Death or Victory: The Battle for Quebec and the Birth of Empire

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Not all the ships were as lucky as the Goodwill. At least three ships grounded in the approaches or in the Traverse itself. Bad weather would have wrecked them as certainly as the trading schooner that Knox watched break up. The next day it was the Lowestoft’s turn to get through the Traverse. After lending one of her anchors to the transport Ann and Elisabeth who had lost all hers during the passage, she was forced to go to the assistance of one sloop and one schooner who both hit ledges. Cargo would have been loaded into the ships’ boats and the drinking water pumped over the side. The lightened ships then refloated as the tide rose. The Traverse took three hours to clear. By the end the Lowestoft fired a gun to catch their attention and signalled the rest of its division to make more sail and increase speed, seemingly in an attempt to clear the passage before the weather changed. Both on the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth the onset of evening was marked with ‘violent’ squalls, ‘incessant rain, thunder and lightning’.

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At 0400 hours on 26 June Saunders ordered the last division of the fleet to weigh, but they had to anchor again almost immediately. By the afternoon they were ready to take on the Traverse. Montresor commented on the boats moored with flags to mark the route. ‘Boats were appointed with red flags and white ones to guide the fleet—directions to keep the red flags on the starboard and the white ones on the larboard sides.’ This was exactly as laid down by Saunders before leaving Halifax. In Montresor’s blue division the wind turned unfavourable and it was ‘obliged to make several tacks within it’. It was a stunning display of seamanship.

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The British were ecstatic. Journals, letters, and accounts are virtually unanimous in their praise for the seamen and a swaggering pride in their achievement. One senior officer boasted that although the Traverse was ‘reckoned dangerous’, the British ships were not only able to sail through it but even did so into the teeth of a ‘contrary wind’. He wrote that ‘this piece of seamanship surprised the enemy a good deal, for we were perhaps the first that ever attempted to get through in that manner’. He concluded that ‘it must be observed that we found the navigation of the river much less difficult than we could expect from the accounts given of it’.

(#litres_trial_promo) A marine officer paid tribute to ‘the great abilities, required of a British admiral to steer his squadrons with safety in so intricate a navigation as that of the River St Lawrence, and so little known to Englishmen’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Another officer wrote that ‘the French account of the navigation of the river St Lawrence we found to be a mere bugbear’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Another described it as ‘an entertaining navigation’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Captain Killick, of course, told Knox that having sailed up all the principal rivers of Europe, ‘he esteems the River St Lawrence to be the finest river, the safest navigation, with the best anchorage in it, of any other within his knowledge; that it is infinitely preferable to the Thames or the Rhone, and that he has not yet met with the least difficulty in working up’.

(#litres_trial_promo) It comes across as a bravado born of enormous relief. Interestingly the only person who makes no mention of the navigational feat is Wolfe. His diary and subsequent letters and dispatches to London are all silent on the matter. He was desperately impatient. He had pushed ahead to be in the vanguard of the fleet and clearly regarded Saunders’ methodical creep up the St Lawrence as overly cautious. The anonymous ‘Family Journal’ written by someone close to Wolfe, contains a scathing indictment of the support he received from the navy. In the very last lines of the journal the author writes that the foremost ships could not be persuaded to ‘go up to the basin of Quebec’ because ‘fire ships, rocks and floating batteries had taken such possession of them, that there was an universal tremor among them’. It ends with the phrase ‘how much is the General to be pitied whose operations depend on naval succour’.

(#litres_trial_promo) This was a grossly unfair critique of the navy. Saunders had brought hundreds of ships up an unknown and hugely treacherous river, in which one Anglo-American expedition and countless other ships had been lost in the past. It was one of the epics of eighteenth-century maritime history, an achievement that was to help cement Britain’s reputation as the world’s foremost naval power for centuries to come. Wolfe’s total lack of understanding of the sea and his impatience to get his men onto dry land made him a poor commander of an amphibious operation which was dependent for its transport, supply, command and control, and much of its firepower on the ships of the Royal Navy.

Unlike Wolfe and his clique, the French were in no doubt about the scale and importance of the achievement. Bougainville had written two years before with utter certainty that ‘the shoals, with which the river is filled, and the navigation, the most dangerous there is, are Quebec’s best defense’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Now this certainty was shattered. It was humiliating that, in the words of one officer, ‘the traverse, a channel so difficult to cross, if our pilots are to be credited, was cleared without any trouble by the English squadron’.

