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

For his final brigadier Wolfe had requested the Yorkshireman Ralph Burton, commanding officer of Webb’s 48th Regiment. Like Murray and Monckton he was a lifelong, professional soldier, although not nearly so well heeled. Both the place and exact date of his birth are unknown but he was an old friend of Wolfe’s and had served in North America from the beginning of the current war. At Monongahela he had been wounded, unsurprisingly given that only six out of twenty-four officers of the 48th had survived the battle unscathed. Lord Loudoun, a previous commander in chief in North America, had written of him: ‘Burton I did not know before, but he is a diligent sensible man, and I think will be of great use here.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Wolfe valued his professionalism; his ‘Family Journal’ describes him as ‘a good officer, and is esteemed a man of spirit and sense’.

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Instead of Burton, Wolfe was given a very different man altogether. A man who stood at the very socio-political zenith of the oligarchic British state: George Townshend. No man outside the Royal Family had a more illustrious name or connections. George I himself had been one of the sponsors at his baptism in 1725. His great uncle was the current Prime Minister, the Duke of Newcastle. His grandfather, Charles 2nd Viscount Townshend, had been one of the chief architects of the Georgian Whig supremacy in the early eighteenth century that had established forty years of unassailable one-party rule. The 2nd Viscount had been the closest ally of the man who had become Britain’s first Prime Minister, the mighty Sir Robert Walpole. They were so close he had even married Walpole’s sister. One of Townshend’s uncles had been an MP; the other was still one, as was he and his younger brother Charles, who would become Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Unlike his brother, George had chosen a predominantly military career, with politics as a sideline. In 1743, age 19, having breezed through Eton and Cambridge, he went on a tour of Europe which he interrupted to join the British army in Flanders as a gentleman volunteer. He saw action at Dettingen and possibly Fontenoy. His regiment was summoned back to crush the Jacobite uprising in 1745-6 and he was present at Culloden, alongside his future commanding officer, James Wolfe. He returned to Europe in the privileged role of aide-de-camp to George II’s son, the Duke of Cumberland. He saw yet more action at the battle of Laffeldt on 21 June 1747 and was given the honour of carrying the dispatch back to London, which by tradition conferred an immediate promotion. As well as receiving a captaincy in the 1st Foot Guards he was elected to the House of Commons to represent Norfolk. His military career had been brought to an end not by the onset of peace in 1748 but by disagreements and a full falling out with Cumberland. The Hanoverians never forgot and rarely forgave. Townshend resigned from the army in 1750 finding that Cumberland had not only vetoed any promotion for him but also for his youngest brother Roger.

Cumberland had fallen from grace and been removed as commander in chief of the British army after a catastrophic defeat on the Continent in 1757. Townshend meanwhile had been establishing friendly relations with the rapidly ascending politician William Pitt. They shared a belief in placing the defence of Britain in the hands of the militia rather than expensive regular troops. Pitt, now Secretary of State for the Southern Department, one of the most powerful jobs in government and one which gave him responsibility for North America, ensured that Townshend was reinstated into the army in May 1758 with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel and the job of aide-de-camp to George

II. Later that year Pitt helped to secure him a job on the Quebeccampaign.

(#litres_trial_promo) The gossip and prolific letter writer Horace Walpole wrote that, ‘the expedition, called to Quebec, departs on Tuesday next, under Wolfe, and George Townshend, who has thrust himself again into the service, and as far as wrongheadedness will go, very proper for a hero’.

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Wolfe sent a distinctly ungenerous note to Townshend on his appointment. There was some very faint praise: ‘such an example in a person of your rank and character could not but have the best effects upon the troops in America and indeed upon the whole military part of the nation’. There was condescension: ‘what might be wanting in experience was amply made up, in an extent of capacity and activity of mind, that would find nothing difficult in our business’. This was more than mildly offensive to a man who had stood on more battlefields than Wolfe himself. There was an attempt to play the role of intimate but stern commanding officer: ‘I persuade myself that we shall concur heartily for the public service—the operation in question will require our united efforts and the utmost exertion of every man’s spirit and judgement.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Wolfe was clearly not pleased by having this ‘political general’ foisted upon him. It is true that Townshend’s military experience had mainly been in staff jobs, and he had spent limited time actually commanding units. But Wolfe, who had served on the staff of a general, ought to have known better than denigrate Town-shend’s experience. Furthermore to resent a man for advancing swiftly through political connection is curious for Wolfe whose entire career was shaped by his father’s influence and those of powerful mentors, not least the son of the King, the Duke of Cumberland, but also Lord John Sackville, the colonel of the 20th Foot which Wolfe had commanded as Lieutenant Colonel. Wolfe wrote to the latter in sycophantic terms and never hesitated to bring friends to the notice of this powerful patron. Wolfe was no radical, he did not seek to change the rules governing advancement in the eighteenth-century army; he was just piqued that someone else was better placed to take advantage of them.

