The highway between two colonial empires, the Hudson River – Lake George – Lake Champlain corridor, was a hugely important waterway during the French and Indian War. It essentially connected two superpowers to each other in the time and place where the most practical means of transportation was by water.
Roughly halfway between Montreal and Albany – two cities of great importance for the two empires involved – lay Fort Carillon (Ticonderoga) and Fort St. Frédéric (Crown Point). To connect the northern shore of Lake Champlain with their border forts on the southern end of the lake, the French built their first “real” ship in 1742, a thirty-five “or so” ton goélette (schooner) today usually known as the Saintonge. The vessel also had other names such as “Goélette du Roy” and the “Barque du Roy”. Besides these semi-mandatory royal names, the small ship was named after Joseph Payant dit Saint Onge, the “Admiral of Lake Champlain”. He wasn’t a soldier, but a naval captain and a ship builder, and very good at both – essentially by far the most experienced sailor on the lake.
Some seven years later in 1749, the Finnish (*) naturalist, Peter (Pehr) Kalm, traveled on the same ship with the captain St. Onge himself. Starting 1756, Saintonge also started to travel down to Fort Carillon to carry supplies to the French garrison busy building the new fort designed to block the British advance towards north and Canada (New France).
* We can have an endless debate about Finland being part of Sweden at the time, but for us Finns, Turku is and was Finland.
As the ship was showing its age and lacking in capacity, a new ship was finished in 1757. Vigilante – a sixty-ton topsail schooner armed with ten four pound cannon – took over most of the duties of Saintonge, commanded by Joseph Payant. As far as I have seen, there are no pictures remaining of these vessels, but we can draw some conclusions from other known ships in the same time period.
A model of a contemporary schooner at Fort Ticonderoga today.
A diorama at the fort depicting ships in the 18th century, but post the 1758 battle.
The game, 1758 Fort Carillon, will have some optional French vessels available, ranging from “Jacaubites” gunboats, known also as “Jacobs”. These were bateaux with cannon. There will be two ships, Saintonge and Vigilante, of which the latter may be of great importance to the French. Vigilante has some serious firepower and can disrupt the British advance across the lake to encircle the French positions. Neither ship is mentioned in historical records of the battle, but they definitely were on Lake Champlain at the time, thus can be included.