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Death or Victory: The Battle for Quebec and the Birth of Empire
Dan Snow
An epic history of the battle of Quebec, the death of Wolfe and the beginnings of Britain’s empire in North America. Military history at its best.Perched on top of a tall promontory, surrounded on three sides by the treacherous St Lawrence River, Quebec – in 1759 France's capital city in Canada – forms an almost impregnable natural fortress. That year, with the Seven Years War raging around the globe, a force of 49 ships and nearly 9,000 men commanded by the irascible General James Wolfe, navigated the river, scaled the cliffs and laid siege to the town in an audacious attempt to expel the French from North America for ever.In this magisterial book which ties in to the 250th anniversary of the battle, Dan Snow tells the story of this famous campaign which was to have far-reaching consequences for Britain's rise to global hegemony, and the world at large. Snow brilliantly sets the battle within its global context and tells a gripping tale of brutal war quite unlike those fought in Europe, where terrain, weather and native Indian tribes were as fearsome as any enemy. 'I never served so disagreeable campaign as this,' grumbled one British commander, 'it is war of the worst shape.'1759 was, without question, a year in which the decisions of men changed the world for ever. Based on original research, and told from all perspectives, this is history – military, political, human – on an epic scale.
Death or Victory
THE BATTLE OF QUEBEC AND THE BIRTH OF EMPIRE
DAN SNOW
To Mum and Dad
Table of Contents
Cover Page (#ue68cc0cd-76ef-53a6-bdea-deaf60a4deb9)
Title Page (#u88ab8719-1920-5f81-aa68-5f80c663f9fe)
Dedication (#u90f995d5-76a4-513c-836d-1a88f5e6daab)
Maps (#u1e17a193-203c-50b0-827e-c176594028f7)
Author’s Note (#u216d60c3-900e-5a73-b2cd-633755246277)
Prologue (#ua3b1500b-2c90-5006-b2df-3d45c2954b47)
One (#u6f0ccd55-66f0-5ea4-ac97-e82d6a45beaa)
Two (#u7e0a494b-7289-575b-b239-ea4b9edaa794)
Three (#u6b4a6f27-2e3c-5f46-a630-9b0dd71d1e25)
Four (#uff98e416-d2b6-5038-a54d-63ef0cf8b68f)
Five (#u275b558d-e5d9-5581-902d-d4f518c49f1e)
Six (#u8252e331-7aec-5e89-b48d-246daaf2918b)
Seven (#u4a96c40e-11b1-51a3-8aa6-a606b9e29bb8)
Eight (#uf05fa34f-f805-57d6-b346-e17ce541e6ba)
Nine (#u686e6901-282e-56c8-aaeb-0e75b7fa6b66)
Ten (#u3dff4a79-ca2c-5bf7-8c2d-75b91dd6ba1c)
Eleven (#uf8598237-fc2e-58f8-84a5-d9db8221b1a7)
Twelve (#uca84f04e-1319-5844-9013-e08a0f8dcd57)
Thirteen (#u327aa636-9fab-54ed-a406-d0f1e26b8b20)
Fourteen (#u29dd039d-712b-5e6c-9b57-120110136177)
Fifteen (#u780a69a5-4b24-5412-bc9f-f0cc77793498)
Epilogue (#uf0e7ce1f-78c3-5bc9-bd50-68e744147f9d)
Bibliography (#uc8af8a1b-374e-5a91-ab12-3a3e166c8507)
Notes (#u9da0fae5-852a-546a-b1f8-f904e7a3cd1b)
Index (#u1fd2dec9-83cd-5ac3-ba54-927cf43768fe)
Copyright (#uc726b85b-b73a-50bf-8299-7544e52d5734)
About the Publisher (#uf18b8694-5f12-5186-8898-39f8c0b243dc)
AUTHOR’S NOTE (#ulink_0ee045ae-ff8a-505f-a15d-aa46fdaa6060)
‘One of the great battles of the world.’
