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

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.’

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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’.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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’.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’

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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’.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) Then she stood out to sea and made for Louisbourg ‘with all the ships that were in readiness’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Two days later they arrived off Louisbourg. ‘The coast was still full of ice’

(#litres_trial_promo) 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’.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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’.

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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’.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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’.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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’.

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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.

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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.

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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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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’.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.”’

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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’.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’

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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’.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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’.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’

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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’.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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’.

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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’.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.