Death or Victory: The Battle for Quebec and the Birth of Empire
Death or Victory: The Battle for Quebec and the Birth of Empire
Dan Snow
An epic history of the battle of Quebec, the death of Wolfe and the beginnings of Britain’s empire in North America. Military history at its best.Perched on top of a tall promontory, surrounded on three sides by the treacherous St Lawrence River, Quebec – in 1759 France's capital city in Canada – forms an almost impregnable natural fortress. That year, with the Seven Years War raging around the globe, a force of 49 ships and nearly 9,000 men commanded by the irascible General James Wolfe, navigated the river, scaled the cliffs and laid siege to the town in an audacious attempt to expel the French from North America for ever.In this magisterial book which ties in to the 250th anniversary of the battle, Dan Snow tells the story of this famous campaign which was to have far-reaching consequences for Britain's rise to global hegemony, and the world at large. Snow brilliantly sets the battle within its global context and tells a gripping tale of brutal war quite unlike those fought in Europe, where terrain, weather and native Indian tribes were as fearsome as any enemy. 'I never served so disagreeable campaign as this,' grumbled one British commander, 'it is war of the worst shape.'1759 was, without question, a year in which the decisions of men changed the world for ever. Based on original research, and told from all perspectives, this is history – military, political, human – on an epic scale.
Death or Victory
THE BATTLE OF QUEBEC AND THE BIRTH OF EMPIRE
DAN SNOW
To Mum and Dad
Table of Contents
Cover Page (#ue68cc0cd-76ef-53a6-bdea-deaf60a4deb9)
Title Page (#u88ab8719-1920-5f81-aa68-5f80c663f9fe)
Dedication (#u90f995d5-76a4-513c-836d-1a88f5e6daab)
Maps (#u1e17a193-203c-50b0-827e-c176594028f7)
Author’s Note (#u216d60c3-900e-5a73-b2cd-633755246277)
Prologue (#ua3b1500b-2c90-5006-b2df-3d45c2954b47)
One (#u6f0ccd55-66f0-5ea4-ac97-e82d6a45beaa)
Two (#u7e0a494b-7289-575b-b239-ea4b9edaa794)
Three (#u6b4a6f27-2e3c-5f46-a630-9b0dd71d1e25)
Four (#uff98e416-d2b6-5038-a54d-63ef0cf8b68f)
Five (#u275b558d-e5d9-5581-902d-d4f518c49f1e)
Six (#u8252e331-7aec-5e89-b48d-246daaf2918b)
Seven (#u4a96c40e-11b1-51a3-8aa6-a606b9e29bb8)
Eight (#uf05fa34f-f805-57d6-b346-e17ce541e6ba)
Nine (#u686e6901-282e-56c8-aaeb-0e75b7fa6b66)
Ten (#u3dff4a79-ca2c-5bf7-8c2d-75b91dd6ba1c)
Eleven (#uf8598237-fc2e-58f8-84a5-d9db8221b1a7)
Twelve (#uca84f04e-1319-5844-9013-e08a0f8dcd57)
Thirteen (#u327aa636-9fab-54ed-a406-d0f1e26b8b20)
Fourteen (#u29dd039d-712b-5e6c-9b57-120110136177)
Fifteen (#u780a69a5-4b24-5412-bc9f-f0cc77793498)
Epilogue (#uf0e7ce1f-78c3-5bc9-bd50-68e744147f9d)
Bibliography (#uc8af8a1b-374e-5a91-ab12-3a3e166c8507)
Notes (#u9da0fae5-852a-546a-b1f8-f904e7a3cd1b)
Index (#u1fd2dec9-83cd-5ac3-ba54-927cf43768fe)
Copyright (#uc726b85b-b73a-50bf-8299-7544e52d5734)
About the Publisher (#uf18b8694-5f12-5186-8898-39f8c0b243dc)
AUTHOR’S NOTE (#ulink_0ee045ae-ff8a-505f-a15d-aa46fdaa6060)
‘One of the great battles of the world.’
FIELD MARSHAL MONTGOMERY
BATTLES CAN CHANGE the course of history. The fighting in North America that culminated with the battle James Wolfe fought outside the walls of Quebec on 13 September 1759 altered the world in a dramatic and lasting way. The dominance of the Anglo-Saxon model with its ideas of government, manners, trade, and finance was built on the British victory in what was truly a world war. Appropriately, I wrote this book during the course of a busy year spent all over the world. In Auckland, New Zealand, I wrote for a few hours every day and then took a fast stroll down to the glistening waters of the Hauraki Gulf to restore my energy. Every time I passed Wolfe Street I smiled; the shabby city street seemed to have little to do with the lanky, chinless, volatile commander of the British army at Quebec. It was, however, a powerful reminder of the enduring significance of the Seven Years War. Those events in the mosquito-ridden woods of New England and Canada, on the foaming seas off Western Europe, and in the shadow of the grand architecture of Quebec still matter. There are Wolfe Streets in cities in every corner of the world: Cape Town, Canberra, Baltimore, Houston, London, Liverpool, and Little Rock, Arkansas. On reflection it is not surprising that Auckland, a city that sprang into life during this time of Anglo-Saxon cultural supremacy, should have a reference, however small, to a man who helped to bring that supremacy about.
The raising of the Union Flag over Quebec and the destruction of French power in North America were far more significant for world history than the subsequent American Revolution. The revolution was merely a squabble for control over the fruits of the British victory over France and her Native allies. At the end of the Seven Years War a continent rich in farmland, minerals, and raw materials fell into the lap of the Anglo-Americans. In time, this continent would become the engine of an international system based on the rule of law, commercialism, representative institutions, and the English language. In the twentieth century North America would play the key part in defending that system as it was challenged by militarism, fascism, and communism. It was the armourer, paymaster, granary, and provider of millions of troops to defend the world order that had been born as a result of the Seven Years War.
Britain defeated France in the Seven Years War because she was able to assemble a crushing advantage in men and ships, paid for by an unprecedented level of government borrowing. By the mid-eighteenth century the French crown was unable to mobilize the country’s superior wealth or manpower nearly as effectively as its smaller neighbour, Britain. The underfunded French navy was swept from the seas by a supremely professional British Royal Navy, while its army remained bogged down in a European war against enemies kept in the field by British loans. British victory owed much to favourable credit ratings. Yet the muskets still needed firing, the ships of the line still needed expert handling, the armies and raids still needed leadership, and the men who trudged along the frontiers of empire still needed to bear the heavy burden of campaigning, fighting, and surviving. The campaign and battle at Quebec in 1759 is a reminder that it was also a victory of flesh, blood, and grit. Indeed, the battle fought on the Plains of Abraham outside Quebec, brief though it was, demonstrates that individuals and the choices they make matter hugely even in vast conflicts. British financial might may have projected Wolfe and his army deep into enemy territory and kept them fed and supplied but the capture of Quebec was not bound to follow.
A battle is celebrated, remembered, and studied not just because it is a decisive event, but because it looks and sounds like one. We cannot help but to be fascinated by its violent crescendos, its sounds, smells, and extremes of emotion, and the flight of one side or another. The mass of British subjects, at the time and since, could not understand or even picture a bond market and were unlikely to name streets after one, but battles can fill imaginations. To English-speaking peoples the victory at Quebec came to be seen as a milepost that marked their rise to global hegemony. Quebec symbolized, and still does, the seismic geo-political shift that occurred in the middle of the eighteenth century. A shift that changed the world for ever.
In attempting to tell the story of that summer in 1759 I have been assisted by friends, colleagues, and family in at least four countries. The book would not have existed were it not for my agent, Caroline Dawnay, and my auntie, Margaret MacMillan, a historian who I can only dream of emulating. Another historian I have always respected and to whom I now owe a debt of gratitude is Professor Robert Bothwell, an expert editor who helped me to avoid terrible mistakes and improve the book in no small measure. Arabella Pike at HarperCollins provided the unflagging support that one would expect from the latest in a line of martial types. It was a privilege to be allowed to renew my partnership with Martin Redfern when Arabella left on maternity leave. Carol Anderson was stunningly efficient. Sarah Hopper was her usual brilliant self on the pictures and Sophie Goulden had the patience of a rock as she steered the project home.
Museums and libraries all over the world have been unstintingly generous with their time and advice. Dorian Hayes at the British Library was a great source of suggestions. Valerie Adams at the Public Record Office in Belfast could not have been more helpful. Pieter Van der Merwe at the National Maritime Museum was very good to give up a morning to fire volley after volley of brilliant, if totally unrelated facts and ideas at me. Richard Kemp at the Somerset Military Museum went so far beyond the call of duty that I was embarrassed. Lizzy Shipton at the Rifles Museum, Salisbury, was a great help and Alan Readman, the assistant country archivist, West Sussex, Nora Hague at the McCord Museum, Montreal, Odile Girard at the Library and Archives Canada, and the team at Harvard all made research that little bit easier.
I was blessed with researchers, translators, and givers of advice. The book would not have been written without Gwyneth MacMillan in Quebec. She was efficient, intelligent, generous, and cheerful. Eddie Kolla in Paris was enormously helpful. Michael Manulak was very helpful in the opening stages. My sister, Rebecca Snow, is an expert in her own right and Roger Nixon and David Mendel were stalwarts; the latter walked me around Quebec bringing the eighteenth century alive on every street. Glen Steppler, Laurence Westgaph and Erica Charters were very good to me while Isabelle Pila and Brigitte Sawyer were vital translators.
Shuna and Katie Snow encouraged me and made me laugh through the process. My parents, Peter Snow and Ann MacMillan, were as unfailingly supportive as they have been of all my projects through the years. They read every word and, more importantly, they have always told me I could do it.
PROLOGUE (#ulink_647c0497-e811-5ebe-91ae-f0211c09de93)
AN HOUR BEFORE SUNRISE the hated drummers marched along the rows of tents. Their sticks beat the ‘General’, driving a clear message into the sleeping brains of the men. Even those befuddled by ‘screech’, cheap rum brewed by boiling the sediment from molasses barrels, were dragged from their slumbers. Men clambered over their drowsy comrades and emerged into the open air. Their feet squelched in the urine-soaked ground, for soldiers invariably eased themselves at the entrance to their tents or even inside where they slept. For an hour a mass of figures in the semi-darkness jostled and cursed. But as the light grew so did their regularity. By the time the drummers beat the ‘Assembly’ at 0500 hours the tents had been struck, kit packed, weapons retrieved and the men bundled onto the assembly area to line up by company and regiment, ready for inspection, colours unfurled, sharp new flints securely fastened in the jaws of their muskets. Companies of between 50 and 100 men were commanded by a captain who knew every one of them by name. When he was happy that his men were properly attired, their weapons clean and thirty-six rounds in their cartridge cases he reported to the major or lieutenant colonel and soon the whole force was ready to march.
Groups of light infantrymen and rangers set off first. The British force had been in the heart of Canada for less than a week and they had been given a shocking immersion into the world of insurgency, sniping, ambush and Native American warfare. Bodies of soldiers that strayed from the riverbank were found horribly killed and mutilated, their scalps taken as trophies by Native Americans and the Canadians who had learnt their way of war from them. Civilians in this populous part of Canada were trapped in between. Their farmhouses ransacked, their provisions confiscated by hungry warriors. That very morning a patrol of British light troops had searched one house and finding no one set it on fire. A British officer reported that ‘they were alarmed with bitter shrieks and cries of women and children’. They had, apparently, ‘foolishly concealed themselves among some lumber in a cellar’. British troops ‘very humanely exerted themselves for the relief of those miserable wretches, but their best endeavours were ineffectual…these unhappy people perished in the flames’. The officer wrote in his diary that ‘Such alas! are the direful effects of war.’
By the end of the summer an incident like this would barely raise a comment as atrocity fed atrocity and the campaign became a nightmare of terror, retribution, and disease.
This was the first serious push away from the beaches where the British had landed just days before. Major General James Wolfe, their commander, had ordered this force to move west, away from the comforting presence of the fleet anchored in the river, to tighten the noose around Quebec, a fortress said to be impregnable, capital of the vast French North American empire. They were to seize a prominent piece of ground called Point Lévis from where British guns could fire across the river into Quebec. The soldiers knew the French would not let this probing force march with impunity. The terrain favoured the defence with thick woodland and a steep rise overlooking the track. One British officer described the route as ‘no regular road’ but ‘only a serpentine path with trees and under-wood on every side of us’.
Rangers led the column. They looked more like Native Americans than Christian subjects of King George with tomahawks at their waists, moccasins and powder horns, while a few even carried scalps of fallen enemies hanging from their belts. They were nearly all Americans recruited from the frontiers and despite their appearance and their unruly reputation (the French dubbed them ‘the English savages’) their skill in this kind of conflict meant that they could command twice the pay of red-coated regular infantrymen. Some carried the long, accurate rifle but most thought that the Brown Bess musket, possibly with a few inches sawed off the end to make it lighter, was a better weapon for close quarters bush fighting. It was quicker to reload and capable of firing buckshot. Alongside them was a new brand of British regular, the light infantryman. They had been introduced by innovative officers to try to improve the British army’s woeful performance in the wilderness fighting of North America. They were picked men who had been selected for having a sharp mind, an ability to improvise and a true aim. Major General Wolfe had written careful instructions. The light troops were to ‘post detachments in all the suspected places on the road to prevent the columns from being fired at, from behind trees, by rascals who dare not show themselves’. As the column marched past the light troops would then fall in as the rear guard.
They had not advanced far before the woods echoed to the bangs of muskets and rifles, the howls of wounded and the shriek of the Native Americans, allies of the French.
The men of the North American tribes were bred as warriors. Martial prowess was highly prized and even in times of peace young men picked fights with neighbouring groups in order to win acclaim. Prisoners, in Native cultures, could replace relatives who had fallen in battle or could be tortured expertly so that their pain assuaged that of the family of a fallen brave. In the two centuries since Europeans had introduced gunpowder into North America the Native Americans had mastered the musket and rifle and men had honed their marksmanship for hunting as well as war. At close quarters they were just as skilled with tomahawk or knife. Their terrible reputation for savagery, together with expert bushcraft, exotic tattoos, and haunting war cries, had all conspired to send many British units into total panic at even the prospect of an encounter. The Canadians of European descent were no less fearsome. Canada had only just survived in the face of an unforgiving climate and constant hostility from some tribes. Her young men had adapted to the North American way of war and to many outsiders they were indistinguishable from the Native warriors. As the British force pushed along the track the biggest challenge was overcoming the massive psychological inferiority that years of ambush, slaughter, and defeat had bred in the men. The redcoats were edgy. One officer reported an unfortunate ‘friendly fire’ incident in which a light infantryman shot one of his corporals, and the wounded man had to be carried on ‘a blanket with skewers to two poles’. It took six men to carry the casualty and they were ‘relieved every quarter of an hour’.
Wolfe would report to his political masters in London that the force had ‘two or three skirmishes’ but the evidence from those who actually sweated up to Point Lévis, clutching their muskets and scanning the unfamiliar woodland for any movement, suggests that it was not as casual as Wolfe made it sound.
A Highlander who acted as his regiment’s bard gives a graphic description in a Gaelic song: ‘the marshalling was under Beaumont/ those ranks were handsome/ sent up to Pointe Levis/ to test the warriors;/ Indians and Frenchmen/ were very close to us in the bushes/ wrecking the heads/ and the legs that belonged to us!’
As the soldiers skirted the shore many caught their first horrifying glimpses of this new kind of war. One young Scotsman was horrified at the sight of several British corpses, ‘all scalped and mangled in a shocking manner’. He wrote that, ‘no human creature but an Indian could be guilty of such inhuman cruelty,’ but changed his journal to read, ‘no human creature but an Indian or Canadian could be guilty of such inhumanity as to insult a dead body’.
His men were uncowed though, if the Gaelic war song is to be believed: ‘when we were fully drawn up/ in line of battle/ and watching them/ to see if they would wait and give us satisfaction/ they sprayed fire into our faces/ but they got it back in return;/ they took fright/ when they recognised us’.
The hit and run tactics of the Canadians and Native Americans could slow the British advance but not stop it. In a series of mini engagements, the light infantry and the rangers edged forward towards Point Lévis. One sergeant called it a ‘sharp skirmish of near two hours’ and said ‘we sustained a considerable loss of killed and wounded’.
An officer wrote that in the end the French forces could not ‘withstand our fire and numbers’ and put the casualty figure at ‘thirty killed and wounded’.
The fighting had been intense enough to make their commander think about turning back.
As the exhausted men fought their way onto the cleared ground around Point Lévis they gazed across the St Lawrence River in awe. There, around half a mile away, was Quebec. It occupied one of the most powerful natural positions of any town or city in the world. Fine buildings with tall sloping roofs and churches with high spires sat above cliffs which soared out of the St Lawrence. The walls atop the cliffs bristled with cannon and beyond the city a great army was camped along the shoreline. Those with telescopes scanned its defences knowing that they could very well be asked to storm its walls. One was dismayed by what he saw: ‘their situation appears to be very strong by nature, and…they are very numerous’. Even from this far away he could pick out lines of trenches and redoubts and, also, ‘throughout their camp there are a continued chain of houses, the windows of which are logged up for the service of musketry’.
It had been a bloody morning. The men who now gazed on Quebec and its defenders realized that it was simply a prologue. Before the waters of the mighty river froze in winter the British force would have to capture Quebec or face an ignominious retreat that could derail the entire British war effort not just in North America but in distant Europe too. Defeat was not an option, yet the soldiers staring out at Quebec knew that they could well pay a terrible price for victory.
ONE (#ulink_4ae8fe66-ccee-50ed-9602-26f71bab80db)
Assault on New France
THERE WERE SHIPS in the St Lawrence. Not an armada, but a squadron powerful enough to dominate the river. Around ten in all, seven of them were obviously warships; their hulls were chequered with gun ports. The largest was a fine man of war with eighty guns, a match for any craft afloat. The air was heavy with fog. The vessels drifted in and out of banks of cloud and cohesion was maintained by the largest ship firing one of its cannon at regular intervals. Sharpeyed officers of the watch saw an eruption of white smoke with a momentary stab of fire at its centre, seconds later came the deep sound of the explosion, echoing back off the banks of the river as the shorelines slowly converged.
The river had grown narrower. After days of sailing up the Gulf of St Lawrence where the land was barely visible on either side, the crews could now see clearly either shore. On the north side it was spectacular: high, near vertical slopes, covered with spruce trees, broken only by the occasional section of cliff, damp with water that gave them a bright sheen during rare bursts of sunshine. On the south side, only twenty-two miles away, the coastline was flatter but beyond it, another mountain range reminded the crews of the vast, wild nature of the country.
There was a large island, separated from the south shore by a gap of just over three miles. With a good natural harbour the Île du Bic had, for centuries, been an easily defensible haven for ships on the passage up or down the river and home to a small community of priests and pilots. Here the largest ship broke out a large plain white flag, or ensign, at its mizzen. It was the ‘Bourbon Banner’, symbol of the Bourbon kings of France. On the shore the inhabitants, who had been keenly examining the ships for clues as to their nationality, broke out into ‘the greatest rejoicing imaginable’.
This was the gateway to Canada, the jewel in the crown of New France, a vast French empire that stretched from the North Atlantic to the Rocky Mountains and down to New Orleans at the mouth of the Mississippi. But its great size was matched by its vulnerability and especially now that France was at war. Her ancient rivalry with England, inherited in 1707 by the newly created Britain, had been revived at the end of the seventeenth century and they had fought a series of wars, each greater than the last, separated by periods of unconvincing peace. No longer did Englishmen strive to carve out dynastic empires in France itself; instead, the fighting surged across the almost limitless horizons of newly discovered continents, dragging in the settlers of the adolescent colonial empires. For four years New France had been fighting the British whose colonies in North America clung to the Atlantic Ocean from Massachusetts down to Georgia. At the beginning of each campaigning season when the ice melted in the St Lawrence River, the artery of Canada, the settlers, or habitants, waited nervously to see what help France would send to her North American possessions. This year, it seemed, France had been generous in her aid. The people of Bic rushed into canoes and paddled out to greet the ships, which they assumed were carrying the food, gunpowder, soldiers, and gold which New France so desperately needed to hold back the British and their American colonial allies.
The enthusiastic Canadians scrambled up the towering sides of the hulls on slippery, shallow steps that formed a vertical ladder. But as soon as they reached the deck, their euphoria was instantly extinguished. Rather than receiving a warm welcome from fellow subjects of the Most Christian King, Louis XV of France, they found themselves with British oak beneath their feet, and the muskets and cold steel of red-coated marines pointed at their bellies. The ships were British. It was 23 May 1759: the war had arrived in the heart of the French empire. This Royal Naval squadron under the command of Rear Admiral of the Red, Philip Durell, had been given the task of blockading Canada; to cut it off from any help that France might send, and hasten its capitulation.
On shore the joy of the habitants turned to confusion as they waited for the canoes to return, then to ‘consternation, rage and grief’ as they saw ‘the White colours struck, and the British flags, hoisted in their place’. Apparently, a priest who had been avidly watching the proceedings with a telescope clamped to his eye, ‘dropped down and instantly expired’.
With an age-old ruse de guerre Durell had lured experienced Canadian pilots on board, men he desperately needed to complete his mission.
The squabbles of European monarchs had poisoned relations between their colonies in the Americas since those continents had been discovered 250 years before. The ambitions of Louis XIV in Germany, the Low Countries, and Spain had pushed England into armed opposition. Fighting had spread from Western Europe to the wildernesses of the Carolinas or northern New Hampshire as it had to West Africa and Asia. But the current conflict was different. Long the victims of Europe’s wars, the colonies now became their instigators. As their size, populations, and economies had all swelled they developed their own ambitions, interests, and points of friction with the colonies of other powers. While Europe would never lose its primacy in policymakers’ minds, by the mid-eighteenth century French and British politicians found themselves increasingly impelled by colonial considerations. In the late 1740s ambitious British colonials had crossed the Allegheny Mountains and started trading with the Native American inhabitants of the Ohio valley. The British colonies had always claimed the entire continent as far as the Pacific but the barrier of the Alleghenies and the hostility of the Native Americans beyond them had prevented them from ever making these claims a reality. Now these adventurers hoped to sell vast swathes of this fertile land to migrants from the colonies, who would then provide a market for manufactured goods that they would supply. Little attention was paid to French assertions of sovereignty in the area, and none at all to those of the Native Americans.
The French regarded these encroachments as an unacceptable violation of the strategic corridor that linked Canada, along the St Lawrence, to Louisiana, a colony that was growing along the length of the Mississippi. New France moved troops into the Ohio valley and started building a chain of forts. This represented a threat not only to the individual British colonies, who believed it their destiny to expand west to the Pacific, but also to British North America as a whole which faced being surrounded by an unbroken ring of French forts from the Gulf of Mexico to the St Lawrence River. Even the British Prime Minister, Thomas Pelham Holles, Duke of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Newcastle-under-Lyme, probably the least belligerent man in George II’s government and no friend to rascally marauders on the fringes of empire, believed that this was intolerable. ‘No war,’ he wrote to the British ambassador at Versailles, ‘could be worse than the suffering of such insults.’ Britain would lose its entire position in America if her colonies were confined to the narrow coastal strip of the eastern seaboard. ‘That,’ he wrote emphatically, ‘is what we must not, we will not, suffer.’
