The Battle of the Thousand Islands was an engagement fought on 16–24 August 1760, in the upper St. Lawrence River, among the Thousand Islands, along the present day Canada–United States border, by British and French forces during the closing phases of the Seven Years' War, as it is called in Canada and Europe, or the French and Indian War as it is referred to in the United States. The engagement took place at Fort Lévis (about one mile (1.6 km) downstream from the modern Ogdensburg–Prescott International Bridge), Pointe au Baril (present-day Maitland, Ontario), and the surrounding waters and islands during the Montreal Campaign. The small French garrison at Fort Lévis held the much larger British army at bay for over a week, managing to sink two British warships and to cripple a third. Their resistance delayed the British advance to Montreal from the west. Background and forces By August 1760, the French were building Fort Lévis at Île Royale (present-day Chimney Island New York) in the St. Lawrence River. Captain Pierre Pouchot was assigned its defense. Pouchot had been taken prisoner after the siege of Fort Niagara, but he was later released in a prisoner exchange. Chevalier de Lévis' original design for the fort called for stone walls, 200 guns and some 2,500 troops. What Pouchot had was a small fort with wooden stockades, five cannon and 200 soldiers. Also under Pouchot's command were the corvettes l'Outaouaise and l'Iroquoise, crewed by 200 sailors and voyageurs. l'Iroquoise, under command of Commodore René Hypolite Pépin dit La Force, was armed with ten 12-pound cannon and swivel guns . l'Outaouaise, commanded by Captain Pierre Boucher de LaBroquerie carried ten 12-pounders, one 18-pound gun and swivel guns. After the fall of Quebec in the 1759 Battle of the Plains of Abraham, British Commander-in-Chief General Jeffery Amherst prepared to launch a three-pronged attack to take Montreal. Columns were to advance along the Saint Lawrence River from Quebec to the northeast, up the Richelieu River from Lake Champlain to the south, and from Oswego on Lake Ontario to the west. The latter force, which Amherst led personally, numbered some 10,000 men and 100 siege guns. Soon after his arrival to Île Royal, Pouchot ordered abandonment of the nearby mission Fort de La Présentation and the shipyard and stockades at Pointe au Baril to consolidate his resources at the more defendable Fort Lévis. La Force had run