Townshend and Wolfe had shared the quarterdeck of the Neptune from Portsmouth to the St Lawrence. Their journals, however, remain distinctly silent on the subject of the other. It is likely that as the troops landed on the Île d’Orléans the relationship between the two men was at best, formal.

At 1400 hours of the day of the landing the gentle easterly breeze suddenly strengthened and veered violently. It seemed like the prayers of the French and Canadians might be answered. Within minutes the ships were hit by a full westerly gale. Montresor says vividly that it ‘rose with great violence together with a great swell which occasioned almost all the fleet to drive from their anchorage and running foul of one another’. He remembers it lasting between three and four hours, during which time, ‘there was nothing but cutting of cables—ships running one against the other, others driving and bearing away before the wind in order to run aground on the island of Orleans if possible which several ships were obliged to do’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Anchor cables parted, others were desperately jettisoned by their crews as the anchors dragged or loose ships threatened to collide with them and drive them ashore or tear away rigging. In a letter to his father Montresor wrote that ‘several vessels lost their masts’.

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Small boats, heavily loaded with stores for the landed army, were caught in the open. Many were swamped by the waves or driven inexorably into the shallows, their rowers unable to combat the gale. The crews of the warships worked quickly to ‘strike’ or dismantle their exposed yards and topmasts and then, where possible, sent men to the transports to help them avoid destruction. The transports were particularly vulnerable having fewer sailors on board than the men of war. The log of the Lowestoft gives us a glimpse of the pandemonium. Early in the gale she was hit by a ‘transport that came foul of us’ and tore away her ‘gibb boom sprit sail yard’, and one of her catheads, used to secure the anchor when raised (often decorated with the face of a cat), which sent their best anchor to the bottom. But there was still more damage as the afternoon wore on; two hours later she ‘came foul of another transport which carried away our spare anchor, larboard main chain and our barge cutter, and one flat bottomed boat, all lost’. At 2200 hours a schooner drifted onto the Lowestoft’s anchor cable and then got entangled with her, ripping away some timbers from the outside of the hull and the hand-rails around the most forward part of the ship. The schooner lost her mast in the encounter. It took an hour and a half to separate the two ships.

(#litres_trial_promo) The Third Lieutenant of the Diana recorded ‘hard gales’ in his log and reported ‘a great deal of damage done among the shipping’ especially the loss of ‘yards and topmasts’.

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The damage could have been catastrophic. Countless amphibious operations throughout history had been destroyed by storms which grateful defenders attributed to divine intervention. The expedition suffered real damage but it was not terminal. Pembroke’s log reports that ‘in the height of the gale seven sail of transports parted from their anchors and run on shore upon the island’. Wolfe’s journal agrees that the wind ‘drove several ships on shore’.

(#litres_trial_promo) All but two seem to have been refloated. The journeys of the vulnerable boats packed with troops, most of whom could not swim, were immediately suspended according to Wolfe’s ‘Family Journal’. It records that ‘at this time the debarkation of the army was not completed; by good fortune none of the troops were lost; the remaining troops landed the succeeding day’. The loss of a few empty transports, and damage to many others, was unimportant. Several accounts mention the loss of anchors, which would limit shallow-water operations. One says that the storm caused ‘great damage to many of the transports; they lost above ninety anchors and cables’.

(#litres_trial_promo) But the real blow to the expedition was the loss of many of the small open boats and flat-bottomed craft. Some had been swamped, others had been washed ashore and their fragile frames stove in on the rocks. The Pembroke’s log says that ‘several of the flat bottomed boats and others belonging to the transports broke adrift and drove on the south shore, and was afterwards burnt by the enemy’.