With only a handful of British regular troops in North America it was left to the colonies to counter the French threat. Virginia took up the challenge and in true British style wrote a strongly worded letter to the French commander in the Ohio valley. It was delivered by eight men. Their leader was in his early twenties, a tall, hardy, rather conservative officer in the Virginia militia who owed his appointment to his connections to Lord Fairfax of Cameron, one of Virginia’s leading landowners. His name was George Washington. Given his later titanic reputation it is perhaps surprising that he stumbled rather than strode onto history’s stage. There was little sign of future greatness, indeed he was lucky to survive. He delivered his letter but the French commander was contemptuous. The following year Washington led a motley force over the mountains, planning to use gunpowder and steel where ink had failed. The first shots of the Seven Years War were fired in a glen near present-day Uniontown in Fayette County, Pennsylvania. In an action that did him no credit, on 28 May 1754, Washington ambushed a small force of French troops who were coming to warn him away from French land. Ensign Joseph Coulon de Villiers de Jumonville and nine of his men were killed. The French responded quickly, defeated Washington, sending him limping back across the Alleghenies. His actions had made war inevitable. He and his men were fortunate that they did not spend the whole of it as prisoners.
The fighting triggered the sending of reinforcements to North America by both the British and the French. Britain moved first by lunging into the Ohio country, trying to capture Fort Duquesne at the Forks of the Ohio River. A force under General Braddock was cobbled together from different units and sent out from Britain. It was raw, unused to American conditions and its men were utterly terrified of the Native Americans. Braddock made some attempt to adapt to local conditions but was unwilling to listen to colonial advice and as far as Native Americans were concerned, he told Benjamin Franklin that ‘it is impossible that [they] should make any impression’ on his disciplined troops.
Braddock’s men wilted as they hacked their way through thick forest, travelling between three and eight miles a day. The supply train collapsed as wagons broke up on the brutal road and horses dropped dead. Dysentery tore through the ranks. It was hugely impressive that the expedition got as far as it did. On 9 July 1755, the British force of approximately fifteen hundred men crossed the Monongahela River, nine miles short of the French Fort Duquesne. Their reward for such grit was blundering straight into a terrible ambush by 108 Canadian colonial troops, 146 militiamen, and 600 Native Americans. Braddock’s force was utterly routed. The French poured fire into the thickly packed column, while sharpshooters picked off the officers. Without leadership, the men simply herded together like terrified animals desperately seeking a false sense of security in numbers. The column eventually broke and flooded back along the road they had made. Native Americans swooped down on the wounded, killing many, saving others to torture later, and claiming others as prisoners to induct into their tribes and replace fallen family members. Braddock was mortally wounded, Washington was hurt and had several horses shot from under him. Two-thirds of the British force were killed or captured. The French suffered less than fifty dead and injured. Of the 150 men in the colonial Virginia Regiment 120 became casualties. Monongahela ranks with the battle of Isandlwana of the Anglo-Zulu War and the massacre of the British army between Kabul and Jalalabad during the First Anglo-Afghan War as an epic tragedy in the military history of the British Empire. The French captured money, supplies, and artillery but the psychological consequences of the defeat were the most serious. It shook the confidence of the British army in North America for years to come and created a myth of the Native American as a superhuman savage.
The war in North America continued to go badly. In Europe the news was scarcely better. The British were forced to shoot one of their admirals, John Byng, on his own quarterdeck to, in Voltaire’s memorable words, ‘encourage the others’. A court martial determined that Byng had been insufficiently aggressive when he withdrew his fleet after an indecisive battle off Minorca, allowing a French force to capture the vital island. On the Continent Britain’s woes were added to not by an absence of aggression but by a surfeit. Britain’s ally, Frederick II of Prussia, ignited a general war by invading Saxony, thus triggering a series of alliances that united Russia, Austria, and France against him, all three determined to punish Prus-sia’s temerity with annihilation. King George II’s hereditary possession in Germany, his beloved Electorate of Hanover, was rapidly overrun by French troops.
Britain’s fortunes did slowly improve from this nadir. French colonies were picked off in West Africa and the Caribbean. The French army was driven out of Hanover and then held at bay by an allied army paid for by London but commanded by a Prussian, Frederick’s brother-in-law, Ferdinand of Brunswick. Frederick won a series of stunning victories that would earn him the epithet ‘the Great’ but even so Prussia was never far from dismemberment. There was unequivocally good news from India where Robert Clive routed the Nawab of Bengal and his French allies at the battle of Plassey in 1757. This battle turned the British East India Company’s zone of influence into an empire. Fighting moved to the Carnatic where British forces sought to wipe out French power as they had in Bengal. But in North America there were years of defeat. Regular troops were trounced as they struggled with unfamiliar terrain and enemies while the civilians of the frontier were murdered, tortured, or captured by war parties of Native Americans and Canadians. 1758 had finally seen some success when a British amphibious force had seized the French stronghold of Louisbourg perched on the rocky Atlantic coast of Cape Breton Island.
Everything suggested that 1759 would be the decisive year. Britain was to make a massive push for victory in North America. Austria and Russia seemed to have Frederick on the brink of defeat and France, frustrated by her lack of progress in Germany, was assembling an invasion force to cross the Channel and knock Britain out of the war. She would then regain those colonies lost on the battlefield at the negotiating table.
For Britain the year began in crisis. London’s financial community were terrified by the spectre of invasion. Everyone knew that Le Havre was awash with shipwrights, its harbour filling inexorably with shallow-draught invasion barges. Forty thousand soldiers had been moved to France’s north-west coast. Lord Lyttelton, an opposition politician, wrote from London that ‘we talk of nothing here but the French invasion; they are certainly making such preparations as have never before been made to invade this island since the Spanish Armada’.
Government bonds sold at the steepest discounts of the war. The national debt was larger than anyone could have imagined possible and any new taxes had little chance of getting through a House of Commons packed with country gentlemen who, while patriots, had no wish to fund a perpetual war for the benefit of London financiers, merchants, and American prospectors. The cost of the navy alone jumped from £3.3 million in 1758 to £5 million in 1759. In all the Duke of Newcastle would have to find £12 million in 1759, over half of which he would need to borrow and as the markets lost confidence in the progress of the war the cost of that borrowing crept up.
The campaigning season opened with defeats for Ferdinand in Germany. He was driven back to the borders of Hanover itself. Frederick suffered sharp setbacks and later in the year he was so badly beaten by the Russians and Austrians at Kunersdorf that he thought the war lost. In Britain, by the start of summer the Chancellor of the Exchequer had asked to resign, government stock had plunged, and Newcastle was thinking about suspending seamen’s wages. The Prime Minister wrote a memorandum in which he admitted that ‘we are engaged in expenses infinitely above our strength…expedition after expedition, campaign after campaign’. He suggested that Prussia should be warned that Britain might not be able to continue the war for another year.
Attempts were made to fortify strategic points in southern England. Chatham, Portsmouth, Dover, and Plymouth were given earthworks and batteries were erected along the coast. They were futile gestures. The country was stripped of regular troops. The commander in chief of the British army told his colleagues that only 10,000 men would be available to meet an invasion on the south coast. So many of Britain’s Royal Engineers had been sent to America there were only five qualified engineers left in the country.
The only other troops available were a half-assembled militia of amateur soldiers. In a clash with veteran French infantrymen there would be no doubt as to the result. In desperation the population clung to reassuring jingoism. A great favourite was ‘Rule, Britannia’, with words by James Thomson and music by Thomas Arne, a song which had become wildly popular during Charles Edward Stuart’s Jacobite uprising of 1745-6. Another hit at the time was ‘Great Britain For Ever’.
Defiance alone never repelled an invasion. Britain’s real defence was her fleet. But her politicians had left little margin for error. The First Lord of the Admiralty reported to a small de facto war cabinet in February that the majority of British battleships had been dispatched around the globe to poach French possessions. Forty-one were left in home waters. The French were thought to have forty-three, although some of these were in her southern ports in the Mediterranean. The number of French ships that were in a condition to get to sea, let alone last long in the Channel, would be far smaller but the Royal Navy was also weaker than its paper strength, lacking nearly ten thousand men; many of its capital ships were hardly able to weigh their anchors.
The government had taken a terrible gamble. Britain itself was at risk and yet men, ships, and treasure had been sent abroad. Vast resources were committed to the invasion of Canada, the most important operation yet undertaken in the war. Failure would place the North American colonies in danger, threaten the creditworthiness of the British government, and almost certainly destroy Newcastle’s administration. The fate of the expedition would be felt from the log cabins of the American frontier to the palaces of Whitehall and Versailles.
If Durell’s Royal Naval squadron in the St Lawrence could block French supplies to Canada the prospects for the British attack would be rosy indeed. But he also had another task, almost as important. The river was unknown to British seamen. With its reefs, currents, rocks, and other hazards it was Canada’s first and, many thought, strongest line of defence. Durell was charged with finding a route up the river. The French authorities had made desultory attempts to chart the river but the results were unimpressive and, it seems, at best only partially available to the British. For generations the French had relied on pilots, each expert in a small stretch of river. So important was their knowledge that one British officer discovered that ‘it is a rule with the inhabitants of Quebec not to let any pilots have the whole navigation of this river’.
Durell had tricked these men aboard by showing them the Bourbon Banner. It was a perfectly legitimate ruse according to the rules that governed eighteenth-century warfare, and it had brought these vital pilots straight to him.
Durell was typical of the fighting admirals of the mid-century navy. He was 52 years old and had been at sea since he was 14. Like so many naval officers he had joined a ship thanks to the patronage of a family member, his uncle Captain Thomas Durell of the Sea Horse, although rather more unusually he had joined as an ordinary seaman. Serving his time on the lowest rung of the Georgian navy had given him an unbeatable training in what it took for men to sail and fight a ship. He had spent the rest of his teenage years in North American waters and was made an officer at 24 and a captain by his early thirties. War had made him rich. In the maelstrom of battle naval officers could fight for something more tangible than honour: prizes. Naval officers were incentivized by the guarantee that they would receive a proportion of the value of any enemy ship captured. In the 1740s he had helped take two French merchantmen, returning from the East Indies packed with valuable goods. But wealth had not dampened his ambition; he had continued at sea and had fought in large fleet actions against the French in European waters until returning to North America for good in 1758.
Durell had had an awful winter. He had written to the Admiralty in London in March 1759 from the British naval base of Halifax in Nova Scotia telling them that ‘the winter has been the severest that has been known since the settling of the place’, vessels attempting to get up the coast ‘have met with ice eighteen or twenty leagues from the land, so were obliged to return, after having had some of their people froze to death, and other frost bitten to that degree, as to lose legs and arms’.
Durell had stationed one of his quickest, most manoeuvrable ships, the frigate Sutherland under Captain John Rous off Canso, to bring him news of the ice melting. Rous was also in his fifties and knew the waters off the coast of Newfoundland and the Gulf of St Lawrence as well as any Briton or American. He had been a New England privateer, preying on French merchantmen, before a commodore in the Royal Navy recruited this ‘brisk, gallant man’ for the King’s Service.
When planning his campaign Durell had decided not to risk taking his full squadron into the gulf to lie in wait for the enemy. He had spent years in these waters, time which included a vain search for the French in similar conditions in 1755, and reckoned that his chances of finding them at sea were small and the cost to his crews and ships from the cold too high. Far better, he decided, to wait for the ice to melt in Halifax, and then sail up the St Lawrence and intercept the French in the confined waters of the river.
But Durell had been unable to leave Halifax until 5 May, trapped by ice and contrary winds. By the time he had arrived at Bic he had found out that his gamble had failed. As one British officer on the ships wrote,
near the isle of Bic we took a small sloop…who gave us the disagreeable news of the arrival of many transports and some frigates from Old France, which they left early in March and were deeply loaded with provisions and warlike stores. Had we sailed at the time you so earnestly wished, we had most certainly intercepted them, as they were not more than 10 days before us.
This was a disaster; the bold attempt to sever the umbilical cord to France had failed and with it any prospect of an easy campaign of conquest. These French supplies would enable Canada to fight on and nothing short of a full military campaign would bring the colony to its knees. Another British officer wrote, ‘this, you may imagine was mortifying news to us’.
It was mortifying enough for the sailors on the ships, but Durell would have known that for one man in particular it would be the most unwelcome news imaginable. The man whose job it was to command the soldiers that would do the fighting once the fleet delivered them up the St Lawrence into the heart of Canada, whose army would attempt to bring about the ruin of New France, to kill, capture, or scatter its defenders and batter its strongholds into submission. For this man, it would be by far the greatest test of his short career but he had been confident of success, as long as the British ships could stop French supplies from reaching the Canadians. Now his plan had misfired before he had even entered the St Lawrence. This commander was Major General James Wolfe.
While Durell secured pilots and intelligence, James Wolfe had spent the spring chafing to follow him up the river. Wolfe was charged with threatening, and ideally capturing, the principal towns of Canada, particularly its capital, Quebec, perched on a plateau, protected by cliffs which plunged down to the St Lawrence. Quebec was a great prize that had eluded British soldiers for generations. On paper he had a considerable force but his chances were lessening by the day as the expedition suffered delay after delay. The campaign season in North America was short; the onset of winter put a stop to any military activity as the river froze and the temperatures plunged far below zero. Every minute counted.
Even as Wolfe and many of his senior officers had met in Portsmouth, in southern England in February 1759 there was already a sense of great urgency. Previous attacks on Canada had petered out as the gales and frosts of September and October had heralded the onset of the terrible winter. Surviving letters to these officers from the bureaucrats and politicians in London are laced with exhortations of speed. On 1 January the Admiralty Secretary had written to the port admiral at Portsmouth telling him ‘in the most pressing manner’ to get the ships ready for service in North America, ‘with all the expedition that is possible’.
Wolfe was in overall command of the army; Rear Admiral Charles Saunders would command the fleet, including Durell’s ships as soon as he arrived in North American waters. Saunders assured the government that ‘the least delay’ was unacceptable.
The red-coated soldiers who would do the bulk of the fighting were already in America, but Wolfe and Saunders were bringing civilian ships hired by the navy to act as transports to get the men and supplies up the St Lawrence. There were 20,000 tons of shipping in all, each ton costing 12s. 9d. and was ‘victualled’ or supplied with food for four months. Many of these ships came straight from the collier trade that brought the coal from north-east England down to London, a city which even by 1759 was insatiable in its appetite. Over Christmas officers were sent up the Thames to chase dawdling ships carrying powder and shot. The Admiralty demanded an account of the readiness of the transports ‘every other day’.
Accompanying these transports and protecting them from French interference, Saunders commanded an overwhelmingly powerful naval task force. The Royal Navy was the strongest on the planet. It outnumbered the French navy, enjoying an advantage in battleships or ‘ships of the line’ of approximately 120 to 55. But whereas Britain had naval commitments across all of the world’s oceans, France was concentrating her ships to launch an invasion of Britain. Despite this threat Saunders was given fourteen battleships to protect the convoy of troop ships across the Atlantic, supported by six smaller frigates, three bomb vessels, and three fireships. These would join Durell’s American squadron of ten ships of the line and four frigates which had wintered in North America. This vast concentration of naval firepower would then be the strongest single fleet in the world.
Portsmouth was booming. It was the crucible of Britain’s naval effort and was packed with sailors, many with spare cash from enlistment bounties and their share of the prize money awarded for capturing enemy ships. The navy was larger than it had ever been before, with unprecedented investment being poured into ships and shore facilities like the Haslar Hospital in Gosport, opened in 1753, with a capacity for 2,000 patients, four times greater than Guy’s and St Thomas’s in London, the next biggest in the country. For years to come Haslar would be the largest brick building in Europe. A visitor to Portsmouth in 1759 commented that, ‘The streets are not the cleanest, nor the smells most savoury; but the continuous resort of seamen &c makes it always full of people, who seem in a hurry.’
It was here that Wolfe was joined by his subordinate, Brigadier George Townshend, who recorded the event in his journal, ‘I embarked on the Neptune,the Admiral’s ship, on the 13th of February on board of which was also the General.’
On 15 February Saunders sent an advance party of fifteen warships, a mix of ships of the line and frigates, plus sixty-six transports to New York to round up the troops who had wintered in the American colonies and collect fresh supplies.
The same day he received a promotion. He was made Vice Admiral of the Blue, and the Neptune immediately raised a blue ensign.
The next day Saunders was able to ‘acquaint the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty that I am now working out between the Buoys, with the wind at East’.
Townshend confirmed the journey’s auspicious start, writing that ‘we had a fine wind down the channel’.
Given that the prevailing winds in the Channel are south-west it must have seemed like a happy omen for the Atlantic crossing that lay ahead.
It did not last. After hitting calms off Cornwall the weather turned rough. Although ships could make the eastern seaboard of America in around a month,
the large convoy was held up by the pace of the slowest vessels. Thanks to ‘strong gales and thick hazy weather’ they lost contact with the Dublin with ‘three of the victuallers, two transports and a bomb tender’. Even though Saunders had ‘no doubt of their getting safe to America’, these incidents were pushing the operation into ever greater delays.
Other ships lost masts and spars in the heavy weather.
Navigation was an imperfect art. Fixing a ship’s longitude with any accuracy in 1759 was impossible. Seven years before, the University of Göttingen in Hanover had published a longitudinal table which allowed a careful navigator to work out his longitude to within sixty nautical miles but it is not known how many of the British ships carried the means to use even this rudimentary method. Cracking longitude was the great civilian and military challenge of the time, what the race to jet engines and harnessing the power of the atom was to the twentieth century. The Royal Navy was edging closer to a solution; two years later in 1761 the Deptford would sail for Jamaica with John Harrison’s chronometer on board and would stun his detractors by arriving just over one nautical mile out from her calculated position.
Such a revolution was a distant dream for the officers of Saunders’ fleet as they lined the quarterdeck every day at noon, praying for a gap in the clouds to get their reading from the position of the sun. Meanwhile ships lost topmasts, sails were shredded, and many of the transports parted company. In these northern latitudes they came across ‘floating islands of ice’.
They were aiming for Louisbourg, until the year before a French possession on Cape Breton Island that had guarded the mouth of the St Lawrence. It had fallen after a siege in the summer of 1758 and would now be a base for attacking Canada rather than defending it. Two miserable months after leaving Portsmouth the fleet neared Louisbourg but as it did so it ran into a thick shelf of ice miles wide that stretched out from the shore. The harbour at Louisbourg was completely enclosed. Saunders dispatched smaller boats to try to find passages through the ice but to no avail.
Saunders had no choice. Working the ships in these conditions was unimaginably tough. The sails were ‘stiff like sheets of tin’, making them impossible to furl, while the ‘running ropes freeze in the blocks’. The ‘topmen’ were suffering the most. These young, agile seamen were responsible for the setting and furling of these highest sails and faced frequent climbs up into the frozen rigging. The weather made this impossible. Durell reported to London that, in conditions such as these, ‘the men cannot expose their hands long enough to the cold to do their duty’.
Having been buffeted with ‘contrary winds and hard gales’ and now ‘stopped with a body of ice’ from getting into Louisbourg, Saunders had to head south-west, away from the Gulf of St Lawrence and towards the British base at Halifax.
The risks to his fleet from a further period at sea in the blizzard conditions waiting for the ice to melt were too great. He was already undermanned and the grim realities of eighteenth-century seafaring were further depleting his crews.
Lack of access to fresh provisions, the freezing weather, and physical exertion left the men, who slept in hammocks fourteen inches apart slung across a gun deck, prone to debilitating sickness. The year before HMS Pembroke had sailed from Portsmouth to Halifax and due to a rather circuitous route the voyage had lasted seventy-five days. Twenty-six men had died on the passage and a large number were put in hospital as soon as she arrived; five desperate men deserted in one of her small boats just after they dropped anchor.
Things were not as bad for Wolfe on the flagship, Neptune, but even so he chafed at the delays. He was a very poor sailor. The year before he had written to his father, ‘You may believe that I have passed my time disagreeably enough in this rough weather; at best, the life, you know, is not pleasant.’
On this crossing he wrote to a senior officer that ‘your servant as usual has been very sensible of the ship’s motions’.
As the battered fleet entered the bay at Halifax on 30 April Wolfe’s frustration turned into rage. There sitting at anchor was Durell’s North American squadron which should by now have been blockading the St Lawrence. The seamen of the fleet would have noticed immediately that Durell’s ships were riding at just one anchor and were therefore clearly ready to sail on the first fair breeze but the landsman Wolfe was livid. To his political superiors in London he was measured but to Major General Jeffrey Amherst, the senior British commander in North America, he wrote that, having arrived in ‘tolerable good order, the length of our passage considered’, he was ‘astounded to find Mr Durell at anchor’.
This was positively diplomatic compared to comments recorded in a remarkable and recently discovered private journal written by one of Wolfe’s close ring of aides. This straight-talking account, the so-called ‘Family Journal’, is more outspoken in its condemnation of Durell and his late departure from Halifax: ‘Nothing could astonish Wolfe more than on our arrival at Halifax’ to discover Durell riding at anchor, and ‘nothing could be more scandalous than their proceedings’ when ‘all the bellowing of the troops at Halifax could not persuade them to leave that harbour for fear of the ice’. The diarist writes that Wolfe, who ‘knew the navy well’, had feared since leaving Britain that they would be late to leave thanks to ‘an aversion to run the hazards of the river’. He went on to say that ‘much time, according to custom was spent in deliberation, and at length they determined that it would be more agreeable to sail up the river when the spring was well advanced than during so cold a season’. The ‘Family Journal’ makes it clear that Wolfe believed this was a setback of the most serious kind: had they got into the river when they were supposed to have done ‘supplies [would have] been intercepted’ and ‘the enemy would not have been able to fire a gun’. In short, concludes the journal, ‘Canada would certainly have been an easy conquest, had that squadron gone early enough into the river.’
Saunders, for whom sadly little personal correspondence exists, was kinder to his subordinate, writing to London on 2 May that he found Durell ‘unmoored, and ready to sail…He waits only for a wind, and, I hope, will sail tomorrow.’
He did sail on 3 May but ‘the wind proved contrary’ and ‘they were obliged to anchor’ just outside the harbour until 5 May.
As a result Durell entered the St Lawrence just days after the precious convoy from France. Wolfe would never forgive his naval colleagues for this failure. It was the first crack in a relationship upon which combined operations depended and the resultant schism was almost as detrimental to the British cause as the arrival of succour to his enemies.
The hysteria of Wolfe’s circle is perhaps attributable to the slow realization of the scale of the challenge and the paucity of their resources. Troop ships from New York trickled in slowly. The first to arrive was the Ruby, on 1 May, carrying ordnance, gunpowder, and shot. She told of storms, dismastings, and delays afflicting the rest of the fleet.
As the other ships did start to arrive it soon became clear that they were carrying numbers of men who were consistently below what Wolfe had been expecting. In Britain, he had been promised battle-hardened regiments of the British army in North America; however, nobody had considered that winter would leave these units decimated. Three thousand reinforcements were supposed to have been sent out from Britain, a mix of new recruits and soldiers drafted in from other regiments.
However, these men had been diverted to bolster a bogged-down campaign in the French-owned Caribbean islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe. Vague promises were made to transfer these men back up to Wolfe’s army after they had conquered the islands, but these assurances must have rung hollow to Wolfe. It was a fact that service in the Caribbean ruined any unit sent there. Microbes broke armies in the Indies more surely than enemy steel. From 1740 to 1742 a British and colonial American army outside the walls of Cartagena had lost 10,000 of its 14,000 men, about one in ten of them as a result of enemy action, the rest from disease. Wolfe, as a boy soldier, had been earmarked for the expedition but had been saved from an almost certain death by a delicate constitution that was so overwhelmed by the germs of Portsmouth that he was sent home to recuperate with his mother. The Spanish boasted that disease provided a surer defence than ships, forts, and men. They morbidly celebrated yellow fever, as fiebre patriótica, ‘patriotic fever’, because it attacked outsiders with such jingoistic fervour.
