_. Surgeon Williams
gives the English loss as two hundred and sixteen killed, and ninety-six
wounded. Pomeroy thinks that the French lost four or five hundred.
Johnson places their loss at four hundred.]

Johnson did not follow up his success. He says that his men were tired.
Yet five hundred of them had stood still all day, and boats enough for
their transportation were lying on the beach. Ten miles down the lake, a
path led over a gorge of the mountains to South Bay, where Dieskau had
left his canoes and provisions. It needed but a few hours to reach and
destroy them; but no such attempt was made. Nor, till a week after, did
Johnson send out scouts to learn the strength of the enemy at
Ticonderoga. Lyman strongly urged him to make an effort to seize that
important pass; but Johnson thought only of holding his own position. "I
think," he wrote, "we may expect very shortly a more formidable attack."
He made a solid breastwork to defend his camp; and as reinforcements
arrived, set them at building a fort on a rising ground by the lake. It
is true that just after the battle he was deficient in stores, and had
not bateaux enough to move his whole force. It is true, also, that he
was wounded, and that he was too jealous of Lyman to delegate the
command to him; and so the days passed till, within a fortnight, his
nimble enemy were entrenched at Ticonderoga in force enough to defy him.

The Crown Point expedition was a failure disguised under an incidental
success. The northern provinces, especially Massachusetts and
Connecticut, did what they could to forward it, and after the battle
sent a herd of raw recruits to the scene of action. Shirley wrote to
Johnson from Oswego; declared that his reasons for not advancing were
insufficient, and urged him to push for Ticonderoga at once. Johnson
replied that he had not wagons enough, and that his troops were
ill-clothed, ill-fed, discontented, insubordinate and sickly. He
complained that discipline was out of the question, because the officers
were chosen by popular election; that many of them were no better than
the men, unfit for command, and like so many "heads of a mob."[317] The
reinforcements began to come in, till, in October there were thirty-six
hundred men in the camp; and as most of them wore summer clothing and
had but one thin domestic blanket, they were half frozen in the chill
autumn nights.

[Footnote 317: _Shirley to Johnson, 19 Sept. 1755. Ibid., 24 Sept. 1755.