(#litres_trial_promo) The engineer Mackellar, who had accompanied Wolfe to the end of the Île d’Orléans that morning, wrote in his journal that, although there was a ‘good deal of damage among our transports…the only loss we felt sensibly was that of our boats, which affected our motions throughout the whole campaign’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Other reports all agree that the loss of flat-bottomed boats was potentially very serious.

Wolfe seems to have regarded the unfortunate episode as yet another example of naval incompetence. Despite the heroic efforts of Saunders’ men to keep the vast majority of the ships from running aground Wolfe, in his journal, criticizes the navy. He described a ‘multitude of boats lost and strange neglect of the men-of-war’s crews’.

(#litres_trial_promo) It is almost impossible to believe that the naval crews had showed neglect. On the contrary it is almost certain that a greater disaster was avoided only by the attention and skill of Saunders’ sailors. Saunders himself wrote to the Admiralty telling them that he had sought to give the transports the ‘best assistance in my power’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Given his extremely impressive record both before and after the gale it is very likely that he spoke the truth.

The French were euphoric as the gale tore down the St Lawrence valley. The first reports in Quebec were that there had been huge losses. Montcalm wrote in his journal that he hoped the British fleet would be badly damaged. He noted bitterly that a French fleet would have ‘perished’ in such conditions.

(#litres_trial_promo) When ‘the truth came to be ascertained’ reported a diarist in Quebec, and it appeared that the only damage was ‘two small vessels wrecked, and five or six of the same size driven on shore’ which ‘were easily pulled off’, there was enormous disappointment. The diarist bemoaned that, ‘if the gale of wind had lasted only one hour altogether, perhaps two thirds of the English fleet would have been destroyed’. Apart from the fickle wind he blamed the French leadership. He wrote that there had been ‘upon this island 1200 men, Canadians and Savages, who undoubtedly might have been extremely troublesome to the English during their debarkation, and particularly whilst the tempest lasted’, because the British ‘were in a state of disorder and dismay’. However, the force was no longer there thanks to orders, ‘sent the preceding night from the Marquis de Vaudreuil for it to evacuate the island and pass over to the Beauport coast’. An equally good opportunity was missed, ‘in not having kept upon the South Shore 3 or 400 Savages, who remained in Quebec, where they did nothing but create disturbances and who might with the greatest ease have destroyed vast numbers of the English left upon the shore, in consequence of the stranding of their vessels upon the coast’.

(#litres_trial_promo) A British account hints at guerrilla activity that was progressing as the storm caused havoc among the fleet, recording that ‘a ranger killed and scalped, and a stake drove through his body’.

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Montcalm had no intention of fighting a guerrilla war of hit and run. He regarded operations involving the Canadian irregulars and Native Americans as worthless and beneath his dignity. He was determined to wait in his fixed positions and let Wolfe break his army on them. Yet again, however, this conservatism had caused him to miss an opportunity to strike at the British when they were vulnerable. The French would not remain totally inactive, though. In the meantime they would deploy yet another weapon against the British. Their invasion force had overcome the treacherous St Lawrence with its rocky banks and irresistible currents. They had survived the gale. There was a further elemental force that could destroy their ships, one that the French were able to control: fire.

FIVE (#ulink_7835b2fd-14a5-5500-ab67-e4a3453cc4a5)

First Skirmishes

THE LOOKOUTS KNEW what to watch for. Wolfe’s Chief Engineer, Patrick Mackellar, had warned his fellow officers that the French would attempt to burn the British fleet. He knew that the French would prepare sacrificial ships and were planning to use them as huge floating bonfires. During his captivity in Quebec he had heard the constant boasts of his jailers and had even been shown a local variation on this tactic, the radeaux à feu, rafts packed with combustibles, which the French assured him would burn any fleet that showed itself before Quebec.

(#litres_trial_promo) So it was no surprise when just after midnight on the night of 28/29 June the dark Quebec basin was pricked by a flash of light. Soon other lights appeared until from a distance it looked like a procession of blazing torches. The glow from the dancing flames illuminated the woods on the south shore, the shadows of the trees quivering as the fire rose in intensity. The British fleet was spread along the south shore of the Île d’Orléans and the easternmost ships could see the clear silhouettes of the upriver ships against the light cast by the fires and their reflections off the surface of the St Lawrence. The French were sending fireships towards the heart of the British fleet. Men of war cleared for action, bells rang and the watch below came sprinting up through the hatches and prepared to slip anchors and make sail. The British were ready: the ships’ boats had been standing by and their crews heaved on the oars, domes of white water atop the end of each blade. In the bows bosun’s mates prepared grappling hooks and lines, carefully coiling the rope to ensure that they would not snag.

