They advanced northward on Lake George, July 5, 1758, in a grand flotilla of over a thousand boats, with two floating castles, the procession brilliant with rich uniforms and waving banners, and the music from its many bands echoing from the enclosing hills. Fenimore Cooper, in _Satanstoe_, gives a vivid description of this pageant. Passing beyond the Narrows, Abercrombie, on a Sunday morning, landed upon the fertile Sabbath Day Point to refresh his men before making the attack, thus naming it. Among them was Major Rogers, the Ranger, and in front could be seen the steep and rugged cliff of Rogers' Slide, named after him, its face a comparatively smooth inclined plane of naked rock, rising four hundred feet. The tale, as Rogers told it, was, that the previous winter, fleeing from the Indians, he practiced upon them a ruse, making them believe he had actually slid down this rock to the frozen surface of the lake. He was on snowshoes, the savages following, and ran out to the edge of the precipice, casting down his knapsack and provision-bag. Then turning around and wearing his snowshoes backward, he went to a neighboring ravine, and making his way safely down, fled over the ice to the head of the lake. The Indians saw the double set of shoe-marks in the snow, and concluded two men had jumped down rather than be captured. They saw Rogers going off over the ice, and believing he had safely slid down the face of the cliff, regarded him as specially protected by the Great Spirit and abandoned the pursuit. Thus has his name clung to the remarkable rock, though he was said to be a great braggart, and there were people who suggested that he ought to have been a leading member of the "Ananias Club." Beyond the slide, at the foot of the lake, is the low-lying Prisoners' Island, where the British kept the captives they took, and nearby Howe's Landing, where the army landed to attack Fort Carillon.