[Footnote 41: "Bateaux are a kind of light, flat-bottomed boats, widest in the middle and pointed at each end, of about fifteen hundred weight burden, and managed by two men, called bateaux-men, with paddles and setting poles, the rivers being in many places too narrow to admit of oars."--Smollett's _Hist. of England_, vol. iii., p. 457.]
[Footnote 42: "Mr. Burnet,[61] governor of New York and New Jersey, deemed it an object of great magnitude to obtain the command of Lake Ontario, and, in pursuance of this plan, he had, in 1722, erected a trading-house at Oswego, in the country of the Senecas, which soon became of considerable importance. After ineffectual remonstrances, both in America and in Europe, against the re-establishment of Niagara Fort, Governor Burnet, to countervail as much as possible its effects, erected at his own expense a fort at Oswego."--Marshall's _Life of Washington_, vol. iv., p. 287.]
[Footnote 43: "The preparations for General Shirley's expedition against Niagara were not only deficient, but shamefully slow, though it was well known that even the possibility of his success must in a great measure depend upon his setting out early in the year, as will appear to any person who considers the situation of our fort at Oswego, this being the only way by which he could proceed to Niagara. Oswego lies on the southeast side of Lake Ontario, near 300 miles almost due west from Albany, in New York. The way to it from thence, though long and tedious, is the more convenient, as the far greater part of it admits of water-carriage by the Mohawk River, Wood's Creek, Lake Oneida, and the River Onondaga, which, after a course of twenty or thirty miles, unites with the River Seneca, and their united streams run into the Lake Ontario at the place where Oswego Fort is situated."--Smollett, vol. iii., p. 458.]
[Footnote 44: "Though repeated advice had been received that the French had there at least 1000 men at their Fort of Frontenac, on the same lake; and, what was still worse, the new forts (that of Ontario, and a new fort bearing the same name as the old, Oswego) were not yet completed, but left to be finished by the hard labor of Colonel Mercer and his little garrison, with the addition of this melancholy circumstance, that if besieged during the winter, it would not be possible for his friends to come to his assistance."--Smollett's _England_, iii. p. 461.]