(#litres_trial_promo) ‘It was truly a matter of surprise and astonishment,’ reports one journal.

(#litres_trial_promo) Vaudreuil was incredulous, ‘the enemy have passed sixty ships of war where we durst not risk a vessel of a hundred tons by night and day’.

(#litres_trial_promo) A French naval officer, de Foligné, who now commanded one of the town batteries, was disgusted with the Canadian seafarers. Having assured everyone that the Traverse would be, ‘of itself, a sufficient obstacle to the enemy’, they should now, he hoped, ‘blush with shame for having waited for the enemy’s arrival before finding out to the contrary’. They had ‘deceived the court and laid the king’s forces and the whole colony open to attack, because they would not take the trouble to get proper soundings’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Montcalm was withering in his journal about French sailors, ‘liars and show-offs’ who refused to sail in bad weather and insisted that the Traverse was ‘an invincible obstacle’.

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The French had thought about making a belated attempt to block the channel. A journal records that when it was heard that the British were at Île aux Coudres, the decision was taken to sink ‘three large merchant ships’ in the Traverse, ‘which our seamen boldly affirmed was only 100 feet wide’. Before condemning the three ships, ‘the precaution was taken of sending proper persons to sound the Traverse, and ascertain its breadth’. To the astonishment of the entire colony, ‘it was found to be nine hundred toises [one mile] wide, and that a whole fleet might pass it abreast’.

(#litres_trial_promo) An ‘officer of the port of Quebec’ was summoned to explain himself and he admitted that ‘it was 25 years since he had sounded the traverse’. Recently, ‘he had proposed its being done; he was refused payment of the expenses which would have attended its execution’.

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As a result of this revelation, no action had been taken to block the passage. Nor was there much point building a hurried gun emplacement as the British ships would be able to pass outside the effective range of the cannon. It was a devastating admission of ignorance for the colony. The only real mystery is why the French frigates did not attempt to obstruct the Traverse. They would have been able to play havoc with the little open boats with Cook and the other Masters on board. To fight them off larger British ships would have been forced into the Traverse with no preparatory sounding and it would have made the whole operation a lot more dangerous for the British. There is one slightly curious reference to this idea in one French journal which suggests that the frigate captains refused and demanded some kind of security if their vessels were lost, which was not forthcoming.

(#litres_trial_promo) Any active defence of the Traverse would have been better than the dismay and detachment with which the French watched the advance of the British fleet. Any delay, even for just a couple of days, increased the chances of a storm catching the British in a bad anchorage, or of sickness breaking out between the crowded decks. The French had lost a serious opportunity to derail the advance of the British force.

By 27 June in clear weather and a fair breeze, the final division of transports anchored ‘within a mile and a half’ of the Île d’Orléans. To one of Wolfe’s officers, it had been a ‘tedious, but pleasant navigation up this vast river, unused to British keels’.

(#litres_trial_promo) It had been anything but tedious to the naval officers responsible for keeping those British keels away from French rocks and reefs but they had managed to do so and now after twenty days the remarkable voyage was over. Ramezay was astonished to see ‘120 or 130 sails along Île d’Orléans…among them there were a few Men O’War and frigates to provide support for the invasion’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Nothing like it had ever been seen in the river before. The siege was about to begin.

FOUR (#ulink_2bd5e95b-20e7-5eb3-9d9d-e619ec2b3696)

Beachhead

AT FIRST LIGHT a red-and-white chequered flag was raised on the main topgallant masthead of the Lowestoft. As it caught the breeze the thud of a cannon demanded the fleet’s attention. Saunders had given the order for the landings to commence on the Île d’Orléans. A carefully choreographed marine dance now commenced. From all the ships of the fleet small boats detached themselves and made ready to ferry men and equipment ashore according to a carefully prepared schedule. For the first time in the campaign the specially designed flat-bottomed boats were winched out of the ships’ waists and lowered into the water. Four of them were put afloat from the Richmond alone. They had been husbanded by Wolfe and Saunders until now, their use forbidden for mundane tasks, so vital were they to the success of the operation. Smaller ships, schooners and sloops, with shallow draughts crept in close to shore. The flat-bottomed boats all rendezvoused at the Lowestoft and then made for these small ships where light infantrymen and rangers, carrying the minimum of kit, clambered down the sides of the hulls and sat in tightly packed rows, some of them helping the crew of twelve sailors with the oars. By 0500 hours on 27 June the rangers were splashing ashore on the Île d’Orléans, their muskets raised high to keep their powder dry in case the inhabitants or Native Americans were lying in wait. The men moved quickly off the beach and through the empty village of St Laurent, on their backs they carried only a rolled-up blanket and just two days’ worth of food: biscuit and salted meat. Their pouches contained thirty-six rounds of ammunition.

