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

(#litres_trial_promo)

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.

(#litres_trial_promo)

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’.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’

(#litres_trial_promo)

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.

(#litres_trial_promo)

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.

(#litres_trial_promo)

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.

(#litres_trial_promo)

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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#litres_trial_promo)

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’.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’

(#litres_trial_promo)

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.’

(#litres_trial_promo) 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’.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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’.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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’.

(#litres_trial_promo)

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’.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#litres_trial_promo)

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’.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’

(#litres_trial_promo)

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’.

(#litres_trial_promo)

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.’

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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’.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’

(#litres_trial_promo)

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.

(#litres_trial_promo)

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’.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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’.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’

(#litres_trial_promo)