"The Thunderer, British Floating Gun-Battery on Lake" Topic

….CHAMPLAIN

"The radeau (French, singular for "raft") was co-opted for eighteenth century warfare on and along Lake George and Lake Champlain, to deal with the challenges of wilderness, inland waterways. The radeau's design was unique, incorporating a pragmatic approach to the problem of transportation and concentration of ship-mounted artillery in a self-contained transport in shallow water. The radeau had much the appearance of a land tortoise. Ugly (apologies to the tortoise), slow, and ungainly, the radeau was a solution to how one concentrated and moved ordinance, slowly and carefully over water, in a backwater wilderness.

Radeaux (French, plural), though few in number, were locally constructed and used in both the French and Indian War and the American Revolution. The French name suggests that these "rafts" had commercial use throughout French-Canada in the years before the British conquest of 1760. Radeaux might be thought of as platforms that had application to land-fortress, siege warfare, where fortresses were built lake-side, such as at Forts Ticonderoga and Crown Point on Lake Champlain. Flat bottomed, used as naval, floating gun-batteries, of simple construction, built from locally available oak used to frame pine planking, some had masts, but they were very poor sailing vessels…."

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