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The boats backed their oars to clear the shallows and headed out to the ships where they collected the regular infantry. They would land in strict seniority; the regimental numbers denoted the notional order in which they had been established, the smaller the number the older the unit. Amherst’s 15th Regiment of Foot was the senior unit of Wolfe’s army and its men would have the honour of landing first. As the flat-bottomed boats picked up the men of the 15th from the Employment, a London-based transport, other boats made for Blackett, Three Sisters, and Fortitude where the men of the 28th scrambled down into them.

It was the start of the largest military operation in North American history. Not only were vastly more ships and men involved on either side than ever before but the total number of soldiers, sailors, Native Americans, townsfolk, and rural habitants within a ten-mile area of Quebec represented by far the largest concentration of humanity in North America at that time, outnumbering the biggest city, Philadelphia, with its population of 24,000 by quite some distance.

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Previous amphibious operations had relied upon getting the troops to shore in the ships’ existing boats, which were small having been designed for tasks like ferrying supplies to and from shore, laying an anchor, or transporting officers to the flagship when summoned. This had put a major restriction on the number of men that could be sent ashore in the first wave. It also tended to mean that they arrived in a disorderly rabble. In the event of a contested landing, success depended on as many troops getting ashore as quickly as possible, ideally in a condition to fight when they arrived. Good generalship, at its simplest, is the ability to deploy as many soldiers as possible, where you want them, at top speed. The flat-bottomed boats could each hold seventy soldiers, vastly more than the biggest of the ships’ boats. Two prototypes had been built at Woolwich after a failed amphibious assault on the French coast and tested on the Thames in April 1758. The London Evening Post noted that ‘on Wednesday last two boats of a new construction, built for landing His Majesty’s Forces in shallow waters, were launched, and sailed down the Thames. They…are rowed by twenty oars, and go much swifter than any other vessels on the river.’ The First Lord of the Admiralty, George Anson (a brilliant seaman turned politician who had made his name circumnavigating the globe in the early 1740s in the Centurion, with Charles Saunders as his first lieutenant) was watching from a barge and was sufficiently impressed to order as many as could be built within the space of a month.

(#litres_trial_promo) They were now employed on the front line for the first time. Every effort had also been made to maximize the number of other types of shallow-draught boats available to the operation. As well as seventeen purposebuilt flat-bottomed boats there were thirteen roomy whale boats, sturdily built and designed to be beached, and cutters, around thirty feet in length, which could be rowed or sailed. There were also 104 small ships that could be used. All together Wolfe could count on 134 small craft of all varieties that could deliver 3,319 men to the landing place in one go.

(#litres_trial_promo) As the boats crossed the mile and a half gap between the fleet and the shore an army officer, a drummer, and a corporal sat in the stern of each alongside the boat’s coxswain, who steered. The soldiers sat three or four abreast on benches or ‘thwarts’ between the rowers. In the bows naval petty officers attached the boats to the side of transports or secured the boats on the shore while the soldiers jumped into the shallows.