Criminals were granted a reprieve from the death penalty in Britain if they agreed to serve in the tropics. Soldiers were often given the choice when being punished for a grave offence: 1,000 lashes or service in the Caribbean; they usually chose the former.
Wolfe would have known it would be a miracle if the troops arrived back in the North Atlantic in time to be of any use even if they were not eviscerated by disease. He would have to make do with the regiments already in theatre. At least every regiment had seen action. British regular soldiers had been fighting in North America since 1755. Each summer’s fighting had been on a larger scale than the year before. Early in the war the men had been so raw that many of them had been taught how to use muskets on decks of transports by officers who had learnt their trade through reading manuals. Now every unit had served through at least one operation and had survived one tough winter. On the downside the campaigns and climate had exerted a powerful attritional effect. Men had used the dispersal to billets over the winter as an opportunity to desert and disappear along the vast and unregulated frontier. Disease could be just as bad among the snow as it was in the tropics. The absence of fresh fruit and vegetables over the winter meant that men lacked vitamin C and scurvy was a constant threat. The year before Wolfe had written at the start of the campaigning season that ‘some of the regiments of this army have 3 or 400 men eaten up with scurvy’.
This terrible disease appeared first as liver spots on the skin and then quickly led to spongy gums and haemorrhaging from all mucous membranes. Sufferers became listless and immobilized and the advanced stages saw the loss of teeth and suppurating wounds. It is famously associated with long sea journeys, but such was the isolation of garrisons in the backcountry during the winter, that it was just as common along the frontier.
Wolfe wrote a barrage of letters to superiors in London and New York, describing the condition of the four battalions that had spent the winter in Halifax. They were ‘in good order’, but ‘are at a very low ebb’. Measles had recently ‘got amongst them’, and they would have suffered far worse had it not been for the ‘more than common care of the officers that command them’. Their officers had attempted to obtain fresh provisions where possible, maintain good hospitals, and lay on plenty of the local anti-scorbutic, ‘spruce beer’, a mildly alcoholic drink brewed from molasses and spruce tips and a good source of vitamin C. These precautions, combined with strict discipline, had ‘preserved these battalions from utter ruin’, without them, ‘these regiments would have been utterly annihilated’. Even so, Wolfe warned that their numbers were still well below expectations. Many of the battalions at Halifax numbered around five hundred men each, just over half their ideal complement. Wolfe feared that the two battalions left further north in Louisbourg, cut off from the outside world over the winter, were ‘in a worse condition’. He stated glumly that ‘the number of regular forces can hardly exceed the half’ of 12,000 that London had promised him during the planning phase. Any losses during the sail up the St Lawrence or a bad outbreak of disease during the campaign would result in ‘some difficulties’, and Wolfe was convinced that the risky nature of this amphibious assault meant that they were ‘very liable to accidents’. He would fight this campaign with no reserve, no margin for error. However, he told his superiors in London, ‘our troops, indeed, are good and very well disposed. If valour can make amends for want of numbers, we shall probably succeed.’
Wolfe set about preparing his army for the expedition with the relentless energy for which he had become famous. At 32 he was young for so important a command. In a letter to his uncle he blamed his appointment on ‘the backwardness of some of the older officers’, which ‘in some measure forced the Government to come down so low’.
As so often the pre-war hierarchy had failed to shine in the first few years of combat and promising young officers had been rapidly promoted. Wolfe certainly had shown potential but he was not Achilles reborn. He was exceptionally tall at six foot, but thin and ungainly, with pale skin, long red hair that looked fine and lank, a pointy, fragile nose, and a weak, receding chin: in all a strange ‘assemblage of feature’.
He had piercing blue eyes but they could not detract from an overall sense of physical infirmity, reinforced by his own constant commentary on his ill health. He suffered from ‘the gravel’, a painful condition caused by the build-up of crystals in the urinary tract, which he tried to douse with regular doses of liquid soap. It no doubt aggravated a pronounced tendency to hypochondria; he often described himself as a broken man. He wrote to his mother that ‘folks are surprised to see [my] meagre, consumptive, decaying figure’. He blamed hard campaigning that ‘stripped me of my bloom’ and brought him ‘to old age and infirmity’. A repeated lament of his letters is that ‘I am perhaps somewhat nearer my end than other of my time.’
To his uncle he wrote, ‘If I have health and constitution enough for the campaign, I shall think myself a lucky man; what happens afterwards is of no great consequence.’
Wolfe is strangely inaccessible. He was certainly melodramatic, sensitive, and prone to self-pity. Many of his letters drip with disapproval for fellow officers and contain an almost puritanical adherence to duty. As a result he is often portrayed as aloof and uneasy among his peers, and yet there are hints of a more relaxed side to him. One officer under his command recorded that ‘his gestures [were] as open as those of an actor who feels no constraint’ and he displayed ‘a certain animation in the countenance and spirit in his manner that solicited attention and interested most people in his favour’.
He certainly had a very loyal group of close friends. His attitude to the men under his command varied wildly depending on his mood and their performance in battle. But he was unwavering in his strong paternalism and the men in return seemed to harbour a genuine affection for their commander. He was certainly visible, his claims of physical infirmity are belied by his behaviour on campaign; he was always where the action was hottest and had the scars to prove it. He never shrank from the rigours of active service and it is possible that his maladies were exaggerated for effect.
His grandfather and father had both been soldiers. He was commissioned an officer aged 14, thanks to his father’s influence, first into the marines and then into an army regiment destined for service on the Continent. He tasted action for the first time at 16 against the French at the battle of Dettingen, where he caught the eye of a powerful patron, the 22-year-old Prince William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, second and favourite son of King George II. With Cumberland’s support, plus his own impeccable family and social army network and his real talent, he ascended quickly through the ranks. He proved himself an excellent regimental commander; his battalions were disciplined and drilled to the highest standards that the army’s peacetime penury would allow. He also thought and wrote with genuine insight on tactics in the age of musket, bayonet, and cannon.
Wolfe’s plan had been to leave Louisbourg and sail up the St Lawrence on 7 May. This was wildly optimistic; the sea ice and the slow Atlantic crossing had delayed operations but so too had the sheer scale of North America and the inadequacy of eighteenth-century communications. Some regiments which had wintered in the colonies only heard about their inclusion in the amphibious force in April. Many were scattered across swathes of country to minimize the impact on the community of the number of extra mouths to feed during the long winter. Four companies of the 78th Regiment had been garrisoning Fort Stanwix over the winter, two-thirds of the way between Albany and Lake Ontario. They had suffered terribly from scurvy, been the target of a daring and bloody Native American raid and were only relieved on 10 April. They were buffeted by blocks of ice on the Mohawk River as they made their way to Albany, then bundled on ships to take them to New York City where, without being allowed to land, they were transferred onto transports and shipped to join Wolfe’s army. It is impressive that they arrived at all. Provisions for the operation arrived from the rich pastures of Pennsylvania, shipped over seven hundred miles from Philadelphia. These were huge logistical achievements on a continent which had not witnessed warfare on this scale before.
On 13 May the Neptune, with Wolfe and Saunders on board, loosed her main course and fired two guns, the prearranged signal for the fleet to weigh anchor.
Then she stood out to sea and made for Louisbourg ‘with all the ships that were in readiness’.
Two days later they arrived off Louisbourg. ‘The coast was still full of ice’
but this time there were sufficient gaps for Saunders to be able to thread his ships into the harbour.
Perched on a barren landscape, Louisbourg was a squat, grey fortress that commanded the mouth of the St Lawrence and was the key to Canada as well as providing French fishermen on the Grand Banks, the most lucrative fishing grounds in the world, with a secure harbour. It had been captured the year before, but had held out long enough to deny the British the chance to enter the St Lawrence and attack the heart of New France. Wolfe had commanded a brigade in the besieging force and his energy and courage had won him a reputation and a promotion back in Britain. Chevalier Johnstone, a Scottish exile serving with the French forces, had painted a bleak picture of life in this desolate stronghold: ‘the climate, like the soil, is abominable at Louisbourg: clouds of thick fogs, which come from the south-west, cover it, generally from the month of April until the end of July, to such a degree that sometimes for a month together they never see the sun’. The surrounding countryside had little to recommend it either, ‘miserable soil—hills, rocks, swamps, lakes and morasses—incapable of producing anything’.
It was the most modern of all the French fortifications in North America, and looked to visitors like a textbook Flanders fortress. Indeed, some of the cut stone had been shipped out from the Rochefort area of France, used as ballast on vessels crossing the Atlantic.
The defences had been battered during the previous summer’s siege, many of the houses and the ‘King’s Bastion’, or citadel, had been reduced to rubble by British cannon and a large breach had been smashed in the curtain wall. As Wolfe had predicted the regiments that had occupied this broken city over the winter were in a parlous state. Scurvy had crippled hundreds of men; recruiting parties sent to the American colonies had proved unsuccessful at persuading young men to surrender their independence in return for a precarious existence at the former French fortress courtesy of King George. So desperate was the need for recruits that no less than 131 former French soldiers were absorbed into British units. Amherst, the senior British officer in North America, expected them to ‘immediately desert’ to their former masters, ‘as soon as we come near to the enemy’.
There was still snow on the ground in the hollows and Saunders reported to London that ‘the harbour was entirely filled up with ice, that for several days it was not practicable for boats to pass’. The weather would cause further delays; in fact, its severity ‘has, by much, exceeded any that can be remembered by the oldest inhabitants of this part of the world’.
Another senior officer wrote that there was so much ice ‘for several days that there was no getting on board or ashore without a great deal of trouble and some danger’.
The sailors were undeterred. Lieutenant John Knox, of the 43rd Regiment, who left the liveliest and most detailed of all the journals of the campaign, arrived in Halifax with his regiment to find ‘foolhardy seamen’ getting from ship to shore and back again using the floating ice as stepping stones, ‘stepping from one to another, with boat-hooks…in their hands; I own I was in some pain while I saw them, for, had their feet slipped from under them, they must have perished’.
Knox was Irish, the third son of a Sligo merchant with an uncle who had attended Trinity College, Dublin and became a priest. He was typical of the educated, ‘middling’ sort of men who considered themselves gentlemen but lacked the money or connections to scale the heights of eighteenth-century society. The army offered men like Knox an honourable career path, with possibilities of glory, reward, and advancement. As was normal he joined as a ‘volunteer’, a civilian given permission to serve with a regiment with a view to obtaining a vacancy in the officer corps when disease or a bullet created one. They carried muskets and served as ordinary soldiers but ate and socialized with the officers. Gallant conduct was the surest way to gain attention and throughout the eighteenth century these young men would show suicidal bravery on countless occasions. Knox’s moment came at the defeat at the battle of Lauffeld, after which Cumberland awarded him an ensigncy (the most junior officer’s rank) in the 43rd Regiment of Foot. He seems to have made a good marriage to a wealthy woman but her money was held by a trustee who went bankrupt. It was clearly to be on the field of battle that Knox would have to make his fortune.
Knox and his men had spent nearly two lonely years in Nova Scotia around Annapolis and Fort Cumberland. His experience of frontier life was typical: extraordinary seasonal extremes of hot and cold weather, long periods of boredom punctuated with moments of utter terror. He was honest about the realities on the ground that belied the carefully coloured maps of Whitehall,
though we are said to be in possession of Nova Scotia, yet it is in reality of a few fortresses only, the French and Indians disputing the country with us on every occasion, inch by inch, even within the range of our artillery; so that, as I have observed before, when the troops are not numerous, they cannot venture in safety beyond their walls.
Seventeen fifty-nine was to be different; the 43rd was finally going to take part in active campaigning. There was a sense of excitement as Knox’s ship fell in with the other transports and arrived at Louisbourg, with its narrow entrance, passed the large naval ships and anchored under the walls of the town. The ice and thick fog forced many of the supply ships to wait off the coast for days at a time before attempting to enter the port, their crews straining their ears for the sound of breakers on the rocky beach to let them know when they were too close to shore.
A cannon roared from a battery on the island in the middle of the bay to give navigators and lookouts a reference point. Despite the conditions Knox was thrilled to be a part of the gathering force: ‘every person seems cheerfully busy here in preparing for the expedi-tion’.
Wolfe noted the arrival of Knox and his fellow soldiers in Kennedy’s 43rd Regiment in his journal: ‘Webb’s, Kennedy’s, part of Lascelles’s Artillery and Military from Boston arrived. A ship with Webb’s Light Infantry ran upon the rocks in Gabarus Bay. Coldness on that occasion. The troops got safe on shore.’
Knox hoped to catch a glimpse of his young commander and he managed to watch as General Wolfe made inspections. On 25 May Knox reports that Wolfe ‘was highly pleased’ with the ‘exactness and spirit’ of some troops who were demonstrating their ‘manoeuvres and evolutions’. So impressive were these particular troops that other commanding officers apologized to Wolfe in advance, saying that the long period in winter quarters had limited their abilities to drill the men and implement a new exercise, which Wolfe favoured, of firing musket volleys. According to Knox, Wolfe cheerfully dismissed their concerns, ‘“Poh! Poh!—new exercise—new fiddlesticks; if they are otherwise well disciplined and will fight,that’s all I shall require of them.”’
The peacetime British army was small, scattered, and poorly trained. Even the existence of a standing army in peacetime was controversial. The British political class revelled in its perceived freedoms and could become hysterical in defending their ‘ancient liberties’. A standing army was seen as a buttress of tyranny. The Stuart kings of the seventeenth century, Charles I and his two sons, and Cromwell, the imperial antiking, had demonstrated dangerously autocratic tendencies, epitomized by their maintenance of large standing armies. Across the Channel Europe provided a multitude of examples of arbitrary government, regimes whose existence rested on the muskets of conscripted peasants. A central plank of the ‘Glorious Revolution’ settlement of 1688-9 was the passing of the Mutiny Act which stated clearly that it was illegal to recruit and maintain a standing army without the consent of Parliament. From then on numbers of troops depended entirely on Parliament’s willingness to pay for them.
By the 1750s the peacetime British army numbered just under thirty thousand men, well below half the size of the Prussian army and equivalent to that commanded by the King of Sardinia. King George could also call on the 12,000 men of the Irish army paid for by his Irish subjects but the Parliament in Dublin got nervous when more than two thousand of these men were sent to serve abroad. The Westminster Parliament proved itself unwilling to impose taxes to maintain even the small British army properly. There were virtually no purposebuilt barracks with facilities to allow whole regiments, let alone brigades or bigger units, to train together. Instead regiments were broken up and billeted upon reluctant landlords in pubs and hostelries across wide areas. The resulting lack of tactical cohesion, not to mention deep antipathy of the civilian population, is not hard to imagine. Wartime was really the only opportunity to concentrate several regiments in single encampments and drill them together. Camp commanders could then enforce a standard drill, equalizing the length and speed of pace, imposing uniform musketry practice and recognizable command signals. As soon as Knox had landed in North America in 1757 his regiment was to join the others and ‘take all opportunities for exercise’. Entrenchments were built ‘in order to discipline and instruct the troops, in the methods of attack and defence’. This would ‘make the troops acquainted with the nature of the service they are going upon; also to render the smell of powder more familiar to the young soldiers’.
For many it would be the first time they had trained with anything other than their own company of, at most, a hundred men.
At Louisbourg Wolfe’s army got the opportunity to make up for the scarcities of peacetime. Gunpowder and musket balls were issued to every soldier; the daily crackle of musket volleys echoed around the bay. Malcolm Fraser was a 26-year-old subaltern. He was an unlikely redcoat. His father had been ‘out’ for Charles James Stuart in the ‘45 rebellion, when Bonnie Prince Charlie had attempted to seize the throne of Britain back from his distant cousin George II. Charles’ depleted, exhausted, and starving army was annihilated on Drumossie Moor, a battle known to history as Culloden. With suicidal bravery the Highlanders had charged into withering British musketry and artillery fire, leaving the moor heaped with dead. Among the fallen was Malcolm Fraser’s father. The rebellion lingered on long enough to give the Duke of Cumberland an excuse to launch a systematic and brutal campaign of counter-insurgency throughout the Highlands. Settlements were burnt, men transported to the New World, and Highland dress, weapons, and bagpipes were all banned. Wolfe had served during the campaign and remained in Scotland long afterwards as part of what was effectively an army of occupation.
Now, only a decade later, the British government’s need for troops forced them to swallow their mistrust of the Highlanders and acquiesce to some recruitment among the more loyal clans. The prospect of economic and social advancement as well as the chance to don traditional Highland garb and assemble with their fellow clansmen on the field of battle ensured that the new Highland regiments were inundated with volunteers. Men begged to serve in the army that had recently slaughtered their fathers and uncles. Malcolm Fraser appears at ease with his inverted allegiance. Loyalty to the family and clan were far more important than the external allegiance of their chief. It mattered little to him which descendant of James VI and I sat on the throne in London. Men like him were happy if they were among their peers, a brace of pistols and a long Highland sword at the waist, accompanied by the clan piper playing traditional airs. Fraser described this period of intensive training after a long winter of isolation with excitement in his journal. ‘We are ordered ashore every day while here,’ he wrote, ‘to exercise along with the rest of the Army.’
On 31 May four regiments ‘performed several manoeuvres in presence of the General Officers, such as charging in line of battle, forming the line into columns, and reducing them; dispersing, rallying…Which were all so well executed, as to afford the highest satisfaction to the generals.’
While Fraser, Knox, and the other soldiers trained, Wolfe continued in his attempts to scrape together every last man for the expedition and ensure that they were fed and kept as healthy as possible. The garrison at Louisbourg was under the command of the Governor, Brigadier Edward Whitmore. It consisted of four regiments, one of which, Colonel Bragg’s 28th, was ordered to join Wolfe’s army. Each regiment in the British army also had a grenadier company. This was made up of the elite of each regiment, physically fit and experienced veterans, distinguished by different uniforms and headwear. Wolfe was given the three grenadier companies from the remaining regiments of the Louisbourg garrison, who would make up a small but crack regiment in his army known as the ‘Louisbourg Grenadiers’ consisting of thirteen officers and 313 men. Wolfe wanted more; as well as a grenadier company, regiments in North America had recently formed companies of ‘light infantry’. It was hoped that these units would give the British army more flexibility when fighting in the woods of North America. Ideally, they were the regiment’s best marksmen and the quickest witted, agile men who were encouraged to fight in a more open, irregular style than the classic infantryman.
Wolfe begged Whitmore for all of his light infantrymen as well as his grenadiers. ‘We are disappointed of the recruits which were intended to be sent from the West Indies to join us,’ he wrote, ‘and as several regiments are much weaker than they were thought, in England, to be, I must further represent to you that good troops only can make amends for the want of numbers in an undertaking of this sort.’ He reminded him of the strategic situation: ‘upon the success of our attacks in Canada, the security of the whole continent of north America in a great measure depends’.
Wolfe did not hold Whitmore in high esteem; they had both served as brigadiers in the siege of Louisbourg the year before, and with Whitmore approaching his seventieth birthday, Wolfe had described him as a ‘poor, old, sleepy man’, and claimed that ‘he never was a soldier’.
It is possible that Wolfe’s difficulty to hide his contempt for people contributed to Whitmore’s refusal. He would not part with any more men than London had specifically ordered. Whitmore had sailed on Quebec as a young man in 1711 and had seen the fleet wrecked on the river and hundreds of men drowned; his duty was to protect Louisbourg not send his finest troops on a dangerous mission to satisfy the thirst for glory of the lanky young Major General. Wolfe informed London, ‘I applied to Mr Whitmore for three companies of light infantry of his garrison…If Brigadier Whitmore did not consent to my proposal it has proceeded from the most scrupulous obedience to orders, believing himself not at liberty to judge and act according to circumstances.’
Wolfe’s disappointment at Whitmore’s defiance did not interfere with his furious activity. He and his staff were busy planning the next phase of the operation: getting the army on board transports and up the St Lawrence as far as the city of Quebec. Daily orders were issued concerning every aspect of the men’s lives. It was ‘particularly necessary’ that a large stock of shoes was provided, given the difficulty of getting them during the campaign. Axes, picks, shovels, and bill hooks were handed out in proportion to the numbers of men in each regiment. Fraser’s large 78th Regiment with its 1,000 men was given 100 pick axes, Amherst’s smaller 15th was only issued with fifty. Regimental quartermasters, the all-important officers responsible for a unit’s equipment, were to go and claim for ‘one hundred and forty tents’ per regiment from the Fair American transport. Every man was issued thirty-six rounds of ammunition as well as musket balls and spare flints, a vital part of the firing mechanism on their ‘flintlock’ muskets. More powder and balls were stored in casks aboard each transport. It was a reminder that as soon as the fleet left Louisbourg they were in hostile waters. Every attempt was also made to obtain ‘as much fresh provisions as can be procured’; each regiment would send a party daily to the barren ground to the north-east of the town, Pointe de Rochefort, at half an hour intervals to receive their daily supply. On 4 June the Neptune’s log recorded that she ‘received on board six live bullocks’.
Although eighteenth-century medical knowledge was sketchy they had certainly grasped that fresh meat was better than salted. Meanwhile ‘lines and hooks’ were placed aboard the transports so that they could eat fresh fish on the way up the river. ‘To prevent the spreading of distempers in the transports, the hospital ship will receive any men that may fall ill on the voyage,’ Wolfe ordered. Transports would raise a flag at the mizzen peak, the end of the yard that carried the mizzen sail, to notify the fleet that they had sick men on board who needed hospitalization, while the hospital ships themselves flew a red banner from the top of their foremast. The men were not to be ‘too much crowded’ and each commander was to report on the state of their transport and whether it was fit to proceed. Officers were told that ‘a quantity of spruce beer…would be of great use to their men’. Any men who were already ‘weak and sickly’ were ‘not to embark with their regiments’. But they were not to worry: ‘measures will be taken to bring those men to the army as soon as they are perfectly recovered’.
By 1 June, Wolfe could be stayed no longer. He was almost a month behind schedule already and he still had to brave the treacherous waters of the St Lawrence before he could even lay his eyes on the enemy. His order for the day stated that ‘the troops land no more’. Flat-bottomed boats, innovations designed specifically for amphibious operations, were ‘to be hoisted in’ and ‘washed every day to prevent leaking’. The ships and crews must now be ready to ‘sail at the first signal, when three guns are fired from the saluting battery, all officers to repair on board’.
The next day the sick were finally sent ashore and those men too old or disabled to have a hope of recovery were sent aboard a transport for the crossing back to Britain. Wolfe and Saunders announced that they were intent on ‘sailing on the first fair wind’. Instructions were left at Louisbourg for any latecomers to follow the fleet into the St Lawrence.
The laborious process of weighing anchor began in the early morning of 4 June. On the biggest ships like the Neptune it was a Herculean task. Ten sailors worked each of fourteen wooden bars that slotted into a giant winch or ‘capstan’ on the middle gun deck just forward of the mainmast. Below them another ten men worked each of twelve bars on a ‘trundlehead’, essentially another capstan working on the same axis. These teams, 260 strong, could lift approximately ten tons. Depending on the length of cable, the wind and tide, an anchor could take six hours to raise. In emergencies, the captain could order the crew to ‘let slip’ and simply leave the anchor and cable behind on the seabed. The twenty-four-inch cable was made from the intertwining of three regular ropes and was too wide for the capstan and so a smaller ‘messenger’ rope was attached to the cable with ‘nipper’ cords that had to be slid along at regular intervals as the cable came in. To lighten the load on the seamen, if the wind favoured it, ships could set some sail to bring them ‘a-peek’, a point at which they were vertically above the anchor. Once it was raised almost out of the water, it had to be ‘catted’: another team of men hauled on a tackle which brought it up out of the water, while keeping it away from the hull, making sure the heavy flukes did not puncture the wood, and lashed it to the side of the forecastle. Meanwhile, the cable was stored right down in the bottom of the ship, below the waterline. When it dried off the soft manilla rope made an excellent mattress and sleeping in the cable tier became a perk of the senior members of the ship’s company.
