You've made it to British Landing — the far side of the island, right about the halfway mark of the loop, and a good place to catch your breath. There's a nature center here, and restrooms, and usually something cold to drink. It looks like the most peaceful spot in the world: a quiet beach, some trees, water lapping. This calm little shoreline is where two different armies came to take this island, and the name is a spoiler for how the first one went.
Roll back to that July morning in eighteen twelve. This beach is where the British came ashore in the dark. A force of British soldiers, a couple hundred voyageurs, and around four hundred Native allies landed right here, quietly, in the middle of the night — because the war was days old and the American fort on the other side of the island still had no idea. From here they marched across the island and hauled a cannon up onto the high ground above the fort, and by dawn it was over without a shot. The landing was so unopposed that, the
story goes, they borrowed an ox from a local farmer to help drag the cannon up the hill — and that farmer, who also had no clue a war had started, spent years afterward grumbling that the British marched off with his island and never gave him his ox back.
That's the easy one. Now the hard one. Two years later, in eighteen fourteen, the Americans came back to take the island home — and they landed
