself up off the floor, I packed it because $35:02 was too good a price to miss out on.
And it’s not going on a snail’s back either – delivery 2/3 weeks they say, which may well be before I get home and certainly before I get back from my next stint in Brussels. And so, Liz and Terry, if you read this before I get in touch with you, I’m sorry that I didn’t ask you if you will take in a parcel for me, but I had to make an on-the-spot executive decision, and with it being an executive decision, if it is the wrong decision, then you can execute me when I return home.