Knox watched the operation from the 337-ton, London-based transport ship, the Goodwill, under its colourful master, Thomas Killick. One hundred and seventy-nine officers and men of the 43rd Regiment were on board. He watched the transports as they ‘got their anchors a-peek’, with the soldiers on board sweating at the capstans alongside the seamen. The time it took to get the entire fleet out of the harbour meant that the brief window of favourable weather was missed. It turned ‘foul, with a thick fog [and] little or no wind’. Those ships not already out of the harbour had to drop their anchors again and wait for the weather to change. One of Wolfe’s senior officers recorded that the wind remained ‘contrary’ until the sixth, ‘during which time the Admiral kept in the offing’, sailing backwards and forwards off Louisbourg until the rest of the fleet could get out of harbour.
At 0400 hours on 6 June it was the Goodwill’s turn to crawl out of Louisbourg. By 1000 hours she joined the waiting fleet. The weather was fair, with a variable, light breeze. ‘Now that we are joined, imagination cannot conceive a more eligible prospect,’ enthused Knox. ‘Our whole armament, naval and military, were in high spirits,’ he recorded, and despite the grave challenges ahead he had no doubt that under ‘such Admirals and Generals’ together ‘with so respectable a fleet’ and ‘such a body of well-appointed regular troops’ there would be ‘the greatest success’. He reported that ‘the prevailing sentimental toast among the officers is—British colours on every French fort, port, and garrison in America’.
Not everyone shared Knox’s enthusiasm. Fraser made an ominous entry in his diary: ‘I hear a Lieutenant on board one of the men of war has shot himself—for fear I suppose the French should do it.’ Fraser was surprised to hear of the suicide given the dangers that certainly beckoned. ‘If he was wearied of life, he might soon get quit of it in a more honourable way.’
Wolfe was relieved to be underway and finished a dispatch that day on board the Neptune in which he was upbeat about the prospects for the operation. He attached a return of the troops embarked at Louisbourg and wrote that he expected ‘to find a good part of the [French] force of Canada at Quebec’, but his army was ‘prepared to meet them. Whatever the end is, I flatter myself that his Majesty will not be dissatisfied with the behaviour of his troops.’ A senior member of Wolfe’s staff wrote that the ‘whole force was now assembled’ and ‘amounted to 8,535 soldiers, fit for duty, officers included’. It was far short of the 12,000 that Wolfe had been promised and it would almost certainly be fewer men than the French could muster to defend Canada.
It was the largest naval expedition in North American history: forty-two men of war, fourteen of which carried sixty guns or more and were known as ‘ships of the line’. In the eighteenth century, the weight, accuracy and range of cannon meant that ships were designed to carry many of them firing at ninety degrees to the direction of the vessel. As a result action was joined when the enemy was alongside rather than in front or behind. The mighty capital ships of powers like Britain and France would form lines and exchange crashing broadsides with their opponents. The Neptune, on whose quarterdeck Wolfe and his staff took their daily exercise, was one of the most powerful ships of the line in the world. Weighing nearly two thousand tons, she was 171 feet long and crewed by just under eight hundred officers and men. She had twenty-eight cannon on her lower gun deck, each firing a thirty-two-pound ball, termed 32 pounders, and on her middle and upper deck another sixty 18 and 12 pounders. In a second the Neptune was capable of blasting a ton of lead into the hull and rigging of an enemy ship. Other warships had different roles; lighter, quicker frigates could harass an enemy’s merchant fleet or provide support for land forces in shallower waters. Some ships carried mortars or acted as scouts. Saunders was well supplied with all varieties.
The main role of the naval vessels was to protect the vast array of civilian vessels on which the success of the operation relied. In all there were between one hundred and twenty and one hundred and forty transport ships of all rigs and sizes. They were carrying not just the troops but all the supplies that would allow the force to sail deep into enemy territory. It had to be assumed that no food would be available around Quebec and so the expedition was forced to bring every sack of flour as well as every spade and ounce of gunpowder with it. The Hunter, Resolution, and Scarboro from Boston carried cattle; ships like the Phoenix, Martha, and Hannah had all the paraphernalia associated with artillery in their holds: siege guns, spare carriages and ramrods, in all 163 pieces of artillery of all shapes and sizes. Other ships carried just powder and shot. The expedition’s 75,000 cannonballs sat low in the holds, providing extra ballast. The Industry and Sally from the south coast of England carried some of the 65,000 shells for the mortars. There were 1.2 million musket cartridges, 10,862 barrels of powder, and even 250 primitive rockets. The New England-based Good Intent and Peggy & Sarah weighing in at just over a hundred tons were designated sounding vessels: shallow-draught ships that could go ahead of the main fleet and check the depth of water by taking regular soundings using a lead weight thrown over the side and measuring the depth on a marked line.
Such a massive fleet needed tight organization if it was to avoid the twin perils of getting scattered across the North Atlantic or of crashing into each other. Saunders had issued a long set of sailing instructions at Louisbourg.
The fleet would travel in three divisions: white, red, and blue. Wolfe’s army had been divided into three brigades and appropriately enough, each brigade was assigned to one of the divisions. Every single ship would fly ‘vanes’ (long, thin flags) denoting which division they were in and exactly what or who was on board. The twenty-eight-gun frigate Lowestoft would command the lead, white division and would ‘wear a white broad pendant’ during the day and a light on the stern of her poop deck and another at the top of her mainmast at night. All the transports in the division were distinguished by smaller white vanes. Each regiment had a slight variation. Ships carrying Knox and his fellow soldiers of the 43rd had white vanes with one red ball. Malcolm Fraser in the 78th sailed in a ship with a white vane with two blue balls. Next, was the red division, commanded by Captain Schomberg on the Diana flying a red pendant and trailed by transports with the second brigade on board all flying red vanes. This was followed by the blue division with the third brigade of Wolfe’s army on board. Ships carrying artillery flew red-and-blue striped flags; those carrying provisions, blue-and-yellow. Saunders used a series of intricate signals using flags and cannon fire to maintain command and control of his unwieldy fleet. He could summon all the key personnel on board, masters of transports, regimental commanders and staff. If he or Wolfe wished to see Knox’s commanding officer, Major Robert Elliot, for example, a blue-and-white chequered pendant would be flown from the head of the main topmast. The masters of the transports had been unambiguously told to obey orders, they were ‘as far as they are able to keep their respective divisions, and carry sail when the men-of-war do, that no time may be lost by negligence of delays’. Saunders emphasized that ‘the regular and orderly sailing of the fleet’ was ‘of the utmost consequence’. The master of every transport was ‘strictly enjoined to look out for and punctually obey’ all the signals that his divisional commander made. Alarmingly for the transports, if they failed to notice or act on a signal, ‘the Captains of his Majesty’s ships are directed to compel them to a stricter observance of their duty by firing a shot at them’. The cohesion of the fleet was vital. The most vulnerable phase for any amphibious force was before it had the chance to deploy on land. The greatest threats to the expedition were the treacherous waters of the St Lawrence, French ships and summer storms. These had the capacity to defeat Wolfe more surely than French muskets outside Quebec.
The soldiers found themselves in a different world, with its own language, hierarchy, mores, and even calendar. They had to know how to behave. To save their red coats from the harsh climate they wore them inside out. On the passage across the Atlantic Knox had almost been fired upon by an American privateer when they saw a deck full of men wearing off-white coats, the colour worn by the French infantry. Wolfe had ordered the soldiers to ‘be as useful as possible in working their ships’. Wooden ships carried great quantities of pitch, tar, gunpowder, and canvas, and were, as a result, horribly vulnerable to fire. Soldiers who were unused to life afloat had to be made aware of this threat. An order to men crossing the Channel to Flanders during the previous war stated that ‘a sergeant, a corporal and 12 men of each transport to be as a guard to keep things quiet and to place sentries on the officers’ baggage and to suffer no man to smoke between decks’.
Wolfe was equally careful to ensure discipline and fire prevention on board ship and zealous in the preservation of his men’s well-being: ‘when the weather permits the men are to eat upon deck, and be as much in the open air as possible. Cleanliness in the berths and bedding and as much exercise as their situation permits, are the best preservatives of health.’
For a landsman, his first passage in a tall ship was extraordinary. Upon entering this new realm for the first time one young man wrote: ‘Nor could I think what world I was in. Whether among spirits or devils. All seemed strange; different language and strange expressions of tongue, that I thought myself always asleep or in a dream, and never properly awake.’
Their lives were now regulated by ‘watches’. Every half hour a petty officer would turn the hourglass and strike the bell. At ‘eight bells’ the four-hour watch had come to an end and half of the crew could go below and sleep. All the watches were four hours, apart from two watches of two hours each, known as the ‘dog watch’, between 1600 and 2000 hours. At four bells in the morning watch, 0600 hours, the bosun would pipe, ‘Up Hammocks’, at which point the watch below roused themselves and brought up their hammocks on deck to stow in the netting which ringed it. There was no chance of a lie-in. The bosun patrolled the gun deck with a knife and would simply slice through the ropes holding a hammock to the deck beams if its occupant was slow to wake up. The ships were cleaned every morning. The bilges were pumped out, and the decks washed with seawater and holystones. Hours of maintenance and odd jobs followed until the bosun’s pipe signalled dinner, a large meal in the early to mid-afternoon followed by the doling out of the grog ration. In the evening the crew would practise ‘Beating to Quarters’ or going to their action stations. Rich captains, who had supplemented the ship’s gunpowder supplies out of their own pocket, would practise the crew at firing their cannon at this time; those of more moderate means had less opportunity to do this since the navy was stingy with its powder allocation and it had to be hoarded in case of an action with the enemy.
Sailing as part of a massive fleet, close to the shore, in largely unknown waters was a challenge to those in command. Constant adjustments to the course of the ship and the sail plan were made as winds varied, or other transports came too close. Collisions were not unusual. Knox’s religious observations were interrupted when on Sunday, 10 June, ‘as we were going to prayer, about ten o’clock, we got foul of another transport, which obliged us to suspend our devotions’.
Other accounts are full of near misses. Exhausted captains could expect not to leave their quarterdecks for days in such conditions.
Soldiers provided useful muscle on the passage. Under the command of a quartermaster they formed teams to ‘attend to the braces’, pulling the yards around to optimize the position of the sails in relation to the wind. They could not be forced to climb the rigging and work aloft. That was the province of the topmen, men with a fixed conviction in their own immortality. A seaman wrote that this job ‘not only requires alertness but courage, to ascend in a manner sky high when stormy winds do blow…the youngest of the topmen generally go highest’.
They handed and made sail, reefed and carried out repairs, all while balancing precariously up to one hundred and fifty feet above the deck. Inshore waters demanded the keeping of a good lookout, which along with extensive use of a line with a lead weight on the end to measure the depth, was the basis of all navigation. Sharp-eyed members of the crew stayed high in the rigging reporting every sighting to the deck. Rewards were given to those with the keenest eyes.
Since the days of Drake there had been an informality born of intimacy on board naval ships; he had always emphasized that officers should lend a hand and haul on ropes. The eighteenth-century navy was a far more harmonious community than has often been assumed; examples of hanging and flogging were exceptional. Many officers had started their careers as common seamen and were promoted, if not always to the highest ranks, through aptitude. The safety of the ship and the lives of everyone who sailed in her depended on officers knowing their business. There was far less opportunity than in the army for venality or the well-connected incompetent. Intruders from the more hierarchical army world were often surprised. Knox was shocked to hear the master of his transport crossing the Atlantic using ‘some of the ordinary profane language of the common sailors’.
By the second week of June the expedition had reached the Gulf of St Lawrence, the largest estuary in the world. It was named by explorer Jacques Cartier who had arrived here for the first time on the feast day of St Lawrence. Nearly two thousand miles inland lay its furthest headwater in today’s Minnesota. It drains nearly four hundred thousand square miles, an area which includes the Great Lakes, the world’s largest system of freshwater lakes. Underneath Saunders’ ships 350,000 cubic feet of water a second discharged into the North Atlantic.
The St Lawrence is the greatest tidal river in the world. It is hugely difficult to sail up thanks to the torrent of water surging to the sea, south-westerly winds that tend to prevail in the summer months and a vast amount of local variation in conditions caused by shallows, reefs, and islands. The amount of deviation that compasses will experience from true north varies and squalls regularly tear down off the high ground. Even the easterly winds that Saunders was praying for were often a mixed blessing as winds from that direction were often accompanied by rain and fog.
Captain John Montresor was a 23-year-old engineer on the expedition. He was the son of an engineer and had been raised on that rocky outcrop of empire, Gibraltar, where he had learnt his trade from his father. They had both been sent to America on the outbreak of hostilities and he was already the veteran of several abortive operations, picking up a wound in the Pennsylvanian backcountry at the hands of the Native Americans. Although his age belied his experience, Wolfe had been unimpressed when he had met him the year before during the Louisbourg expedition, describing him, rather hypocritically, as just a ‘boy’.
Engineers were scarce in the British army and even scarcer in North America and Wolfe would have to tolerate Montresor’s youth. The young engineer kept a careful journal of the passage up the St Lawrence, recording the weather each day and all the important landmarks, headlands, and islands that guided the expedition into the river mouth. On the evening of 11 June, a gale blowing hard out of the Gulf of St Lawrence scattered the fleet. The gale continued until dusk on 12 June when the ships were suddenly becalmed, left to drift east-north-east with the tide. By the fourteenth the fleet saw land in the distance on both sides. On the north shore it was ‘very craggy, irregular’ while the south was ‘very high being mountains of Notre Dame’. The ships took frequent soundings with eighty fathoms of line (480 feet) and ‘found no bottom’. Montresor could tell because the depth, like everything else, was communicated to the fleet. If an ensign fluttered at the main topmast of the Neptune the depth was over forty fathoms (240 feet); if a yellow pendant was hoisted in its place the depth was five fathoms (thirty feet), if it was hoisted twice in succession the depth was six fathoms (thirty-six feet), three times, seven fathoms (forty-two feet), and so on.
It was clear to the British that the St Lawrence was a formidable barrier. One marine officer wrote that ‘the whole of this channel is exceedingly dangerous, and the passage up so nice, that it might with some propriety be considered as the principal outwork of Quebec, and in ordinary attacks more to be depended upon, than the strongest fortifications or defences of the town’.
The further the expedition progressed up the Gulf of St Lawrence the more challenging it became. The strength of the tide grew more pronounced. Knox’s host, Killick, described the flood tide as ‘extremely curious’ and the winds ‘perverse’. Montresor reported typical gulf weather on 15 June. The wind was ‘small and very changeable never continuing long in the same quarter. We observed several vessels having a fresh breeze when others within a quarter of a mile have been becalmed, this circumstance is very frequent, owing to the eddies of the wind from off the high lands.’ Few British subjects had ever ventured into these waters; there is an other-worldly tone to the accounts of both men as they watched the shores close in on the fleet. Knox noticed that ‘the low as well as the high lands are woody on both sides’. The water had gone a ‘blackish colour’ with weird ripples and swirls. Montresor thought ‘the land on the south shore very mountainous and romantic, forming in some parts a kind of table land, its appearance was very green. The trees seemed to be of Birch-Beach [sic] and fir.’
The sixteenth of June saw the fleet smothered in a heavy fog which tested the admiral’s sailing instructions. The bigger ships tacked in the middle of the channel to avoid shallow water, the Neptune’s cannon roaring out, seven times if she was going to port, nine if starboard and with additional guns after four minutes to notify the fleet by how many degrees. The smaller ships risked shallower waters, some sailing ‘within a league of the shore’.
The winds had so far favoured the expedition. Progress had been swift down the Gulf of St Lawrence but not fast enough for the young commander. Wolfe’s frustration is palpable in his journal entries. On 10 June he records, ‘Fog and contrary wind obliged the Fleet to anchor. I intimated my design of going up with the very Troops to the Admiral, and hinted the pushing on of the Transports, leaving the men-of-war to come up at leisure.’
The Admiralty in London had assumed that Saunders would keep the larger ships at the mouth of the St Lawrence to lie in wait for any French fleet that dared to interfere with Wolfe’s expedition or threaten Louisbourg and Halifax. Instead, Saunders obviously intended to push as much of his fleet as far up the river as possible. It may have slowed progress up the St Lawrence but Saunders no doubt believed that his ships with, in all, nearly two thousand cannon and approximately thirteen thousand five hundred officers and men on board could play a decisive role not just in transporting Wolfe’s army safely to the target but an active one in operations once they had arrived.
On 18 June, with Île du Bic eight miles to the south-west, a sail was sighted. Five days before Durell had sent Captain Hankerson and his frigate Richmond with many of the captured French pilots on board to wait for Saunders. Wolfe was about to get his first news from Durell since he had sent him packing from Halifax.
Knox records that the Richmond sent a midshipman aboard his transport to inform them that Durell had occupied the Île aux Coudres further upstream where the river was very narrow. The fleet finally learnt that although he had managed to take three prizes with ‘flour and other provisions’ on board, dozens of other French ships ‘had escaped them’ laden with ‘provisions, especially bread, that are scarce in the French army’.
Wolfe’s journal oozes a barely controlled rage, it records that letters were captured on some of the prizes which ‘mention the most extreme want of everything at Quebec’ before the supply ships arrived, ‘so that if Mr Durell had come up the river in time every one of the ships might have been taken and Quebec obliged to surrender in a very few days, instead of which they now have plenty of everything’. He repeats himself the next day, 19 June, saying that he had ‘read a number of [captured] letters from Quebec, painting their distress in the liveliest manner. All in general agree that they must have starved if the succours from France had not arrived.’ To cap it all, ‘Captain Hankerson told Mr Saunders that there had been no ice in the River these two months.’
The Neptune raised its ‘jack’ on the ensign staff on its stern and fired one gun. It was the signal for the ships to anchor. The jack was the Union Flag of Great Britain with the red cross of St George superimposed on the white saltire on a blue background of St Andrew and usually flew at the bows of naval ships. Three ships had gone ahead of the fleet, one flying the British jack, the second a French flag, and the last displaying the Dutch colours. They were the marker ships and the ships of each division anchored as close to them as possible. The anchorage was in the sheltered water provided by Bic. At the last minute each helmsman turned the bows into the wind and as the ship slowed the final stopper was yanked off and the heavy iron anchor crashed into the water taking the cable whipping after it. As the anchor held, the ship turned to face the direction of the strong St Lawrence tidal flow. In tightly packed anchorages like this one another anchor was rowed out on the ship’s boat and released so that when the tide turned the ship would be held in position and not swing around and risk hitting neighbouring ones. The complexity of the operation was bound to produce the odd accident. Montresor watched one of the transports run afoul of a smaller naval ship and break her bowsprit off. She had to be rescued by the seventy-gun Orford.
The next day the fleet was underway again but from now on, as one senior officer recorded, ‘we were, for the most part, obliged to take advantage of the flood-tides, and daylight, as the currents began to be strong, and the channel narrow’.
The fleet would now anchor every night, the treacherous waters, fast tides, and squalls of wind being far too dangerous to press on in the dark. They often anchored during the ebb tide as well. Strengthened by the waters of the St Lawrence flowing downstream the ebb can reach six knots today. Knox reported that he witnessed ‘nine or ten knots’ and called it ‘the strongest rippling current I ever saw’.
As the tide turned and the sea advanced up the St Lawrence the fleet would weigh anchor and creep another few miles into the heart of the continent. Progress was achingly slow, even if the wind and tide were kind. The sounding vessels had to go ahead and feel their way along the rocky bottom of the river with their lead lines to measure the depth of water. As a result the ships were constantly dropping and weighing anchor.
Brigadier Townshend wrote that ‘the river above Bic is about 7 leagues [around twenty-two miles] in breadth. Both shores very high: the southern very beautiful. Though of a most wild and uncultivated aspect, save where a few straggling French settlements appear. We could now upon this fine river view the whole fleet in three separate Divisions.’ Smaller schooners and sloops dashed between the larger ships carrying messages and personnel, desperately trying to maintain the cohesion of the fleet. This new land had plenty to amuse the soldiers packed on board; Montresor reports a ‘great number of white whales and many seals’. Knox recalls seeing ‘an immense number of sea-cows rolling about our ships…which are as white as snow’. He estimated that their exposed backs were twelve to fifteen feet in length and when he and his men fired muskets at them, the balls bounced off. All the journals make numerous references to collisions and groundings that were becoming more frequent as the channel narrowed. On 21 June a transport struck a shoal and fired three guns, to be towed off. Townshend tells of near disaster when five of the largest warships were ‘nearly running on board each other, the current being strong’ and ‘few would answer the helm at first’. The Diana was ‘ungovernable for a long while’ and there was very nearly a collision with the Royal William and the Orford. Just as the situation reached the ‘critical’ point, ‘a breeze sprung up which…saved us from that shock which but a few moments before seemed inevitable. Had the least fog prevailed or had it been a little later, nothing could have prevented disaster.’
At 0200 hours on 23 June the Stirling Castle, one of Durell’s squadron which had pushed up the river and now waited for Saunders and the main body of the fleet, anchored off the Île aux Coudres, heard the noise of cannon downriver. As dawn broke her log records that she ‘saw a fleet to the east’ sailing with the wind up the St Lawrence. The captain ordered his ship cleared for action and the shrill noise of the bosun’s whistle sent the watch below tumbling out of their hammocks and ‘to their quarters’.
A flurry of signalling ensued and it was soon established that this was Saunders’ fleet. Gradually all the ships caught up and anchored in a protected bay on the north coast. The island was bleak; the 400-feet-high cliffs on its north side presented a defiant aspect to the ships as they sailed under them.
Quebec was about fifty miles ahead. But between the fleet and the French stronghold lay by far the most dangerous stretch of river. A passage through ‘the Narrows’ separated Île aux Coudres from the north shore and beyond that the St Lawrence was scattered with low lying islands and reefs just below the surface. A number of channels led through this natural barrier but they were ever-changing because of silting. The ebb tide tore down the river and in certain wind conditions could create steep, short waves that could swamp open boats and even small ships. They were a fearsome physical barrier. To make matters worse as the British fleet approached the heart of Canada, French intervention grew ever more likely. There was every possibility that the defenders of Quebec would take up positions to augment the natural barricades with ships, men and cannon. So far the enemy had hardly shown himself; the odd crack of a musket from the trees along the shoreline had been a fine gesture of defiance but held little menace. However, after years of desperate battles against the French and their Canadian colonists, no one in Wolfe’s army doubted that they would fight to the last extremity to protect their land from invasion. The all-too-visible progress of the fleet ensured that they would have plenty of notice of the British advance and although, as Knox commented, they saw no Canadians, they did see ‘large signal fires everywhere before us’.
The French knew they were coming.
