www.vtarchaeology.org/wp-content/uploads/v1_ch7_reduced.pdf

From the goings-on between the newly minted USA and the Brits in early 1777:
The British advance guard entered Fort Ticonderoga and then charged across the bridge to the Vermont shore. Just four Americans had been left behind at Mount Independence, in the Horseshoe Battery overlooking the bridge. and they had orders to fire a cannon upon the British when they started across. Had they obeyed their instructions, the outcome might have been truly heroic. However, the American soldiers had broken into some of the supplies abandoned by their fleeing comrades, and as a British officer later reported, "we found them dead drunk by a cask of Madeira"


(Ticonderoga, NY and Mt. Independence, VT are opposite each other at the southern end of Lake Champlain. The lake is very narrow at that point and both forts were connected by a floating bridge, now gone.)