Knox and the 43rd Regiment sailed in the white division, which was the first to land its troops. His men were more heavily loaded than the light infantrymen and rangers, with ‘knapsacks, tools, camp necessaries, and 1 blanket of their ship bedding, besides their own blankets, 36 rounds of ammunition…and four days provisions’. Knox would have to forgo some of the luxuries that his rank entitled him to. Wolfe had strictly ordered that the officers ‘must be contented with very little baggage for a day or two’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Knox had spent the previous day scanning the shore and as he set foot on dry land his positive impressions were confirmed. Île d’Orléans is a long thin island, 21 miles by 5 miles. Along the centre of the island there is a ridge that runs right along the spine, with a continuous, gentle slope leading down to the river on either side. The farms were, and still are, long thin strips on this slope providing every farm with a river frontage. Indeed, there was hardly a farm or settlement in Canada that was not within yards of the St Lawrence or tributary rivers. Well-built farmhouses tended to be positioned near the water so there was an almost continuous band of settlement around the shore with the fields in neat, narrow strips stretching off up the hill behind them. The island appeared ‘fertile and agreeable’ and the ‘delightful country’ was dotted with ‘pleasant villages’ and ‘windmills, water-mills, churches, chapels and compact farm houses, all built with stone and covered some with wood and others with straw’. Knox was ‘inclined to think we are happily arrived at the place, to all appearance, will be the theatre of our future operations’.

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The soldiers were extremely pleased to be disembarking from the crowded ships, on which they had been unwelcome interlopers, and finally set their feet on dry land. John Johnson was the Quartermaster and Clerk of the 58th Regiment. Like most sergeants he was literate but he was unusual in that he wrote an account of the campaign. (The vast majority did not.) He described the land as ‘the most agreeable spot I ever saw…it is a bountiful island and well cultivated, and produces all kinds of grain, pasture and vegetables [and] is full of villages’.

(#litres_trial_promo) The most explicit were the Highlanders. A remarkable song composed by the regimental bard Iain Campbell during the campaign, in his native Gaelic, recounts that, ‘we were glad to be on the land,/ each one of us,/ with a good deal of haste/ went into the long boats/ to go to the island of Orleans’.

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The island was deserted. The previous day on the south shore Knox had spotted ‘the country-people…removing their effects in carts’ and being escorted to a place of safety, far from the British invaders.

(#litres_trial_promo) They crossed the river to the north bank where they sought shelter with friends or relatives. The sheer concentration of British ships caused panic around the Quebec basin, not just on the Île d’Orléans: ‘At the sight of so many English ships,’ recorded one French journal, ‘terror again seized upon the women, most of whom left the town as soon as possible, and retired into the country.’

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There was certainly no resistance to the landing. Amphibious assaults are terribly vulnerable when the attacking troops are cooped up in small boats just before landing. Wolfe’s men were unable to fire their muskets effectively while afloat and boats full of defenceless men made tempting targets. The French, however, made no move to defend the coast. With such a huge shoreline the Île d’Orléans was impossible to protect while still maintaining their positions along the all-important Beauport shore. Montcalm had to accept that Wolfe would be able to land his army in the area around Quebec. He just had to stop them landing in a place that gave them a springboard for attacking the city itself. The Île d’Orléans was indefensible and Montcalm was content to cede the island knowing that Wolfe would have to make yet another amphibious assault before he could get his forces up to the walls of the city. That next assault, Montcalm planned, would receive a lethal reception.

The night before, on the evening of 26 June, Wolfe had sent Captain Joseph Gorham ashore with forty of his men to scout out the landing place. Gorham was a tough New England ranger who had fought alongside his father and older brother since he was a teenager, protecting the isolated settlements of Nova Scotia against Native American raids. Not encountering any opposition the rangers pushed on to the north side of the island. Here they stumbled upon a large party of the inhabitants who were hiding their valuables in the woods and there was a skirmish. Gorham and his men retreated to the south shore and barricaded themselves into a farmhouse. They had lost a man and when they searched for him the next day they found the corpse ‘scalped and butchered in a very barbarous manner’. They followed a grim trail of blood to the water’s edge on the north shore and realized that the Canadians had made their escape.

(#litres_trial_promo) It was a first, gruesome signal that the summer’s fighting was to be conducted along very different lines to what the men could expect on the battlefields of Europe.

For the moment, though, the British troops were told to conduct themselves according to the European norm. Non-combatants were to be protected; Wolfe issued strict orders that ‘no insult of any kind be offered to the inhabitants of the island’. Wolfe also forbade the landing of the numerous bands of women that always accompanied eighteenth-century armies. These soldiers’ wives made themselves useful on campaign, doing all sorts of jobs such as laundry, nursing, and cooking, but Wolfe regarded them as a nuisance. He did not want them getting in the way of what could be a sharp fight to get ashore. They would be allowed to disembark only after order had been established.