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Dan Snow
An epic history of the battle of Quebec, the death of Wolfe and the beginnings of Britain’s empire in North America. Military history at its best.Perched on top of a tall promontory, surrounded on three sides by the treacherous St Lawrence River, Quebec – in 1759 France's capital city in Canada – forms an almost impregnable natural fortress. That year, with the Seven Years War raging around the globe, a force of 49 ships and nearly 9,000 men commanded by the irascible General James Wolfe, navigated the river, scaled the cliffs and laid siege to the town in an audacious attempt to expel the French from North America for ever.In this magisterial book which ties in to the 250th anniversary of the battle, Dan Snow tells the story of this famous campaign which was to have far-reaching consequences for Britain's rise to global hegemony, and the world at large. Snow brilliantly sets the battle within its global context and tells a gripping tale of brutal war quite unlike those fought in Europe, where terrain, weather and native Indian tribes were as fearsome as any enemy. 'I never served so disagreeable campaign as this,' grumbled one British commander, 'it is war of the worst shape.'1759 was, without question, a year in which the decisions of men changed the world for ever. Based on original research, and told from all perspectives, this is history – military, political, human – on an epic scale.
Death or Victory
THE BATTLE OF QUEBEC AND THE BIRTH OF EMPIRE
DAN SNOW
To Mum and Dad
Table of Contents
Cover Page (#ue68cc0cd-76ef-53a6-bdea-deaf60a4deb9)
Title Page (#u88ab8719-1920-5f81-aa68-5f80c663f9fe)
Dedication (#u90f995d5-76a4-513c-836d-1a88f5e6daab)
Maps (#u1e17a193-203c-50b0-827e-c176594028f7)
Author’s Note (#u216d60c3-900e-5a73-b2cd-633755246277)
Prologue (#ua3b1500b-2c90-5006-b2df-3d45c2954b47)
One (#u6f0ccd55-66f0-5ea4-ac97-e82d6a45beaa)
Two (#u7e0a494b-7289-575b-b239-ea4b9edaa794)
Three (#u6b4a6f27-2e3c-5f46-a630-9b0dd71d1e25)
Four (#uff98e416-d2b6-5038-a54d-63ef0cf8b68f)
Five (#u275b558d-e5d9-5581-902d-d4f518c49f1e)
Six (#u8252e331-7aec-5e89-b48d-246daaf2918b)
Seven (#u4a96c40e-11b1-51a3-8aa6-a606b9e29bb8)
Eight (#uf05fa34f-f805-57d6-b346-e17ce541e6ba)
Nine (#u686e6901-282e-56c8-aaeb-0e75b7fa6b66)
Ten (#u3dff4a79-ca2c-5bf7-8c2d-75b91dd6ba1c)
Eleven (#uf8598237-fc2e-58f8-84a5-d9db8221b1a7)
Twelve (#uca84f04e-1319-5844-9013-e08a0f8dcd57)
Thirteen (#u327aa636-9fab-54ed-a406-d0f1e26b8b20)
Fourteen (#u29dd039d-712b-5e6c-9b57-120110136177)
Fifteen (#u780a69a5-4b24-5412-bc9f-f0cc77793498)
Epilogue (#uf0e7ce1f-78c3-5bc9-bd50-68e744147f9d)
Bibliography (#uc8af8a1b-374e-5a91-ab12-3a3e166c8507)
Notes (#u9da0fae5-852a-546a-b1f8-f904e7a3cd1b)
Index (#u1fd2dec9-83cd-5ac3-ba54-927cf43768fe)
Copyright (#uc726b85b-b73a-50bf-8299-7544e52d5734)
About the Publisher (#uf18b8694-5f12-5186-8898-39f8c0b243dc)
AUTHOR’S NOTE (#ulink_0ee045ae-ff8a-505f-a15d-aa46fdaa6060)
‘One of the great battles of the world.’
FIELD MARSHAL MONTGOMERY
BATTLES CAN CHANGE the course of history. The fighting in North America that culminated with the battle James Wolfe fought outside the walls of Quebec on 13 September 1759 altered the world in a dramatic and lasting way. The dominance of the Anglo-Saxon model with its ideas of government, manners, trade, and finance was built on the British victory in what was truly a world war. Appropriately, I wrote this book during the course of a busy year spent all over the world. In Auckland, New Zealand, I wrote for a few hours every day and then took a fast stroll down to the glistening waters of the Hauraki Gulf to restore my energy. Every time I passed Wolfe Street I smiled; the shabby city street seemed to have little to do with the lanky, chinless, volatile commander of the British army at Quebec. It was, however, a powerful reminder of the enduring significance of the Seven Years War. Those events in the mosquito-ridden woods of New England and Canada, on the foaming seas off Western Europe, and in the shadow of the grand architecture of Quebec still matter. There are Wolfe Streets in cities in every corner of the world: Cape Town, Canberra, Baltimore, Houston, London, Liverpool, and Little Rock, Arkansas. On reflection it is not surprising that Auckland, a city that sprang into life during this time of Anglo-Saxon cultural supremacy, should have a reference, however small, to a man who helped to bring that supremacy about.
The raising of the Union Flag over Quebec and the destruction of French power in North America were far more significant for world history than the subsequent American Revolution. The revolution was merely a squabble for control over the fruits of the British victory over France and her Native allies. At the end of the Seven Years War a continent rich in farmland, minerals, and raw materials fell into the lap of the Anglo-Americans. In time, this continent would become the engine of an international system based on the rule of law, commercialism, representative institutions, and the English language. In the twentieth century North America would play the key part in defending that system as it was challenged by militarism, fascism, and communism. It was the armourer, paymaster, granary, and provider of millions of troops to defend the world order that had been born as a result of the Seven Years War.
Britain defeated France in the Seven Years War because she was able to assemble a crushing advantage in men and ships, paid for by an unprecedented level of government borrowing. By the mid-eighteenth century the French crown was unable to mobilize the country’s superior wealth or manpower nearly as effectively as its smaller neighbour, Britain. The underfunded French navy was swept from the seas by a supremely professional British Royal Navy, while its army remained bogged down in a European war against enemies kept in the field by British loans. British victory owed much to favourable credit ratings. Yet the muskets still needed firing, the ships of the line still needed expert handling, the armies and raids still needed leadership, and the men who trudged along the frontiers of empire still needed to bear the heavy burden of campaigning, fighting, and surviving. The campaign and battle at Quebec in 1759 is a reminder that it was also a victory of flesh, blood, and grit. Indeed, the battle fought on the Plains of Abraham outside Quebec, brief though it was, demonstrates that individuals and the choices they make matter hugely even in vast conflicts. British financial might may have projected Wolfe and his army deep into enemy territory and kept them fed and supplied but the capture of Quebec was not bound to follow.
A battle is celebrated, remembered, and studied not just because it is a decisive event, but because it looks and sounds like one. We cannot help but to be fascinated by its violent crescendos, its sounds, smells, and extremes of emotion, and the flight of one side or another. The mass of British subjects, at the time and since, could not understand or even picture a bond market and were unlikely to name streets after one, but battles can fill imaginations. To English-speaking peoples the victory at Quebec came to be seen as a milepost that marked their rise to global hegemony. Quebec symbolized, and still does, the seismic geo-political shift that occurred in the middle of the eighteenth century. A shift that changed the world for ever.
In attempting to tell the story of that summer in 1759 I have been assisted by friends, colleagues, and family in at least four countries. The book would not have existed were it not for my agent, Caroline Dawnay, and my auntie, Margaret MacMillan, a historian who I can only dream of emulating. Another historian I have always respected and to whom I now owe a debt of gratitude is Professor Robert Bothwell, an expert editor who helped me to avoid terrible mistakes and improve the book in no small measure. Arabella Pike at HarperCollins provided the unflagging support that one would expect from the latest in a line of martial types. It was a privilege to be allowed to renew my partnership with Martin Redfern when Arabella left on maternity leave. Carol Anderson was stunningly efficient. Sarah Hopper was her usual brilliant self on the pictures and Sophie Goulden had the patience of a rock as she steered the project home.
Museums and libraries all over the world have been unstintingly generous with their time and advice. Dorian Hayes at the British Library was a great source of suggestions. Valerie Adams at the Public Record Office in Belfast could not have been more helpful. Pieter Van der Merwe at the National Maritime Museum was very good to give up a morning to fire volley after volley of brilliant, if totally unrelated facts and ideas at me. Richard Kemp at the Somerset Military Museum went so far beyond the call of duty that I was embarrassed. Lizzy Shipton at the Rifles Museum, Salisbury, was a great help and Alan Readman, the assistant country archivist, West Sussex, Nora Hague at the McCord Museum, Montreal, Odile Girard at the Library and Archives Canada, and the team at Harvard all made research that little bit easier.
I was blessed with researchers, translators, and givers of advice. The book would not have been written without Gwyneth MacMillan in Quebec. She was efficient, intelligent, generous, and cheerful. Eddie Kolla in Paris was enormously helpful. Michael Manulak was very helpful in the opening stages. My sister, Rebecca Snow, is an expert in her own right and Roger Nixon and David Mendel were stalwarts; the latter walked me around Quebec bringing the eighteenth century alive on every street. Glen Steppler, Laurence Westgaph and Erica Charters were very good to me while Isabelle Pila and Brigitte Sawyer were vital translators.
Shuna and Katie Snow encouraged me and made me laugh through the process. My parents, Peter Snow and Ann MacMillan, were as unfailingly supportive as they have been of all my projects through the years. They read every word and, more importantly, they have always told me I could do it.
PROLOGUE (#ulink_647c0497-e811-5ebe-91ae-f0211c09de93)
AN HOUR BEFORE SUNRISE the hated drummers marched along the rows of tents. Their sticks beat the ‘General’, driving a clear message into the sleeping brains of the men. Even those befuddled by ‘screech’, cheap rum brewed by boiling the sediment from molasses barrels, were dragged from their slumbers. Men clambered over their drowsy comrades and emerged into the open air. Their feet squelched in the urine-soaked ground, for soldiers invariably eased themselves at the entrance to their tents or even inside where they slept. For an hour a mass of figures in the semi-darkness jostled and cursed. But as the light grew so did their regularity. By the time the drummers beat the ‘Assembly’ at 0500 hours the tents had been struck, kit packed, weapons retrieved and the men bundled onto the assembly area to line up by company and regiment, ready for inspection, colours unfurled, sharp new flints securely fastened in the jaws of their muskets. Companies of between 50 and 100 men were commanded by a captain who knew every one of them by name. When he was happy that his men were properly attired, their weapons clean and thirty-six rounds in their cartridge cases he reported to the major or lieutenant colonel and soon the whole force was ready to march.
Groups of light infantrymen and rangers set off first. The British force had been in the heart of Canada for less than a week and they had been given a shocking immersion into the world of insurgency, sniping, ambush and Native American warfare. Bodies of soldiers that strayed from the riverbank were found horribly killed and mutilated, their scalps taken as trophies by Native Americans and the Canadians who had learnt their way of war from them. Civilians in this populous part of Canada were trapped in between. Their farmhouses ransacked, their provisions confiscated by hungry warriors. That very morning a patrol of British light troops had searched one house and finding no one set it on fire. A British officer reported that ‘they were alarmed with bitter shrieks and cries of women and children’. They had, apparently, ‘foolishly concealed themselves among some lumber in a cellar’. British troops ‘very humanely exerted themselves for the relief of those miserable wretches, but their best endeavours were ineffectual…these unhappy people perished in the flames’. The officer wrote in his diary that ‘Such alas! are the direful effects of war.’
By the end of the summer an incident like this would barely raise a comment as atrocity fed atrocity and the campaign became a nightmare of terror, retribution, and disease.
This was the first serious push away from the beaches where the British had landed just days before. Major General James Wolfe, their commander, had ordered this force to move west, away from the comforting presence of the fleet anchored in the river, to tighten the noose around Quebec, a fortress said to be impregnable, capital of the vast French North American empire. They were to seize a prominent piece of ground called Point Lévis from where British guns could fire across the river into Quebec. The soldiers knew the French would not let this probing force march with impunity. The terrain favoured the defence with thick woodland and a steep rise overlooking the track. One British officer described the route as ‘no regular road’ but ‘only a serpentine path with trees and under-wood on every side of us’.
Rangers led the column. They looked more like Native Americans than Christian subjects of King George with tomahawks at their waists, moccasins and powder horns, while a few even carried scalps of fallen enemies hanging from their belts. They were nearly all Americans recruited from the frontiers and despite their appearance and their unruly reputation (the French dubbed them ‘the English savages’) their skill in this kind of conflict meant that they could command twice the pay of red-coated regular infantrymen. Some carried the long, accurate rifle but most thought that the Brown Bess musket, possibly with a few inches sawed off the end to make it lighter, was a better weapon for close quarters bush fighting. It was quicker to reload and capable of firing buckshot. Alongside them was a new brand of British regular, the light infantryman. They had been introduced by innovative officers to try to improve the British army’s woeful performance in the wilderness fighting of North America. They were picked men who had been selected for having a sharp mind, an ability to improvise and a true aim. Major General Wolfe had written careful instructions. The light troops were to ‘post detachments in all the suspected places on the road to prevent the columns from being fired at, from behind trees, by rascals who dare not show themselves’. As the column marched past the light troops would then fall in as the rear guard.
They had not advanced far before the woods echoed to the bangs of muskets and rifles, the howls of wounded and the shriek of the Native Americans, allies of the French.
The men of the North American tribes were bred as warriors. Martial prowess was highly prized and even in times of peace young men picked fights with neighbouring groups in order to win acclaim. Prisoners, in Native cultures, could replace relatives who had fallen in battle or could be tortured expertly so that their pain assuaged that of the family of a fallen brave. In the two centuries since Europeans had introduced gunpowder into North America the Native Americans had mastered the musket and rifle and men had honed their marksmanship for hunting as well as war. At close quarters they were just as skilled with tomahawk or knife. Their terrible reputation for savagery, together with expert bushcraft, exotic tattoos, and haunting war cries, had all conspired to send many British units into total panic at even the prospect of an encounter. The Canadians of European descent were no less fearsome. Canada had only just survived in the face of an unforgiving climate and constant hostility from some tribes. Her young men had adapted to the North American way of war and to many outsiders they were indistinguishable from the Native warriors. As the British force pushed along the track the biggest challenge was overcoming the massive psychological inferiority that years of ambush, slaughter, and defeat had bred in the men. The redcoats were edgy. One officer reported an unfortunate ‘friendly fire’ incident in which a light infantryman shot one of his corporals, and the wounded man had to be carried on ‘a blanket with skewers to two poles’. It took six men to carry the casualty and they were ‘relieved every quarter of an hour’.
Wolfe would report to his political masters in London that the force had ‘two or three skirmishes’ but the evidence from those who actually sweated up to Point Lévis, clutching their muskets and scanning the unfamiliar woodland for any movement, suggests that it was not as casual as Wolfe made it sound.
A Highlander who acted as his regiment’s bard gives a graphic description in a Gaelic song: ‘the marshalling was under Beaumont/ those ranks were handsome/ sent up to Pointe Levis/ to test the warriors;/ Indians and Frenchmen/ were very close to us in the bushes/ wrecking the heads/ and the legs that belonged to us!’
As the soldiers skirted the shore many caught their first horrifying glimpses of this new kind of war. One young Scotsman was horrified at the sight of several British corpses, ‘all scalped and mangled in a shocking manner’. He wrote that, ‘no human creature but an Indian could be guilty of such inhuman cruelty,’ but changed his journal to read, ‘no human creature but an Indian or Canadian could be guilty of such inhumanity as to insult a dead body’.
His men were uncowed though, if the Gaelic war song is to be believed: ‘when we were fully drawn up/ in line of battle/ and watching them/ to see if they would wait and give us satisfaction/ they sprayed fire into our faces/ but they got it back in return;/ they took fright/ when they recognised us’.
The hit and run tactics of the Canadians and Native Americans could slow the British advance but not stop it. In a series of mini engagements, the light infantry and the rangers edged forward towards Point Lévis. One sergeant called it a ‘sharp skirmish of near two hours’ and said ‘we sustained a considerable loss of killed and wounded’.
An officer wrote that in the end the French forces could not ‘withstand our fire and numbers’ and put the casualty figure at ‘thirty killed and wounded’.
The fighting had been intense enough to make their commander think about turning back.
As the exhausted men fought their way onto the cleared ground around Point Lévis they gazed across the St Lawrence River in awe. There, around half a mile away, was Quebec. It occupied one of the most powerful natural positions of any town or city in the world. Fine buildings with tall sloping roofs and churches with high spires sat above cliffs which soared out of the St Lawrence. The walls atop the cliffs bristled with cannon and beyond the city a great army was camped along the shoreline. Those with telescopes scanned its defences knowing that they could very well be asked to storm its walls. One was dismayed by what he saw: ‘their situation appears to be very strong by nature, and…they are very numerous’. Even from this far away he could pick out lines of trenches and redoubts and, also, ‘throughout their camp there are a continued chain of houses, the windows of which are logged up for the service of musketry’.
It had been a bloody morning. The men who now gazed on Quebec and its defenders realized that it was simply a prologue. Before the waters of the mighty river froze in winter the British force would have to capture Quebec or face an ignominious retreat that could derail the entire British war effort not just in North America but in distant Europe too. Defeat was not an option, yet the soldiers staring out at Quebec knew that they could well pay a terrible price for victory.
ONE (#ulink_4ae8fe66-ccee-50ed-9602-26f71bab80db)
Assault on New France
THERE WERE SHIPS in the St Lawrence. Not an armada, but a squadron powerful enough to dominate the river. Around ten in all, seven of them were obviously warships; their hulls were chequered with gun ports. The largest was a fine man of war with eighty guns, a match for any craft afloat. The air was heavy with fog. The vessels drifted in and out of banks of cloud and cohesion was maintained by the largest ship firing one of its cannon at regular intervals. Sharpeyed officers of the watch saw an eruption of white smoke with a momentary stab of fire at its centre, seconds later came the deep sound of the explosion, echoing back off the banks of the river as the shorelines slowly converged.
The river had grown narrower. After days of sailing up the Gulf of St Lawrence where the land was barely visible on either side, the crews could now see clearly either shore. On the north side it was spectacular: high, near vertical slopes, covered with spruce trees, broken only by the occasional section of cliff, damp with water that gave them a bright sheen during rare bursts of sunshine. On the south side, only twenty-two miles away, the coastline was flatter but beyond it, another mountain range reminded the crews of the vast, wild nature of the country.
There was a large island, separated from the south shore by a gap of just over three miles. With a good natural harbour the Île du Bic had, for centuries, been an easily defensible haven for ships on the passage up or down the river and home to a small community of priests and pilots. Here the largest ship broke out a large plain white flag, or ensign, at its mizzen. It was the ‘Bourbon Banner’, symbol of the Bourbon kings of France. On the shore the inhabitants, who had been keenly examining the ships for clues as to their nationality, broke out into ‘the greatest rejoicing imaginable’.
This was the gateway to Canada, the jewel in the crown of New France, a vast French empire that stretched from the North Atlantic to the Rocky Mountains and down to New Orleans at the mouth of the Mississippi. But its great size was matched by its vulnerability and especially now that France was at war. Her ancient rivalry with England, inherited in 1707 by the newly created Britain, had been revived at the end of the seventeenth century and they had fought a series of wars, each greater than the last, separated by periods of unconvincing peace. No longer did Englishmen strive to carve out dynastic empires in France itself; instead, the fighting surged across the almost limitless horizons of newly discovered continents, dragging in the settlers of the adolescent colonial empires. For four years New France had been fighting the British whose colonies in North America clung to the Atlantic Ocean from Massachusetts down to Georgia. At the beginning of each campaigning season when the ice melted in the St Lawrence River, the artery of Canada, the settlers, or habitants, waited nervously to see what help France would send to her North American possessions. This year, it seemed, France had been generous in her aid. The people of Bic rushed into canoes and paddled out to greet the ships, which they assumed were carrying the food, gunpowder, soldiers, and gold which New France so desperately needed to hold back the British and their American colonial allies.
The enthusiastic Canadians scrambled up the towering sides of the hulls on slippery, shallow steps that formed a vertical ladder. But as soon as they reached the deck, their euphoria was instantly extinguished. Rather than receiving a warm welcome from fellow subjects of the Most Christian King, Louis XV of France, they found themselves with British oak beneath their feet, and the muskets and cold steel of red-coated marines pointed at their bellies. The ships were British. It was 23 May 1759: the war had arrived in the heart of the French empire. This Royal Naval squadron under the command of Rear Admiral of the Red, Philip Durell, had been given the task of blockading Canada; to cut it off from any help that France might send, and hasten its capitulation.
On shore the joy of the habitants turned to confusion as they waited for the canoes to return, then to ‘consternation, rage and grief’ as they saw ‘the White colours struck, and the British flags, hoisted in their place’. Apparently, a priest who had been avidly watching the proceedings with a telescope clamped to his eye, ‘dropped down and instantly expired’.
With an age-old ruse de guerre Durell had lured experienced Canadian pilots on board, men he desperately needed to complete his mission.
The squabbles of European monarchs had poisoned relations between their colonies in the Americas since those continents had been discovered 250 years before. The ambitions of Louis XIV in Germany, the Low Countries, and Spain had pushed England into armed opposition. Fighting had spread from Western Europe to the wildernesses of the Carolinas or northern New Hampshire as it had to West Africa and Asia. But the current conflict was different. Long the victims of Europe’s wars, the colonies now became their instigators. As their size, populations, and economies had all swelled they developed their own ambitions, interests, and points of friction with the colonies of other powers. While Europe would never lose its primacy in policymakers’ minds, by the mid-eighteenth century French and British politicians found themselves increasingly impelled by colonial considerations. In the late 1740s ambitious British colonials had crossed the Allegheny Mountains and started trading with the Native American inhabitants of the Ohio valley. The British colonies had always claimed the entire continent as far as the Pacific but the barrier of the Alleghenies and the hostility of the Native Americans beyond them had prevented them from ever making these claims a reality. Now these adventurers hoped to sell vast swathes of this fertile land to migrants from the colonies, who would then provide a market for manufactured goods that they would supply. Little attention was paid to French assertions of sovereignty in the area, and none at all to those of the Native Americans.
The French regarded these encroachments as an unacceptable violation of the strategic corridor that linked Canada, along the St Lawrence, to Louisiana, a colony that was growing along the length of the Mississippi. New France moved troops into the Ohio valley and started building a chain of forts. This represented a threat not only to the individual British colonies, who believed it their destiny to expand west to the Pacific, but also to British North America as a whole which faced being surrounded by an unbroken ring of French forts from the Gulf of Mexico to the St Lawrence River. Even the British Prime Minister, Thomas Pelham Holles, Duke of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Newcastle-under-Lyme, probably the least belligerent man in George II’s government and no friend to rascally marauders on the fringes of empire, believed that this was intolerable. ‘No war,’ he wrote to the British ambassador at Versailles, ‘could be worse than the suffering of such insults.’ Britain would lose its entire position in America if her colonies were confined to the narrow coastal strip of the eastern seaboard. ‘That,’ he wrote emphatically, ‘is what we must not, we will not, suffer.’
With only a handful of British regular troops in North America it was left to the colonies to counter the French threat. Virginia took up the challenge and in true British style wrote a strongly worded letter to the French commander in the Ohio valley. It was delivered by eight men. Their leader was in his early twenties, a tall, hardy, rather conservative officer in the Virginia militia who owed his appointment to his connections to Lord Fairfax of Cameron, one of Virginia’s leading landowners. His name was George Washington. Given his later titanic reputation it is perhaps surprising that he stumbled rather than strode onto history’s stage. There was little sign of future greatness, indeed he was lucky to survive. He delivered his letter but the French commander was contemptuous. The following year Washington led a motley force over the mountains, planning to use gunpowder and steel where ink had failed. The first shots of the Seven Years War were fired in a glen near present-day Uniontown in Fayette County, Pennsylvania. In an action that did him no credit, on 28 May 1754, Washington ambushed a small force of French troops who were coming to warn him away from French land. Ensign Joseph Coulon de Villiers de Jumonville and nine of his men were killed. The French responded quickly, defeated Washington, sending him limping back across the Alleghenies. His actions had made war inevitable. He and his men were fortunate that they did not spend the whole of it as prisoners.