Fireships were something of an anachronism by 1759. In fact, this was the only example of their use during the Seven Years War. Two hundred years before they had been a battle-winning weapon but their use had declined as ships and tactics had progressed. They were most famously used by Lord Howard of Effingham and Sir Francis Drake against the Spanish Armada as it sat at anchor off Calais in 1588. On that occasion eight ships of the English fleet were sacrificed; their helms lashed in place, their hulls filled with gunpowder and pitch and they were sent into the Spanish fleet with a following wind. The Spanish panicked, cut their anchors, and abandoned their formation. The scattered Spanish ships were attacked and defeated in the battle of Gravelines the following day. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries fleets fought in tightly packed formations and the aim of an admiral was to break up that of his enemy and in the melee destroy or capture the isolated ships. Fireships were ideally suited for this role. But by the eighteenth century cannon fleet actions were more spread out as ships fought gunnery duels sailing in long lines. Fireships had no part to play.

In very specific circumstances, however, they could still be very useful. In August 1666 English Admiral Sir Robert Holmes had launched a devastating attack on a mass of Dutch merchantmen lying off the coast in the Vliestroom, which destroyed over one hundred and fifty ships.

(#litres_trial_promo) It was in these conditions, a narrow channel, with a following wind and a strong ebb tide, that they could be sent into a crowded anchorage and cause mayhem among an enemy fleet. Conditions like those off Quebec in late June 1759.

The French had been preparing for weeks. At vast expense merchant ships were purchased and made ready. To ensure that the fire was fed by a constant stream of fresh air the gun ports were hinged at the bottom rather than the top so they would fall open when their retaining ropes burnt through. Funnels were bored to provide a clear updraught from below decks to the rigging above. The masts were strengthened to make sure they did not collapse too soon. Barrels of gunpowder and anything flammable were packed on board. Cannon were loaded with double shot.

(#litres_trial_promo) It was a delicate process; one of the eight ships burst into flame in the harbour according to a French officer, ‘through the imprudence of the men who were preparing it’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Another journal says that ‘either from inattention or ignorance’ the ship caught fire ‘at the very moment of its completion’. In all, ‘twelve men were killed by the fire’ and for a terrifying moment ‘the most serious apprehensions were entertained’ of it setting the other ships or even the town itself aflame. It was a terrible demonstration of the potency of fire in a wooden world.

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The wind was blowing from the south-west. The logs agree that it was a squally night with a bit of rain in the air. It was as dark as ‘sable’ according to Knox, with ‘no light but what the stars produced’.

(#litres_trial_promo) The ebb tide was running and with conditions close to perfect the French decided to deploy their fireships. They had high hopes. One journal speculated that ‘if they acted effectually, [they] would completely put an end to the enterprise of the English’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Success depended on the crews being brave enough, first, to sail their ships towards an enemy fleet carrying hundreds of cannon and, second, to set fire to the ships at the last possible minute. A length of quick match ran along a trough from barrels of gunpowder and resin to the escape hatch in the ship’s side. The minute that was lit the crew would clamber down into the longboats which the fireships towed and make their escape. It required nerves of steel and a good deal of luck.

The French crews lacked both. Nearly all the sources agree that the French fired their ships too soon. This advertised their presence to the British and gave them vital extra minutes to prepare. One journal records that the day before the French captains ‘differed widely in their opinions and even some indications were perceptible of want of courage and resolution’. Perhaps as a result, at 2200 hours as they headed to the ships, they had only a vague plan to follow the example of the commander ‘who was to take the lead, and was to fire two musket shots, as the signal that each captain was to set fire to his ship’. This author then blames the commander, ‘a cowardly man of no reputation’, for taking fright and setting his ship alight far too early. They were still miles away from the British fleet but ‘a panic had seized on all the captains’, and they insisted on copying their leader and fired the charges early.

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