The fighting triggered the sending of reinforcements to North America by both the British and the French. Britain moved first by lunging into the Ohio country, trying to capture Fort Duquesne at the Forks of the Ohio River. A force under General Braddock was cobbled together from different units and sent out from Britain. It was raw, unused to American conditions and its men were utterly terrified of the Native Americans. Braddock made some attempt to adapt to local conditions but was unwilling to listen to colonial advice and as far as Native Americans were concerned, he told Benjamin Franklin that ‘it is impossible that [they] should make any impression’ on his disciplined troops.
Braddock’s men wilted as they hacked their way through thick forest, travelling between three and eight miles a day. The supply train collapsed as wagons broke up on the brutal road and horses dropped dead. Dysentery tore through the ranks. It was hugely impressive that the expedition got as far as it did. On 9 July 1755, the British force of approximately fifteen hundred men crossed the Monongahela River, nine miles short of the French Fort Duquesne. Their reward for such grit was blundering straight into a terrible ambush by 108 Canadian colonial troops, 146 militiamen, and 600 Native Americans. Braddock’s force was utterly routed. The French poured fire into the thickly packed column, while sharpshooters picked off the officers. Without leadership, the men simply herded together like terrified animals desperately seeking a false sense of security in numbers. The column eventually broke and flooded back along the road they had made. Native Americans swooped down on the wounded, killing many, saving others to torture later, and claiming others as prisoners to induct into their tribes and replace fallen family members. Braddock was mortally wounded, Washington was hurt and had several horses shot from under him. Two-thirds of the British force were killed or captured. The French suffered less than fifty dead and injured. Of the 150 men in the colonial Virginia Regiment 120 became casualties. Monongahela ranks with the battle of Isandlwana of the Anglo-Zulu War and the massacre of the British army between Kabul and Jalalabad during the First Anglo-Afghan War as an epic tragedy in the military history of the British Empire. The French captured money, supplies, and artillery but the psychological consequences of the defeat were the most serious. It shook the confidence of the British army in North America for years to come and created a myth of the Native American as a superhuman savage.
The war in North America continued to go badly. In Europe the news was scarcely better. The British were forced to shoot one of their admirals, John Byng, on his own quarterdeck to, in Voltaire’s memorable words, ‘encourage the others’. A court martial determined that Byng had been insufficiently aggressive when he withdrew his fleet after an indecisive battle off Minorca, allowing a French force to capture the vital island. On the Continent Britain’s woes were added to not by an absence of aggression but by a surfeit. Britain’s ally, Frederick II of Prussia, ignited a general war by invading Saxony, thus triggering a series of alliances that united Russia, Austria, and France against him, all three determined to punish Prus-sia’s temerity with annihilation. King George II’s hereditary possession in Germany, his beloved Electorate of Hanover, was rapidly overrun by French troops.
Britain’s fortunes did slowly improve from this nadir. French colonies were picked off in West Africa and the Caribbean. The French army was driven out of Hanover and then held at bay by an allied army paid for by London but commanded by a Prussian, Frederick’s brother-in-law, Ferdinand of Brunswick. Frederick won a series of stunning victories that would earn him the epithet ‘the Great’ but even so Prussia was never far from dismemberment. There was unequivocally good news from India where Robert Clive routed the Nawab of Bengal and his French allies at the battle of Plassey in 1757. This battle turned the British East India Company’s zone of influence into an empire. Fighting moved to the Carnatic where British forces sought to wipe out French power as they had in Bengal. But in North America there were years of defeat. Regular troops were trounced as they struggled with unfamiliar terrain and enemies while the civilians of the frontier were murdered, tortured, or captured by war parties of Native Americans and Canadians. 1758 had finally seen some success when a British amphibious force had seized the French stronghold of Louisbourg perched on the rocky Atlantic coast of Cape Breton Island.
Everything suggested that 1759 would be the decisive year. Britain was to make a massive push for victory in North America. Austria and Russia seemed to have Frederick on the brink of defeat and France, frustrated by her lack of progress in Germany, was assembling an invasion force to cross the Channel and knock Britain out of the war. She would then regain those colonies lost on the battlefield at the negotiating table.
For Britain the year began in crisis. London’s financial community were terrified by the spectre of invasion. Everyone knew that Le Havre was awash with shipwrights, its harbour filling inexorably with shallow-draught invasion barges. Forty thousand soldiers had been moved to France’s north-west coast. Lord Lyttelton, an opposition politician, wrote from London that ‘we talk of nothing here but the French invasion; they are certainly making such preparations as have never before been made to invade this island since the Spanish Armada’.
Government bonds sold at the steepest discounts of the war. The national debt was larger than anyone could have imagined possible and any new taxes had little chance of getting through a House of Commons packed with country gentlemen who, while patriots, had no wish to fund a perpetual war for the benefit of London financiers, merchants, and American prospectors. The cost of the navy alone jumped from £3.3 million in 1758 to £5 million in 1759. In all the Duke of Newcastle would have to find £12 million in 1759, over half of which he would need to borrow and as the markets lost confidence in the progress of the war the cost of that borrowing crept up.
The campaigning season opened with defeats for Ferdinand in Germany. He was driven back to the borders of Hanover itself. Frederick suffered sharp setbacks and later in the year he was so badly beaten by the Russians and Austrians at Kunersdorf that he thought the war lost. In Britain, by the start of summer the Chancellor of the Exchequer had asked to resign, government stock had plunged, and Newcastle was thinking about suspending seamen’s wages. The Prime Minister wrote a memorandum in which he admitted that ‘we are engaged in expenses infinitely above our strength…expedition after expedition, campaign after campaign’. He suggested that Prussia should be warned that Britain might not be able to continue the war for another year.
Attempts were made to fortify strategic points in southern England. Chatham, Portsmouth, Dover, and Plymouth were given earthworks and batteries were erected along the coast. They were futile gestures. The country was stripped of regular troops. The commander in chief of the British army told his colleagues that only 10,000 men would be available to meet an invasion on the south coast. So many of Britain’s Royal Engineers had been sent to America there were only five qualified engineers left in the country.
The only other troops available were a half-assembled militia of amateur soldiers. In a clash with veteran French infantrymen there would be no doubt as to the result. In desperation the population clung to reassuring jingoism. A great favourite was ‘Rule, Britannia’, with words by James Thomson and music by Thomas Arne, a song which had become wildly popular during Charles Edward Stuart’s Jacobite uprising of 1745-6. Another hit at the time was ‘Great Britain For Ever’.
Defiance alone never repelled an invasion. Britain’s real defence was her fleet. But her politicians had left little margin for error. The First Lord of the Admiralty reported to a small de facto war cabinet in February that the majority of British battleships had been dispatched around the globe to poach French possessions. Forty-one were left in home waters. The French were thought to have forty-three, although some of these were in her southern ports in the Mediterranean. The number of French ships that were in a condition to get to sea, let alone last long in the Channel, would be far smaller but the Royal Navy was also weaker than its paper strength, lacking nearly ten thousand men; many of its capital ships were hardly able to weigh their anchors.
The government had taken a terrible gamble. Britain itself was at risk and yet men, ships, and treasure had been sent abroad. Vast resources were committed to the invasion of Canada, the most important operation yet undertaken in the war. Failure would place the North American colonies in danger, threaten the creditworthiness of the British government, and almost certainly destroy Newcastle’s administration. The fate of the expedition would be felt from the log cabins of the American frontier to the palaces of Whitehall and Versailles.
If Durell’s Royal Naval squadron in the St Lawrence could block French supplies to Canada the prospects for the British attack would be rosy indeed. But he also had another task, almost as important. The river was unknown to British seamen. With its reefs, currents, rocks, and other hazards it was Canada’s first and, many thought, strongest line of defence. Durell was charged with finding a route up the river. The French authorities had made desultory attempts to chart the river but the results were unimpressive and, it seems, at best only partially available to the British. For generations the French had relied on pilots, each expert in a small stretch of river. So important was their knowledge that one British officer discovered that ‘it is a rule with the inhabitants of Quebec not to let any pilots have the whole navigation of this river’.
Durell had tricked these men aboard by showing them the Bourbon Banner. It was a perfectly legitimate ruse according to the rules that governed eighteenth-century warfare, and it had brought these vital pilots straight to him.
Durell was typical of the fighting admirals of the mid-century navy. He was 52 years old and had been at sea since he was 14. Like so many naval officers he had joined a ship thanks to the patronage of a family member, his uncle Captain Thomas Durell of the Sea Horse, although rather more unusually he had joined as an ordinary seaman. Serving his time on the lowest rung of the Georgian navy had given him an unbeatable training in what it took for men to sail and fight a ship. He had spent the rest of his teenage years in North American waters and was made an officer at 24 and a captain by his early thirties. War had made him rich. In the maelstrom of battle naval officers could fight for something more tangible than honour: prizes. Naval officers were incentivized by the guarantee that they would receive a proportion of the value of any enemy ship captured. In the 1740s he had helped take two French merchantmen, returning from the East Indies packed with valuable goods. But wealth had not dampened his ambition; he had continued at sea and had fought in large fleet actions against the French in European waters until returning to North America for good in 1758.
Durell had had an awful winter. He had written to the Admiralty in London in March 1759 from the British naval base of Halifax in Nova Scotia telling them that ‘the winter has been the severest that has been known since the settling of the place’, vessels attempting to get up the coast ‘have met with ice eighteen or twenty leagues from the land, so were obliged to return, after having had some of their people froze to death, and other frost bitten to that degree, as to lose legs and arms’.
Durell had stationed one of his quickest, most manoeuvrable ships, the frigate Sutherland under Captain John Rous off Canso, to bring him news of the ice melting. Rous was also in his fifties and knew the waters off the coast of Newfoundland and the Gulf of St Lawrence as well as any Briton or American. He had been a New England privateer, preying on French merchantmen, before a commodore in the Royal Navy recruited this ‘brisk, gallant man’ for the King’s Service.
When planning his campaign Durell had decided not to risk taking his full squadron into the gulf to lie in wait for the enemy. He had spent years in these waters, time which included a vain search for the French in similar conditions in 1755, and reckoned that his chances of finding them at sea were small and the cost to his crews and ships from the cold too high. Far better, he decided, to wait for the ice to melt in Halifax, and then sail up the St Lawrence and intercept the French in the confined waters of the river.
But Durell had been unable to leave Halifax until 5 May, trapped by ice and contrary winds. By the time he had arrived at Bic he had found out that his gamble had failed. As one British officer on the ships wrote,
near the isle of Bic we took a small sloop…who gave us the disagreeable news of the arrival of many transports and some frigates from Old France, which they left early in March and were deeply loaded with provisions and warlike stores. Had we sailed at the time you so earnestly wished, we had most certainly intercepted them, as they were not more than 10 days before us.
This was a disaster; the bold attempt to sever the umbilical cord to France had failed and with it any prospect of an easy campaign of conquest. These French supplies would enable Canada to fight on and nothing short of a full military campaign would bring the colony to its knees. Another British officer wrote, ‘this, you may imagine was mortifying news to us’.
It was mortifying enough for the sailors on the ships, but Durell would have known that for one man in particular it would be the most unwelcome news imaginable. The man whose job it was to command the soldiers that would do the fighting once the fleet delivered them up the St Lawrence into the heart of Canada, whose army would attempt to bring about the ruin of New France, to kill, capture, or scatter its defenders and batter its strongholds into submission. For this man, it would be by far the greatest test of his short career but he had been confident of success, as long as the British ships could stop French supplies from reaching the Canadians. Now his plan had misfired before he had even entered the St Lawrence. This commander was Major General James Wolfe.
While Durell secured pilots and intelligence, James Wolfe had spent the spring chafing to follow him up the river. Wolfe was charged with threatening, and ideally capturing, the principal towns of Canada, particularly its capital, Quebec, perched on a plateau, protected by cliffs which plunged down to the St Lawrence. Quebec was a great prize that had eluded British soldiers for generations. On paper he had a considerable force but his chances were lessening by the day as the expedition suffered delay after delay. The campaign season in North America was short; the onset of winter put a stop to any military activity as the river froze and the temperatures plunged far below zero. Every minute counted.
Even as Wolfe and many of his senior officers had met in Portsmouth, in southern England in February 1759 there was already a sense of great urgency. Previous attacks on Canada had petered out as the gales and frosts of September and October had heralded the onset of the terrible winter. Surviving letters to these officers from the bureaucrats and politicians in London are laced with exhortations of speed. On 1 January the Admiralty Secretary had written to the port admiral at Portsmouth telling him ‘in the most pressing manner’ to get the ships ready for service in North America, ‘with all the expedition that is possible’.
Wolfe was in overall command of the army; Rear Admiral Charles Saunders would command the fleet, including Durell’s ships as soon as he arrived in North American waters. Saunders assured the government that ‘the least delay’ was unacceptable.
The red-coated soldiers who would do the bulk of the fighting were already in America, but Wolfe and Saunders were bringing civilian ships hired by the navy to act as transports to get the men and supplies up the St Lawrence. There were 20,000 tons of shipping in all, each ton costing 12s. 9d. and was ‘victualled’ or supplied with food for four months. Many of these ships came straight from the collier trade that brought the coal from north-east England down to London, a city which even by 1759 was insatiable in its appetite. Over Christmas officers were sent up the Thames to chase dawdling ships carrying powder and shot. The Admiralty demanded an account of the readiness of the transports ‘every other day’.
Accompanying these transports and protecting them from French interference, Saunders commanded an overwhelmingly powerful naval task force. The Royal Navy was the strongest on the planet. It outnumbered the French navy, enjoying an advantage in battleships or ‘ships of the line’ of approximately 120 to 55. But whereas Britain had naval commitments across all of the world’s oceans, France was concentrating her ships to launch an invasion of Britain. Despite this threat Saunders was given fourteen battleships to protect the convoy of troop ships across the Atlantic, supported by six smaller frigates, three bomb vessels, and three fireships. These would join Durell’s American squadron of ten ships of the line and four frigates which had wintered in North America. This vast concentration of naval firepower would then be the strongest single fleet in the world.
Portsmouth was booming. It was the crucible of Britain’s naval effort and was packed with sailors, many with spare cash from enlistment bounties and their share of the prize money awarded for capturing enemy ships. The navy was larger than it had ever been before, with unprecedented investment being poured into ships and shore facilities like the Haslar Hospital in Gosport, opened in 1753, with a capacity for 2,000 patients, four times greater than Guy’s and St Thomas’s in London, the next biggest in the country. For years to come Haslar would be the largest brick building in Europe. A visitor to Portsmouth in 1759 commented that, ‘The streets are not the cleanest, nor the smells most savoury; but the continuous resort of seamen &c makes it always full of people, who seem in a hurry.’
It was here that Wolfe was joined by his subordinate, Brigadier George Townshend, who recorded the event in his journal, ‘I embarked on the Neptune,the Admiral’s ship, on the 13th of February on board of which was also the General.’
On 15 February Saunders sent an advance party of fifteen warships, a mix of ships of the line and frigates, plus sixty-six transports to New York to round up the troops who had wintered in the American colonies and collect fresh supplies.
The same day he received a promotion. He was made Vice Admiral of the Blue, and the Neptune immediately raised a blue ensign.
The next day Saunders was able to ‘acquaint the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty that I am now working out between the Buoys, with the wind at East’.
Townshend confirmed the journey’s auspicious start, writing that ‘we had a fine wind down the channel’.
Given that the prevailing winds in the Channel are south-west it must have seemed like a happy omen for the Atlantic crossing that lay ahead.
It did not last. After hitting calms off Cornwall the weather turned rough. Although ships could make the eastern seaboard of America in around a month,
the large convoy was held up by the pace of the slowest vessels. Thanks to ‘strong gales and thick hazy weather’ they lost contact with the Dublin with ‘three of the victuallers, two transports and a bomb tender’. Even though Saunders had ‘no doubt of their getting safe to America’, these incidents were pushing the operation into ever greater delays.
Other ships lost masts and spars in the heavy weather.
Navigation was an imperfect art. Fixing a ship’s longitude with any accuracy in 1759 was impossible. Seven years before, the University of Göttingen in Hanover had published a longitudinal table which allowed a careful navigator to work out his longitude to within sixty nautical miles but it is not known how many of the British ships carried the means to use even this rudimentary method. Cracking longitude was the great civilian and military challenge of the time, what the race to jet engines and harnessing the power of the atom was to the twentieth century. The Royal Navy was edging closer to a solution; two years later in 1761 the Deptford would sail for Jamaica with John Harrison’s chronometer on board and would stun his detractors by arriving just over one nautical mile out from her calculated position.
Such a revolution was a distant dream for the officers of Saunders’ fleet as they lined the quarterdeck every day at noon, praying for a gap in the clouds to get their reading from the position of the sun. Meanwhile ships lost topmasts, sails were shredded, and many of the transports parted company. In these northern latitudes they came across ‘floating islands of ice’.
They were aiming for Louisbourg, until the year before a French possession on Cape Breton Island that had guarded the mouth of the St Lawrence. It had fallen after a siege in the summer of 1758 and would now be a base for attacking Canada rather than defending it. Two miserable months after leaving Portsmouth the fleet neared Louisbourg but as it did so it ran into a thick shelf of ice miles wide that stretched out from the shore. The harbour at Louisbourg was completely enclosed. Saunders dispatched smaller boats to try to find passages through the ice but to no avail.
Saunders had no choice. Working the ships in these conditions was unimaginably tough. The sails were ‘stiff like sheets of tin’, making them impossible to furl, while the ‘running ropes freeze in the blocks’. The ‘topmen’ were suffering the most. These young, agile seamen were responsible for the setting and furling of these highest sails and faced frequent climbs up into the frozen rigging. The weather made this impossible. Durell reported to London that, in conditions such as these, ‘the men cannot expose their hands long enough to the cold to do their duty’.
Having been buffeted with ‘contrary winds and hard gales’ and now ‘stopped with a body of ice’ from getting into Louisbourg, Saunders had to head south-west, away from the Gulf of St Lawrence and towards the British base at Halifax.
The risks to his fleet from a further period at sea in the blizzard conditions waiting for the ice to melt were too great. He was already undermanned and the grim realities of eighteenth-century seafaring were further depleting his crews.
Lack of access to fresh provisions, the freezing weather, and physical exertion left the men, who slept in hammocks fourteen inches apart slung across a gun deck, prone to debilitating sickness. The year before HMS Pembroke had sailed from Portsmouth to Halifax and due to a rather circuitous route the voyage had lasted seventy-five days. Twenty-six men had died on the passage and a large number were put in hospital as soon as she arrived; five desperate men deserted in one of her small boats just after they dropped anchor.
Things were not as bad for Wolfe on the flagship, Neptune, but even so he chafed at the delays. He was a very poor sailor. The year before he had written to his father, ‘You may believe that I have passed my time disagreeably enough in this rough weather; at best, the life, you know, is not pleasant.’
On this crossing he wrote to a senior officer that ‘your servant as usual has been very sensible of the ship’s motions’.
As the battered fleet entered the bay at Halifax on 30 April Wolfe’s frustration turned into rage. There sitting at anchor was Durell’s North American squadron which should by now have been blockading the St Lawrence. The seamen of the fleet would have noticed immediately that Durell’s ships were riding at just one anchor and were therefore clearly ready to sail on the first fair breeze but the landsman Wolfe was livid. To his political superiors in London he was measured but to Major General Jeffrey Amherst, the senior British commander in North America, he wrote that, having arrived in ‘tolerable good order, the length of our passage considered’, he was ‘astounded to find Mr Durell at anchor’.
This was positively diplomatic compared to comments recorded in a remarkable and recently discovered private journal written by one of Wolfe’s close ring of aides. This straight-talking account, the so-called ‘Family Journal’, is more outspoken in its condemnation of Durell and his late departure from Halifax: ‘Nothing could astonish Wolfe more than on our arrival at Halifax’ to discover Durell riding at anchor, and ‘nothing could be more scandalous than their proceedings’ when ‘all the bellowing of the troops at Halifax could not persuade them to leave that harbour for fear of the ice’. The diarist writes that Wolfe, who ‘knew the navy well’, had feared since leaving Britain that they would be late to leave thanks to ‘an aversion to run the hazards of the river’. He went on to say that ‘much time, according to custom was spent in deliberation, and at length they determined that it would be more agreeable to sail up the river when the spring was well advanced than during so cold a season’. The ‘Family Journal’ makes it clear that Wolfe believed this was a setback of the most serious kind: had they got into the river when they were supposed to have done ‘supplies [would have] been intercepted’ and ‘the enemy would not have been able to fire a gun’. In short, concludes the journal, ‘Canada would certainly have been an easy conquest, had that squadron gone early enough into the river.’
Saunders, for whom sadly little personal correspondence exists, was kinder to his subordinate, writing to London on 2 May that he found Durell ‘unmoored, and ready to sail…He waits only for a wind, and, I hope, will sail tomorrow.’
He did sail on 3 May but ‘the wind proved contrary’ and ‘they were obliged to anchor’ just outside the harbour until 5 May.
As a result Durell entered the St Lawrence just days after the precious convoy from France. Wolfe would never forgive his naval colleagues for this failure. It was the first crack in a relationship upon which combined operations depended and the resultant schism was almost as detrimental to the British cause as the arrival of succour to his enemies.
The hysteria of Wolfe’s circle is perhaps attributable to the slow realization of the scale of the challenge and the paucity of their resources. Troop ships from New York trickled in slowly. The first to arrive was the Ruby, on 1 May, carrying ordnance, gunpowder, and shot. She told of storms, dismastings, and delays afflicting the rest of the fleet.
As the other ships did start to arrive it soon became clear that they were carrying numbers of men who were consistently below what Wolfe had been expecting. In Britain, he had been promised battle-hardened regiments of the British army in North America; however, nobody had considered that winter would leave these units decimated. Three thousand reinforcements were supposed to have been sent out from Britain, a mix of new recruits and soldiers drafted in from other regiments.
However, these men had been diverted to bolster a bogged-down campaign in the French-owned Caribbean islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe. Vague promises were made to transfer these men back up to Wolfe’s army after they had conquered the islands, but these assurances must have rung hollow to Wolfe. It was a fact that service in the Caribbean ruined any unit sent there. Microbes broke armies in the Indies more surely than enemy steel. From 1740 to 1742 a British and colonial American army outside the walls of Cartagena had lost 10,000 of its 14,000 men, about one in ten of them as a result of enemy action, the rest from disease. Wolfe, as a boy soldier, had been earmarked for the expedition but had been saved from an almost certain death by a delicate constitution that was so overwhelmed by the germs of Portsmouth that he was sent home to recuperate with his mother. The Spanish boasted that disease provided a surer defence than ships, forts, and men. They morbidly celebrated yellow fever, as fiebre patriótica, ‘patriotic fever’, because it attacked outsiders with such jingoistic fervour.
Criminals were granted a reprieve from the death penalty in Britain if they agreed to serve in the tropics. Soldiers were often given the choice when being punished for a grave offence: 1,000 lashes or service in the Caribbean; they usually chose the former.
Wolfe would have known it would be a miracle if the troops arrived back in the North Atlantic in time to be of any use even if they were not eviscerated by disease. He would have to make do with the regiments already in theatre. At least every regiment had seen action. British regular soldiers had been fighting in North America since 1755. Each summer’s fighting had been on a larger scale than the year before. Early in the war the men had been so raw that many of them had been taught how to use muskets on decks of transports by officers who had learnt their trade through reading manuals. Now every unit had served through at least one operation and had survived one tough winter. On the downside the campaigns and climate had exerted a powerful attritional effect. Men had used the dispersal to billets over the winter as an opportunity to desert and disappear along the vast and unregulated frontier. Disease could be just as bad among the snow as it was in the tropics. The absence of fresh fruit and vegetables over the winter meant that men lacked vitamin C and scurvy was a constant threat. The year before Wolfe had written at the start of the campaigning season that ‘some of the regiments of this army have 3 or 400 men eaten up with scurvy’.
This terrible disease appeared first as liver spots on the skin and then quickly led to spongy gums and haemorrhaging from all mucous membranes. Sufferers became listless and immobilized and the advanced stages saw the loss of teeth and suppurating wounds. It is famously associated with long sea journeys, but such was the isolation of garrisons in the backcountry during the winter, that it was just as common along the frontier.
Wolfe wrote a barrage of letters to superiors in London and New York, describing the condition of the four battalions that had spent the winter in Halifax. They were ‘in good order’, but ‘are at a very low ebb’. Measles had recently ‘got amongst them’, and they would have suffered far worse had it not been for the ‘more than common care of the officers that command them’. Their officers had attempted to obtain fresh provisions where possible, maintain good hospitals, and lay on plenty of the local anti-scorbutic, ‘spruce beer’, a mildly alcoholic drink brewed from molasses and spruce tips and a good source of vitamin C. These precautions, combined with strict discipline, had ‘preserved these battalions from utter ruin’, without them, ‘these regiments would have been utterly annihilated’. Even so, Wolfe warned that their numbers were still well below expectations. Many of the battalions at Halifax numbered around five hundred men each, just over half their ideal complement. Wolfe feared that the two battalions left further north in Louisbourg, cut off from the outside world over the winter, were ‘in a worse condition’. He stated glumly that ‘the number of regular forces can hardly exceed the half’ of 12,000 that London had promised him during the planning phase. Any losses during the sail up the St Lawrence or a bad outbreak of disease during the campaign would result in ‘some difficulties’, and Wolfe was convinced that the risky nature of this amphibious assault meant that they were ‘very liable to accidents’. He would fight this campaign with no reserve, no margin for error. However, he told his superiors in London, ‘our troops, indeed, are good and very well disposed. If valour can make amends for want of numbers, we shall probably succeed.’
Wolfe set about preparing his army for the expedition with the relentless energy for which he had become famous. At 32 he was young for so important a command. In a letter to his uncle he blamed his appointment on ‘the backwardness of some of the older officers’, which ‘in some measure forced the Government to come down so low’.
As so often the pre-war hierarchy had failed to shine in the first few years of combat and promising young officers had been rapidly promoted. Wolfe certainly had shown potential but he was not Achilles reborn. He was exceptionally tall at six foot, but thin and ungainly, with pale skin, long red hair that looked fine and lank, a pointy, fragile nose, and a weak, receding chin: in all a strange ‘assemblage of feature’.
He had piercing blue eyes but they could not detract from an overall sense of physical infirmity, reinforced by his own constant commentary on his ill health. He suffered from ‘the gravel’, a painful condition caused by the build-up of crystals in the urinary tract, which he tried to douse with regular doses of liquid soap. It no doubt aggravated a pronounced tendency to hypochondria; he often described himself as a broken man. He wrote to his mother that ‘folks are surprised to see [my] meagre, consumptive, decaying figure’. He blamed hard campaigning that ‘stripped me of my bloom’ and brought him ‘to old age and infirmity’. A repeated lament of his letters is that ‘I am perhaps somewhat nearer my end than other of my time.’
To his uncle he wrote, ‘If I have health and constitution enough for the campaign, I shall think myself a lucky man; what happens afterwards is of no great consequence.’
Wolfe is strangely inaccessible. He was certainly melodramatic, sensitive, and prone to self-pity. Many of his letters drip with disapproval for fellow officers and contain an almost puritanical adherence to duty. As a result he is often portrayed as aloof and uneasy among his peers, and yet there are hints of a more relaxed side to him. One officer under his command recorded that ‘his gestures [were] as open as those of an actor who feels no constraint’ and he displayed ‘a certain animation in the countenance and spirit in his manner that solicited attention and interested most people in his favour’.
He certainly had a very loyal group of close friends. His attitude to the men under his command varied wildly depending on his mood and their performance in battle. But he was unwavering in his strong paternalism and the men in return seemed to harbour a genuine affection for their commander. He was certainly visible, his claims of physical infirmity are belied by his behaviour on campaign; he was always where the action was hottest and had the scars to prove it. He never shrank from the rigours of active service and it is possible that his maladies were exaggerated for effect.
His grandfather and father had both been soldiers. He was commissioned an officer aged 14, thanks to his father’s influence, first into the marines and then into an army regiment destined for service on the Continent. He tasted action for the first time at 16 against the French at the battle of Dettingen, where he caught the eye of a powerful patron, the 22-year-old Prince William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, second and favourite son of King George II. With Cumberland’s support, plus his own impeccable family and social army network and his real talent, he ascended quickly through the ranks. He proved himself an excellent regimental commander; his battalions were disciplined and drilled to the highest standards that the army’s peacetime penury would allow. He also thought and wrote with genuine insight on tactics in the age of musket, bayonet, and cannon.
Wolfe’s plan had been to leave Louisbourg and sail up the St Lawrence on 7 May. This was wildly optimistic; the sea ice and the slow Atlantic crossing had delayed operations but so too had the sheer scale of North America and the inadequacy of eighteenth-century communications. Some regiments which had wintered in the colonies only heard about their inclusion in the amphibious force in April. Many were scattered across swathes of country to minimize the impact on the community of the number of extra mouths to feed during the long winter. Four companies of the 78th Regiment had been garrisoning Fort Stanwix over the winter, two-thirds of the way between Albany and Lake Ontario. They had suffered terribly from scurvy, been the target of a daring and bloody Native American raid and were only relieved on 10 April. They were buffeted by blocks of ice on the Mohawk River as they made their way to Albany, then bundled on ships to take them to New York City where, without being allowed to land, they were transferred onto transports and shipped to join Wolfe’s army. It is impressive that they arrived at all. Provisions for the operation arrived from the rich pastures of Pennsylvania, shipped over seven hundred miles from Philadelphia. These were huge logistical achievements on a continent which had not witnessed warfare on this scale before.
On 13 May the Neptune, with Wolfe and Saunders on board, loosed her main course and fired two guns, the prearranged signal for the fleet to weigh anchor.
Then she stood out to sea and made for Louisbourg ‘with all the ships that were in readiness’.
Two days later they arrived off Louisbourg. ‘The coast was still full of ice’
but this time there were sufficient gaps for Saunders to be able to thread his ships into the harbour.
Perched on a barren landscape, Louisbourg was a squat, grey fortress that commanded the mouth of the St Lawrence and was the key to Canada as well as providing French fishermen on the Grand Banks, the most lucrative fishing grounds in the world, with a secure harbour. It had been captured the year before, but had held out long enough to deny the British the chance to enter the St Lawrence and attack the heart of New France. Wolfe had commanded a brigade in the besieging force and his energy and courage had won him a reputation and a promotion back in Britain. Chevalier Johnstone, a Scottish exile serving with the French forces, had painted a bleak picture of life in this desolate stronghold: ‘the climate, like the soil, is abominable at Louisbourg: clouds of thick fogs, which come from the south-west, cover it, generally from the month of April until the end of July, to such a degree that sometimes for a month together they never see the sun’. The surrounding countryside had little to recommend it either, ‘miserable soil—hills, rocks, swamps, lakes and morasses—incapable of producing anything’.
It was the most modern of all the French fortifications in North America, and looked to visitors like a textbook Flanders fortress. Indeed, some of the cut stone had been shipped out from the Rochefort area of France, used as ballast on vessels crossing the Atlantic.
The defences had been battered during the previous summer’s siege, many of the houses and the ‘King’s Bastion’, or citadel, had been reduced to rubble by British cannon and a large breach had been smashed in the curtain wall. As Wolfe had predicted the regiments that had occupied this broken city over the winter were in a parlous state. Scurvy had crippled hundreds of men; recruiting parties sent to the American colonies had proved unsuccessful at persuading young men to surrender their independence in return for a precarious existence at the former French fortress courtesy of King George. So desperate was the need for recruits that no less than 131 former French soldiers were absorbed into British units. Amherst, the senior British officer in North America, expected them to ‘immediately desert’ to their former masters, ‘as soon as we come near to the enemy’.
There was still snow on the ground in the hollows and Saunders reported to London that ‘the harbour was entirely filled up with ice, that for several days it was not practicable for boats to pass’. The weather would cause further delays; in fact, its severity ‘has, by much, exceeded any that can be remembered by the oldest inhabitants of this part of the world’.
Another senior officer wrote that there was so much ice ‘for several days that there was no getting on board or ashore without a great deal of trouble and some danger’.
The sailors were undeterred. Lieutenant John Knox, of the 43rd Regiment, who left the liveliest and most detailed of all the journals of the campaign, arrived in Halifax with his regiment to find ‘foolhardy seamen’ getting from ship to shore and back again using the floating ice as stepping stones, ‘stepping from one to another, with boat-hooks…in their hands; I own I was in some pain while I saw them, for, had their feet slipped from under them, they must have perished’.
Knox was Irish, the third son of a Sligo merchant with an uncle who had attended Trinity College, Dublin and became a priest. He was typical of the educated, ‘middling’ sort of men who considered themselves gentlemen but lacked the money or connections to scale the heights of eighteenth-century society. The army offered men like Knox an honourable career path, with possibilities of glory, reward, and advancement. As was normal he joined as a ‘volunteer’, a civilian given permission to serve with a regiment with a view to obtaining a vacancy in the officer corps when disease or a bullet created one. They carried muskets and served as ordinary soldiers but ate and socialized with the officers. Gallant conduct was the surest way to gain attention and throughout the eighteenth century these young men would show suicidal bravery on countless occasions. Knox’s moment came at the defeat at the battle of Lauffeld, after which Cumberland awarded him an ensigncy (the most junior officer’s rank) in the 43rd Regiment of Foot. He seems to have made a good marriage to a wealthy woman but her money was held by a trustee who went bankrupt. It was clearly to be on the field of battle that Knox would have to make his fortune.
Knox and his men had spent nearly two lonely years in Nova Scotia around Annapolis and Fort Cumberland. His experience of frontier life was typical: extraordinary seasonal extremes of hot and cold weather, long periods of boredom punctuated with moments of utter terror. He was honest about the realities on the ground that belied the carefully coloured maps of Whitehall,
though we are said to be in possession of Nova Scotia, yet it is in reality of a few fortresses only, the French and Indians disputing the country with us on every occasion, inch by inch, even within the range of our artillery; so that, as I have observed before, when the troops are not numerous, they cannot venture in safety beyond their walls.
Seventeen fifty-nine was to be different; the 43rd was finally going to take part in active campaigning. There was a sense of excitement as Knox’s ship fell in with the other transports and arrived at Louisbourg, with its narrow entrance, passed the large naval ships and anchored under the walls of the town. The ice and thick fog forced many of the supply ships to wait off the coast for days at a time before attempting to enter the port, their crews straining their ears for the sound of breakers on the rocky beach to let them know when they were too close to shore.
A cannon roared from a battery on the island in the middle of the bay to give navigators and lookouts a reference point. Despite the conditions Knox was thrilled to be a part of the gathering force: ‘every person seems cheerfully busy here in preparing for the expedi-tion’.
Wolfe noted the arrival of Knox and his fellow soldiers in Kennedy’s 43rd Regiment in his journal: ‘Webb’s, Kennedy’s, part of Lascelles’s Artillery and Military from Boston arrived. A ship with Webb’s Light Infantry ran upon the rocks in Gabarus Bay. Coldness on that occasion. The troops got safe on shore.’
Knox hoped to catch a glimpse of his young commander and he managed to watch as General Wolfe made inspections. On 25 May Knox reports that Wolfe ‘was highly pleased’ with the ‘exactness and spirit’ of some troops who were demonstrating their ‘manoeuvres and evolutions’. So impressive were these particular troops that other commanding officers apologized to Wolfe in advance, saying that the long period in winter quarters had limited their abilities to drill the men and implement a new exercise, which Wolfe favoured, of firing musket volleys. According to Knox, Wolfe cheerfully dismissed their concerns, ‘“Poh! Poh!—new exercise—new fiddlesticks; if they are otherwise well disciplined and will fight,that’s all I shall require of them.”’
The peacetime British army was small, scattered, and poorly trained. Even the existence of a standing army in peacetime was controversial. The British political class revelled in its perceived freedoms and could become hysterical in defending their ‘ancient liberties’. A standing army was seen as a buttress of tyranny. The Stuart kings of the seventeenth century, Charles I and his two sons, and Cromwell, the imperial antiking, had demonstrated dangerously autocratic tendencies, epitomized by their maintenance of large standing armies. Across the Channel Europe provided a multitude of examples of arbitrary government, regimes whose existence rested on the muskets of conscripted peasants. A central plank of the ‘Glorious Revolution’ settlement of 1688-9 was the passing of the Mutiny Act which stated clearly that it was illegal to recruit and maintain a standing army without the consent of Parliament. From then on numbers of troops depended entirely on Parliament’s willingness to pay for them.
By the 1750s the peacetime British army numbered just under thirty thousand men, well below half the size of the Prussian army and equivalent to that commanded by the King of Sardinia. King George could also call on the 12,000 men of the Irish army paid for by his Irish subjects but the Parliament in Dublin got nervous when more than two thousand of these men were sent to serve abroad. The Westminster Parliament proved itself unwilling to impose taxes to maintain even the small British army properly. There were virtually no purposebuilt barracks with facilities to allow whole regiments, let alone brigades or bigger units, to train together. Instead regiments were broken up and billeted upon reluctant landlords in pubs and hostelries across wide areas. The resulting lack of tactical cohesion, not to mention deep antipathy of the civilian population, is not hard to imagine. Wartime was really the only opportunity to concentrate several regiments in single encampments and drill them together. Camp commanders could then enforce a standard drill, equalizing the length and speed of pace, imposing uniform musketry practice and recognizable command signals. As soon as Knox had landed in North America in 1757 his regiment was to join the others and ‘take all opportunities for exercise’. Entrenchments were built ‘in order to discipline and instruct the troops, in the methods of attack and defence’. This would ‘make the troops acquainted with the nature of the service they are going upon; also to render the smell of powder more familiar to the young soldiers’.
For many it would be the first time they had trained with anything other than their own company of, at most, a hundred men.
At Louisbourg Wolfe’s army got the opportunity to make up for the scarcities of peacetime. Gunpowder and musket balls were issued to every soldier; the daily crackle of musket volleys echoed around the bay. Malcolm Fraser was a 26-year-old subaltern. He was an unlikely redcoat. His father had been ‘out’ for Charles James Stuart in the ‘45 rebellion, when Bonnie Prince Charlie had attempted to seize the throne of Britain back from his distant cousin George II. Charles’ depleted, exhausted, and starving army was annihilated on Drumossie Moor, a battle known to history as Culloden. With suicidal bravery the Highlanders had charged into withering British musketry and artillery fire, leaving the moor heaped with dead. Among the fallen was Malcolm Fraser’s father. The rebellion lingered on long enough to give the Duke of Cumberland an excuse to launch a systematic and brutal campaign of counter-insurgency throughout the Highlands. Settlements were burnt, men transported to the New World, and Highland dress, weapons, and bagpipes were all banned. Wolfe had served during the campaign and remained in Scotland long afterwards as part of what was effectively an army of occupation.
Now, only a decade later, the British government’s need for troops forced them to swallow their mistrust of the Highlanders and acquiesce to some recruitment among the more loyal clans. The prospect of economic and social advancement as well as the chance to don traditional Highland garb and assemble with their fellow clansmen on the field of battle ensured that the new Highland regiments were inundated with volunteers. Men begged to serve in the army that had recently slaughtered their fathers and uncles. Malcolm Fraser appears at ease with his inverted allegiance. Loyalty to the family and clan were far more important than the external allegiance of their chief. It mattered little to him which descendant of James VI and I sat on the throne in London. Men like him were happy if they were among their peers, a brace of pistols and a long Highland sword at the waist, accompanied by the clan piper playing traditional airs. Fraser described this period of intensive training after a long winter of isolation with excitement in his journal. ‘We are ordered ashore every day while here,’ he wrote, ‘to exercise along with the rest of the Army.’
On 31 May four regiments ‘performed several manoeuvres in presence of the General Officers, such as charging in line of battle, forming the line into columns, and reducing them; dispersing, rallying…Which were all so well executed, as to afford the highest satisfaction to the generals.’
While Fraser, Knox, and the other soldiers trained, Wolfe continued in his attempts to scrape together every last man for the expedition and ensure that they were fed and kept as healthy as possible. The garrison at Louisbourg was under the command of the Governor, Brigadier Edward Whitmore. It consisted of four regiments, one of which, Colonel Bragg’s 28th, was ordered to join Wolfe’s army. Each regiment in the British army also had a grenadier company. This was made up of the elite of each regiment, physically fit and experienced veterans, distinguished by different uniforms and headwear. Wolfe was given the three grenadier companies from the remaining regiments of the Louisbourg garrison, who would make up a small but crack regiment in his army known as the ‘Louisbourg Grenadiers’ consisting of thirteen officers and 313 men. Wolfe wanted more; as well as a grenadier company, regiments in North America had recently formed companies of ‘light infantry’. It was hoped that these units would give the British army more flexibility when fighting in the woods of North America. Ideally, they were the regiment’s best marksmen and the quickest witted, agile men who were encouraged to fight in a more open, irregular style than the classic infantryman.
Wolfe begged Whitmore for all of his light infantrymen as well as his grenadiers. ‘We are disappointed of the recruits which were intended to be sent from the West Indies to join us,’ he wrote, ‘and as several regiments are much weaker than they were thought, in England, to be, I must further represent to you that good troops only can make amends for the want of numbers in an undertaking of this sort.’ He reminded him of the strategic situation: ‘upon the success of our attacks in Canada, the security of the whole continent of north America in a great measure depends’.
Wolfe did not hold Whitmore in high esteem; they had both served as brigadiers in the siege of Louisbourg the year before, and with Whitmore approaching his seventieth birthday, Wolfe had described him as a ‘poor, old, sleepy man’, and claimed that ‘he never was a soldier’.
It is possible that Wolfe’s difficulty to hide his contempt for people contributed to Whitmore’s refusal. He would not part with any more men than London had specifically ordered. Whitmore had sailed on Quebec as a young man in 1711 and had seen the fleet wrecked on the river and hundreds of men drowned; his duty was to protect Louisbourg not send his finest troops on a dangerous mission to satisfy the thirst for glory of the lanky young Major General. Wolfe informed London, ‘I applied to Mr Whitmore for three companies of light infantry of his garrison…If Brigadier Whitmore did not consent to my proposal it has proceeded from the most scrupulous obedience to orders, believing himself not at liberty to judge and act according to circumstances.’
Wolfe’s disappointment at Whitmore’s defiance did not interfere with his furious activity. He and his staff were busy planning the next phase of the operation: getting the army on board transports and up the St Lawrence as far as the city of Quebec. Daily orders were issued concerning every aspect of the men’s lives. It was ‘particularly necessary’ that a large stock of shoes was provided, given the difficulty of getting them during the campaign. Axes, picks, shovels, and bill hooks were handed out in proportion to the numbers of men in each regiment. Fraser’s large 78th Regiment with its 1,000 men was given 100 pick axes, Amherst’s smaller 15th was only issued with fifty. Regimental quartermasters, the all-important officers responsible for a unit’s equipment, were to go and claim for ‘one hundred and forty tents’ per regiment from the Fair American transport. Every man was issued thirty-six rounds of ammunition as well as musket balls and spare flints, a vital part of the firing mechanism on their ‘flintlock’ muskets. More powder and balls were stored in casks aboard each transport. It was a reminder that as soon as the fleet left Louisbourg they were in hostile waters. Every attempt was also made to obtain ‘as much fresh provisions as can be procured’; each regiment would send a party daily to the barren ground to the north-east of the town, Pointe de Rochefort, at half an hour intervals to receive their daily supply. On 4 June the Neptune’s log recorded that she ‘received on board six live bullocks’.
Although eighteenth-century medical knowledge was sketchy they had certainly grasped that fresh meat was better than salted. Meanwhile ‘lines and hooks’ were placed aboard the transports so that they could eat fresh fish on the way up the river. ‘To prevent the spreading of distempers in the transports, the hospital ship will receive any men that may fall ill on the voyage,’ Wolfe ordered. Transports would raise a flag at the mizzen peak, the end of the yard that carried the mizzen sail, to notify the fleet that they had sick men on board who needed hospitalization, while the hospital ships themselves flew a red banner from the top of their foremast. The men were not to be ‘too much crowded’ and each commander was to report on the state of their transport and whether it was fit to proceed. Officers were told that ‘a quantity of spruce beer…would be of great use to their men’. Any men who were already ‘weak and sickly’ were ‘not to embark with their regiments’. But they were not to worry: ‘measures will be taken to bring those men to the army as soon as they are perfectly recovered’.
By 1 June, Wolfe could be stayed no longer. He was almost a month behind schedule already and he still had to brave the treacherous waters of the St Lawrence before he could even lay his eyes on the enemy. His order for the day stated that ‘the troops land no more’. Flat-bottomed boats, innovations designed specifically for amphibious operations, were ‘to be hoisted in’ and ‘washed every day to prevent leaking’. The ships and crews must now be ready to ‘sail at the first signal, when three guns are fired from the saluting battery, all officers to repair on board’.
The next day the sick were finally sent ashore and those men too old or disabled to have a hope of recovery were sent aboard a transport for the crossing back to Britain. Wolfe and Saunders announced that they were intent on ‘sailing on the first fair wind’. Instructions were left at Louisbourg for any latecomers to follow the fleet into the St Lawrence.
The laborious process of weighing anchor began in the early morning of 4 June. On the biggest ships like the Neptune it was a Herculean task. Ten sailors worked each of fourteen wooden bars that slotted into a giant winch or ‘capstan’ on the middle gun deck just forward of the mainmast. Below them another ten men worked each of twelve bars on a ‘trundlehead’, essentially another capstan working on the same axis. These teams, 260 strong, could lift approximately ten tons. Depending on the length of cable, the wind and tide, an anchor could take six hours to raise. In emergencies, the captain could order the crew to ‘let slip’ and simply leave the anchor and cable behind on the seabed. The twenty-four-inch cable was made from the intertwining of three regular ropes and was too wide for the capstan and so a smaller ‘messenger’ rope was attached to the cable with ‘nipper’ cords that had to be slid along at regular intervals as the cable came in. To lighten the load on the seamen, if the wind favoured it, ships could set some sail to bring them ‘a-peek’, a point at which they were vertically above the anchor. Once it was raised almost out of the water, it had to be ‘catted’: another team of men hauled on a tackle which brought it up out of the water, while keeping it away from the hull, making sure the heavy flukes did not puncture the wood, and lashed it to the side of the forecastle. Meanwhile, the cable was stored right down in the bottom of the ship, below the waterline. When it dried off the soft manilla rope made an excellent mattress and sleeping in the cable tier became a perk of the senior members of the ship’s company.
Knox watched the operation from the 337-ton, London-based transport ship, the Goodwill, under its colourful master, Thomas Killick. One hundred and seventy-nine officers and men of the 43rd Regiment were on board. He watched the transports as they ‘got their anchors a-peek’, with the soldiers on board sweating at the capstans alongside the seamen. The time it took to get the entire fleet out of the harbour meant that the brief window of favourable weather was missed. It turned ‘foul, with a thick fog [and] little or no wind’. Those ships not already out of the harbour had to drop their anchors again and wait for the weather to change. One of Wolfe’s senior officers recorded that the wind remained ‘contrary’ until the sixth, ‘during which time the Admiral kept in the offing’, sailing backwards and forwards off Louisbourg until the rest of the fleet could get out of harbour.
At 0400 hours on 6 June it was the Goodwill’s turn to crawl out of Louisbourg. By 1000 hours she joined the waiting fleet. The weather was fair, with a variable, light breeze. ‘Now that we are joined, imagination cannot conceive a more eligible prospect,’ enthused Knox. ‘Our whole armament, naval and military, were in high spirits,’ he recorded, and despite the grave challenges ahead he had no doubt that under ‘such Admirals and Generals’ together ‘with so respectable a fleet’ and ‘such a body of well-appointed regular troops’ there would be ‘the greatest success’. He reported that ‘the prevailing sentimental toast among the officers is—British colours on every French fort, port, and garrison in America’.
Not everyone shared Knox’s enthusiasm. Fraser made an ominous entry in his diary: ‘I hear a Lieutenant on board one of the men of war has shot himself—for fear I suppose the French should do it.’ Fraser was surprised to hear of the suicide given the dangers that certainly beckoned. ‘If he was wearied of life, he might soon get quit of it in a more honourable way.’
Wolfe was relieved to be underway and finished a dispatch that day on board the Neptune in which he was upbeat about the prospects for the operation. He attached a return of the troops embarked at Louisbourg and wrote that he expected ‘to find a good part of the [French] force of Canada at Quebec’, but his army was ‘prepared to meet them. Whatever the end is, I flatter myself that his Majesty will not be dissatisfied with the behaviour of his troops.’ A senior member of Wolfe’s staff wrote that the ‘whole force was now assembled’ and ‘amounted to 8,535 soldiers, fit for duty, officers included’. It was far short of the 12,000 that Wolfe had been promised and it would almost certainly be fewer men than the French could muster to defend Canada.
It was the largest naval expedition in North American history: forty-two men of war, fourteen of which carried sixty guns or more and were known as ‘ships of the line’. In the eighteenth century, the weight, accuracy and range of cannon meant that ships were designed to carry many of them firing at ninety degrees to the direction of the vessel. As a result action was joined when the enemy was alongside rather than in front or behind. The mighty capital ships of powers like Britain and France would form lines and exchange crashing broadsides with their opponents. The Neptune, on whose quarterdeck Wolfe and his staff took their daily exercise, was one of the most powerful ships of the line in the world. Weighing nearly two thousand tons, she was 171 feet long and crewed by just under eight hundred officers and men. She had twenty-eight cannon on her lower gun deck, each firing a thirty-two-pound ball, termed 32 pounders, and on her middle and upper deck another sixty 18 and 12 pounders. In a second the Neptune was capable of blasting a ton of lead into the hull and rigging of an enemy ship. Other warships had different roles; lighter, quicker frigates could harass an enemy’s merchant fleet or provide support for land forces in shallower waters. Some ships carried mortars or acted as scouts. Saunders was well supplied with all varieties.
The main role of the naval vessels was to protect the vast array of civilian vessels on which the success of the operation relied. In all there were between one hundred and twenty and one hundred and forty transport ships of all rigs and sizes. They were carrying not just the troops but all the supplies that would allow the force to sail deep into enemy territory. It had to be assumed that no food would be available around Quebec and so the expedition was forced to bring every sack of flour as well as every spade and ounce of gunpowder with it. The Hunter, Resolution, and Scarboro from Boston carried cattle; ships like the Phoenix, Martha, and Hannah had all the paraphernalia associated with artillery in their holds: siege guns, spare carriages and ramrods, in all 163 pieces of artillery of all shapes and sizes. Other ships carried just powder and shot. The expedition’s 75,000 cannonballs sat low in the holds, providing extra ballast. The Industry and Sally from the south coast of England carried some of the 65,000 shells for the mortars. There were 1.2 million musket cartridges, 10,862 barrels of powder, and even 250 primitive rockets. The New England-based Good Intent and Peggy & Sarah weighing in at just over a hundred tons were designated sounding vessels: shallow-draught ships that could go ahead of the main fleet and check the depth of water by taking regular soundings using a lead weight thrown over the side and measuring the depth on a marked line.
Such a massive fleet needed tight organization if it was to avoid the twin perils of getting scattered across the North Atlantic or of crashing into each other. Saunders had issued a long set of sailing instructions at Louisbourg.
The fleet would travel in three divisions: white, red, and blue. Wolfe’s army had been divided into three brigades and appropriately enough, each brigade was assigned to one of the divisions. Every single ship would fly ‘vanes’ (long, thin flags) denoting which division they were in and exactly what or who was on board. The twenty-eight-gun frigate Lowestoft would command the lead, white division and would ‘wear a white broad pendant’ during the day and a light on the stern of her poop deck and another at the top of her mainmast at night. All the transports in the division were distinguished by smaller white vanes. Each regiment had a slight variation. Ships carrying Knox and his fellow soldiers of the 43rd had white vanes with one red ball. Malcolm Fraser in the 78th sailed in a ship with a white vane with two blue balls. Next, was the red division, commanded by Captain Schomberg on the Diana flying a red pendant and trailed by transports with the second brigade on board all flying red vanes. This was followed by the blue division with the third brigade of Wolfe’s army on board. Ships carrying artillery flew red-and-blue striped flags; those carrying provisions, blue-and-yellow. Saunders used a series of intricate signals using flags and cannon fire to maintain command and control of his unwieldy fleet. He could summon all the key personnel on board, masters of transports, regimental commanders and staff. If he or Wolfe wished to see Knox’s commanding officer, Major Robert Elliot, for example, a blue-and-white chequered pendant would be flown from the head of the main topmast. The masters of the transports had been unambiguously told to obey orders, they were ‘as far as they are able to keep their respective divisions, and carry sail when the men-of-war do, that no time may be lost by negligence of delays’. Saunders emphasized that ‘the regular and orderly sailing of the fleet’ was ‘of the utmost consequence’. The master of every transport was ‘strictly enjoined to look out for and punctually obey’ all the signals that his divisional commander made. Alarmingly for the transports, if they failed to notice or act on a signal, ‘the Captains of his Majesty’s ships are directed to compel them to a stricter observance of their duty by firing a shot at them’. The cohesion of the fleet was vital. The most vulnerable phase for any amphibious force was before it had the chance to deploy on land. The greatest threats to the expedition were the treacherous waters of the St Lawrence, French ships and summer storms. These had the capacity to defeat Wolfe more surely than French muskets outside Quebec.
The soldiers found themselves in a different world, with its own language, hierarchy, mores, and even calendar. They had to know how to behave. To save their red coats from the harsh climate they wore them inside out. On the passage across the Atlantic Knox had almost been fired upon by an American privateer when they saw a deck full of men wearing off-white coats, the colour worn by the French infantry. Wolfe had ordered the soldiers to ‘be as useful as possible in working their ships’. Wooden ships carried great quantities of pitch, tar, gunpowder, and canvas, and were, as a result, horribly vulnerable to fire. Soldiers who were unused to life afloat had to be made aware of this threat. An order to men crossing the Channel to Flanders during the previous war stated that ‘a sergeant, a corporal and 12 men of each transport to be as a guard to keep things quiet and to place sentries on the officers’ baggage and to suffer no man to smoke between decks’.
Wolfe was equally careful to ensure discipline and fire prevention on board ship and zealous in the preservation of his men’s well-being: ‘when the weather permits the men are to eat upon deck, and be as much in the open air as possible. Cleanliness in the berths and bedding and as much exercise as their situation permits, are the best preservatives of health.’
For a landsman, his first passage in a tall ship was extraordinary. Upon entering this new realm for the first time one young man wrote: ‘Nor could I think what world I was in. Whether among spirits or devils. All seemed strange; different language and strange expressions of tongue, that I thought myself always asleep or in a dream, and never properly awake.’
Their lives were now regulated by ‘watches’. Every half hour a petty officer would turn the hourglass and strike the bell. At ‘eight bells’ the four-hour watch had come to an end and half of the crew could go below and sleep. All the watches were four hours, apart from two watches of two hours each, known as the ‘dog watch’, between 1600 and 2000 hours. At four bells in the morning watch, 0600 hours, the bosun would pipe, ‘Up Hammocks’, at which point the watch below roused themselves and brought up their hammocks on deck to stow in the netting which ringed it. There was no chance of a lie-in. The bosun patrolled the gun deck with a knife and would simply slice through the ropes holding a hammock to the deck beams if its occupant was slow to wake up. The ships were cleaned every morning. The bilges were pumped out, and the decks washed with seawater and holystones. Hours of maintenance and odd jobs followed until the bosun’s pipe signalled dinner, a large meal in the early to mid-afternoon followed by the doling out of the grog ration. In the evening the crew would practise ‘Beating to Quarters’ or going to their action stations. Rich captains, who had supplemented the ship’s gunpowder supplies out of their own pocket, would practise the crew at firing their cannon at this time; those of more moderate means had less opportunity to do this since the navy was stingy with its powder allocation and it had to be hoarded in case of an action with the enemy.
Sailing as part of a massive fleet, close to the shore, in largely unknown waters was a challenge to those in command. Constant adjustments to the course of the ship and the sail plan were made as winds varied, or other transports came too close. Collisions were not unusual. Knox’s religious observations were interrupted when on Sunday, 10 June, ‘as we were going to prayer, about ten o’clock, we got foul of another transport, which obliged us to suspend our devotions’.
Other accounts are full of near misses. Exhausted captains could expect not to leave their quarterdecks for days in such conditions.
Soldiers provided useful muscle on the passage. Under the command of a quartermaster they formed teams to ‘attend to the braces’, pulling the yards around to optimize the position of the sails in relation to the wind. They could not be forced to climb the rigging and work aloft. That was the province of the topmen, men with a fixed conviction in their own immortality. A seaman wrote that this job ‘not only requires alertness but courage, to ascend in a manner sky high when stormy winds do blow…the youngest of the topmen generally go highest’.
They handed and made sail, reefed and carried out repairs, all while balancing precariously up to one hundred and fifty feet above the deck. Inshore waters demanded the keeping of a good lookout, which along with extensive use of a line with a lead weight on the end to measure the depth, was the basis of all navigation. Sharp-eyed members of the crew stayed high in the rigging reporting every sighting to the deck. Rewards were given to those with the keenest eyes.
Since the days of Drake there had been an informality born of intimacy on board naval ships; he had always emphasized that officers should lend a hand and haul on ropes. The eighteenth-century navy was a far more harmonious community than has often been assumed; examples of hanging and flogging were exceptional. Many officers had started their careers as common seamen and were promoted, if not always to the highest ranks, through aptitude. The safety of the ship and the lives of everyone who sailed in her depended on officers knowing their business. There was far less opportunity than in the army for venality or the well-connected incompetent. Intruders from the more hierarchical army world were often surprised. Knox was shocked to hear the master of his transport crossing the Atlantic using ‘some of the ordinary profane language of the common sailors’.
By the second week of June the expedition had reached the Gulf of St Lawrence, the largest estuary in the world. It was named by explorer Jacques Cartier who had arrived here for the first time on the feast day of St Lawrence. Nearly two thousand miles inland lay its furthest headwater in today’s Minnesota. It drains nearly four hundred thousand square miles, an area which includes the Great Lakes, the world’s largest system of freshwater lakes. Underneath Saunders’ ships 350,000 cubic feet of water a second discharged into the North Atlantic.
The St Lawrence is the greatest tidal river in the world. It is hugely difficult to sail up thanks to the torrent of water surging to the sea, south-westerly winds that tend to prevail in the summer months and a vast amount of local variation in conditions caused by shallows, reefs, and islands. The amount of deviation that compasses will experience from true north varies and squalls regularly tear down off the high ground. Even the easterly winds that Saunders was praying for were often a mixed blessing as winds from that direction were often accompanied by rain and fog.
Captain John Montresor was a 23-year-old engineer on the expedition. He was the son of an engineer and had been raised on that rocky outcrop of empire, Gibraltar, where he had learnt his trade from his father. They had both been sent to America on the outbreak of hostilities and he was already the veteran of several abortive operations, picking up a wound in the Pennsylvanian backcountry at the hands of the Native Americans. Although his age belied his experience, Wolfe had been unimpressed when he had met him the year before during the Louisbourg expedition, describing him, rather hypocritically, as just a ‘boy’.
Engineers were scarce in the British army and even scarcer in North America and Wolfe would have to tolerate Montresor’s youth. The young engineer kept a careful journal of the passage up the St Lawrence, recording the weather each day and all the important landmarks, headlands, and islands that guided the expedition into the river mouth. On the evening of 11 June, a gale blowing hard out of the Gulf of St Lawrence scattered the fleet. The gale continued until dusk on 12 June when the ships were suddenly becalmed, left to drift east-north-east with the tide. By the fourteenth the fleet saw land in the distance on both sides. On the north shore it was ‘very craggy, irregular’ while the south was ‘very high being mountains of Notre Dame’. The ships took frequent soundings with eighty fathoms of line (480 feet) and ‘found no bottom’. Montresor could tell because the depth, like everything else, was communicated to the fleet. If an ensign fluttered at the main topmast of the Neptune the depth was over forty fathoms (240 feet); if a yellow pendant was hoisted in its place the depth was five fathoms (thirty feet), if it was hoisted twice in succession the depth was six fathoms (thirty-six feet), three times, seven fathoms (forty-two feet), and so on.
It was clear to the British that the St Lawrence was a formidable barrier. One marine officer wrote that ‘the whole of this channel is exceedingly dangerous, and the passage up so nice, that it might with some propriety be considered as the principal outwork of Quebec, and in ordinary attacks more to be depended upon, than the strongest fortifications or defences of the town’.
The further the expedition progressed up the Gulf of St Lawrence the more challenging it became. The strength of the tide grew more pronounced. Knox’s host, Killick, described the flood tide as ‘extremely curious’ and the winds ‘perverse’. Montresor reported typical gulf weather on 15 June. The wind was ‘small and very changeable never continuing long in the same quarter. We observed several vessels having a fresh breeze when others within a quarter of a mile have been becalmed, this circumstance is very frequent, owing to the eddies of the wind from off the high lands.’ Few British subjects had ever ventured into these waters; there is an other-worldly tone to the accounts of both men as they watched the shores close in on the fleet. Knox noticed that ‘the low as well as the high lands are woody on both sides’. The water had gone a ‘blackish colour’ with weird ripples and swirls. Montresor thought ‘the land on the south shore very mountainous and romantic, forming in some parts a kind of table land, its appearance was very green. The trees seemed to be of Birch-Beach [sic] and fir.’
The sixteenth of June saw the fleet smothered in a heavy fog which tested the admiral’s sailing instructions. The bigger ships tacked in the middle of the channel to avoid shallow water, the Neptune’s cannon roaring out, seven times if she was going to port, nine if starboard and with additional guns after four minutes to notify the fleet by how many degrees. The smaller ships risked shallower waters, some sailing ‘within a league of the shore’.
The winds had so far favoured the expedition. Progress had been swift down the Gulf of St Lawrence but not fast enough for the young commander. Wolfe’s frustration is palpable in his journal entries. On 10 June he records, ‘Fog and contrary wind obliged the Fleet to anchor. I intimated my design of going up with the very Troops to the Admiral, and hinted the pushing on of the Transports, leaving the men-of-war to come up at leisure.’
The Admiralty in London had assumed that Saunders would keep the larger ships at the mouth of the St Lawrence to lie in wait for any French fleet that dared to interfere with Wolfe’s expedition or threaten Louisbourg and Halifax. Instead, Saunders obviously intended to push as much of his fleet as far up the river as possible. It may have slowed progress up the St Lawrence but Saunders no doubt believed that his ships with, in all, nearly two thousand cannon and approximately thirteen thousand five hundred officers and men on board could play a decisive role not just in transporting Wolfe’s army safely to the target but an active one in operations once they had arrived.
On 18 June, with Île du Bic eight miles to the south-west, a sail was sighted. Five days before Durell had sent Captain Hankerson and his frigate Richmond with many of the captured French pilots on board to wait for Saunders. Wolfe was about to get his first news from Durell since he had sent him packing from Halifax.
Knox records that the Richmond sent a midshipman aboard his transport to inform them that Durell had occupied the Île aux Coudres further upstream where the river was very narrow. The fleet finally learnt that although he had managed to take three prizes with ‘flour and other provisions’ on board, dozens of other French ships ‘had escaped them’ laden with ‘provisions, especially bread, that are scarce in the French army’.
Wolfe’s journal oozes a barely controlled rage, it records that letters were captured on some of the prizes which ‘mention the most extreme want of everything at Quebec’ before the supply ships arrived, ‘so that if Mr Durell had come up the river in time every one of the ships might have been taken and Quebec obliged to surrender in a very few days, instead of which they now have plenty of everything’. He repeats himself the next day, 19 June, saying that he had ‘read a number of [captured] letters from Quebec, painting their distress in the liveliest manner. All in general agree that they must have starved if the succours from France had not arrived.’ To cap it all, ‘Captain Hankerson told Mr Saunders that there had been no ice in the River these two months.’
The Neptune raised its ‘jack’ on the ensign staff on its stern and fired one gun. It was the signal for the ships to anchor. The jack was the Union Flag of Great Britain with the red cross of St George superimposed on the white saltire on a blue background of St Andrew and usually flew at the bows of naval ships. Three ships had gone ahead of the fleet, one flying the British jack, the second a French flag, and the last displaying the Dutch colours. They were the marker ships and the ships of each division anchored as close to them as possible. The anchorage was in the sheltered water provided by Bic. At the last minute each helmsman turned the bows into the wind and as the ship slowed the final stopper was yanked off and the heavy iron anchor crashed into the water taking the cable whipping after it. As the anchor held, the ship turned to face the direction of the strong St Lawrence tidal flow. In tightly packed anchorages like this one another anchor was rowed out on the ship’s boat and released so that when the tide turned the ship would be held in position and not swing around and risk hitting neighbouring ones. The complexity of the operation was bound to produce the odd accident. Montresor watched one of the transports run afoul of a smaller naval ship and break her bowsprit off. She had to be rescued by the seventy-gun Orford.
The next day the fleet was underway again but from now on, as one senior officer recorded, ‘we were, for the most part, obliged to take advantage of the flood-tides, and daylight, as the currents began to be strong, and the channel narrow’.
The fleet would now anchor every night, the treacherous waters, fast tides, and squalls of wind being far too dangerous to press on in the dark. They often anchored during the ebb tide as well. Strengthened by the waters of the St Lawrence flowing downstream the ebb can reach six knots today. Knox reported that he witnessed ‘nine or ten knots’ and called it ‘the strongest rippling current I ever saw’.
As the tide turned and the sea advanced up the St Lawrence the fleet would weigh anchor and creep another few miles into the heart of the continent. Progress was achingly slow, even if the wind and tide were kind. The sounding vessels had to go ahead and feel their way along the rocky bottom of the river with their lead lines to measure the depth of water. As a result the ships were constantly dropping and weighing anchor.
Brigadier Townshend wrote that ‘the river above Bic is about 7 leagues [around twenty-two miles] in breadth. Both shores very high: the southern very beautiful. Though of a most wild and uncultivated aspect, save where a few straggling French settlements appear. We could now upon this fine river view the whole fleet in three separate Divisions.’ Smaller schooners and sloops dashed between the larger ships carrying messages and personnel, desperately trying to maintain the cohesion of the fleet. This new land had plenty to amuse the soldiers packed on board; Montresor reports a ‘great number of white whales and many seals’. Knox recalls seeing ‘an immense number of sea-cows rolling about our ships…which are as white as snow’. He estimated that their exposed backs were twelve to fifteen feet in length and when he and his men fired muskets at them, the balls bounced off. All the journals make numerous references to collisions and groundings that were becoming more frequent as the channel narrowed. On 21 June a transport struck a shoal and fired three guns, to be towed off. Townshend tells of near disaster when five of the largest warships were ‘nearly running on board each other, the current being strong’ and ‘few would answer the helm at first’. The Diana was ‘ungovernable for a long while’ and there was very nearly a collision with the Royal William and the Orford. Just as the situation reached the ‘critical’ point, ‘a breeze sprung up which…saved us from that shock which but a few moments before seemed inevitable. Had the least fog prevailed or had it been a little later, nothing could have prevented disaster.’
At 0200 hours on 23 June the Stirling Castle, one of Durell’s squadron which had pushed up the river and now waited for Saunders and the main body of the fleet, anchored off the Île aux Coudres, heard the noise of cannon downriver. As dawn broke her log records that she ‘saw a fleet to the east’ sailing with the wind up the St Lawrence. The captain ordered his ship cleared for action and the shrill noise of the bosun’s whistle sent the watch below tumbling out of their hammocks and ‘to their quarters’.
A flurry of signalling ensued and it was soon established that this was Saunders’ fleet. Gradually all the ships caught up and anchored in a protected bay on the north coast. The island was bleak; the 400-feet-high cliffs on its north side presented a defiant aspect to the ships as they sailed under them.
Quebec was about fifty miles ahead. But between the fleet and the French stronghold lay by far the most dangerous stretch of river. A passage through ‘the Narrows’ separated Île aux Coudres from the north shore and beyond that the St Lawrence was scattered with low lying islands and reefs just below the surface. A number of channels led through this natural barrier but they were ever-changing because of silting. The ebb tide tore down the river and in certain wind conditions could create steep, short waves that could swamp open boats and even small ships. They were a fearsome physical barrier. To make matters worse as the British fleet approached the heart of Canada, French intervention grew ever more likely. There was every possibility that the defenders of Quebec would take up positions to augment the natural barricades with ships, men and cannon. So far the enemy had hardly shown himself; the odd crack of a musket from the trees along the shoreline had been a fine gesture of defiance but held little menace. However, after years of desperate battles against the French and their Canadian colonists, no one in Wolfe’s army doubted that they would fight to the last extremity to protect their land from invasion. The all-too-visible progress of the fleet ensured that they would have plenty of notice of the British advance and although, as Knox commented, they saw no Canadians, they did see ‘large signal fires everywhere before us’.
The French knew they were coming.
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Dan Snow
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Книги о войне
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: An epic history of the battle of Quebec, the death of Wolfe and the beginnings of Britain’s empire in North America. Military history at its best.Perched on top of a tall promontory, surrounded on three sides by the treacherous St Lawrence River, Quebec – in 1759 France′s capital city in Canada – forms an almost impregnable natural fortress. That year, with the Seven Years War raging around the globe, a force of 49 ships and nearly 9,000 men commanded by the irascible General James Wolfe, navigated the river, scaled the cliffs and laid siege to the town in an audacious attempt to expel the French from North America for ever.In this magisterial book which ties in to the 250th anniversary of the battle, Dan Snow tells the story of this famous campaign which was to have far-reaching consequences for Britain′s rise to global hegemony, and the world at large. Snow brilliantly sets the battle within its global context and tells a gripping tale of brutal war quite unlike those fought in Europe, where terrain, weather and native Indian tribes were as fearsome as any enemy. ′I never served so disagreeable campaign as this,′ grumbled one British commander, ′it is war of the worst shape.′1759 was, without question, a year in which the decisions of men changed the world for ever. Based on original research, and told from all perspectives, this is history – military, political, human – on an epic scale.