FIELD MARSHAL MONTGOMERY
BATTLES CAN CHANGE the course of history. The fighting in North America that culminated with the battle James Wolfe fought outside the walls of Quebec on 13 September 1759 altered the world in a dramatic and lasting way. The dominance of the Anglo-Saxon model with its ideas of government, manners, trade, and finance was built on the British victory in what was truly a world war. Appropriately, I wrote this book during the course of a busy year spent all over the world. In Auckland, New Zealand, I wrote for a few hours every day and then took a fast stroll down to the glistening waters of the Hauraki Gulf to restore my energy. Every time I passed Wolfe Street I smiled; the shabby city street seemed to have little to do with the lanky, chinless, volatile commander of the British army at Quebec. It was, however, a powerful reminder of the enduring significance of the Seven Years War. Those events in the mosquito-ridden woods of New England and Canada, on the foaming seas off Western Europe, and in the shadow of the grand architecture of Quebec still matter. There are Wolfe Streets in cities in every corner of the world: Cape Town, Canberra, Baltimore, Houston, London, Liverpool, and Little Rock, Arkansas. On reflection it is not surprising that Auckland, a city that sprang into life during this time of Anglo-Saxon cultural supremacy, should have a reference, however small, to a man who helped to bring that supremacy about.
The raising of the Union Flag over Quebec and the destruction of French power in North America were far more significant for world history than the subsequent American Revolution. The revolution was merely a squabble for control over the fruits of the British victory over France and her Native allies. At the end of the Seven Years War a continent rich in farmland, minerals, and raw materials fell into the lap of the Anglo-Americans. In time, this continent would become the engine of an international system based on the rule of law, commercialism, representative institutions, and the English language. In the twentieth century North America would play the key part in defending that system as it was challenged by militarism, fascism, and communism. It was the armourer, paymaster, granary, and provider of millions of troops to defend the world order that had been born as a result of the Seven Years War.
Britain defeated France in the Seven Years War because she was able to assemble a crushing advantage in men and ships, paid for by an unprecedented level of government borrowing. By the mid-eighteenth century the French crown was unable to mobilize the country’s superior wealth or manpower nearly as effectively as its smaller neighbour, Britain. The underfunded French navy was swept from the seas by a supremely professional British Royal Navy, while its army remained bogged down in a European war against enemies kept in the field by British loans. British victory owed much to favourable credit ratings. Yet the muskets still needed firing, the ships of the line still needed expert handling, the armies and raids still needed leadership, and the men who trudged along the frontiers of empire still needed to bear the heavy burden of campaigning, fighting, and surviving. The campaign and battle at Quebec in 1759 is a reminder that it was also a victory of flesh, blood, and grit. Indeed, the battle fought on the Plains of Abraham outside Quebec, brief though it was, demonstrates that individuals and the choices they make matter hugely even in vast conflicts. British financial might may have projected Wolfe and his army deep into enemy territory and kept them fed and supplied but the capture of Quebec was not bound to follow.
A battle is celebrated, remembered, and studied not just because it is a decisive event, but because it looks and sounds like one. We cannot help but to be fascinated by its violent crescendos, its sounds, smells, and extremes of emotion, and the flight of one side or another. The mass of British subjects, at the time and since, could not understand or even picture a bond market and were unlikely to name streets after one, but battles can fill imaginations. To English-speaking peoples the victory at Quebec came to be seen as a milepost that marked their rise to global hegemony. Quebec symbolized, and still does, the seismic geo-political shift that occurred in the middle of the eighteenth century. A shift that changed the world for ever.
In attempting to tell the story of that summer in 1759 I have been assisted by friends, colleagues, and family in at least four countries. The book would not have existed were it not for my agent, Caroline Dawnay, and my auntie, Margaret MacMillan, a historian who I can only dream of emulating. Another historian I have always respected and to whom I now owe a debt of gratitude is Professor Robert Bothwell, an expert editor who helped me to avoid terrible mistakes and improve the book in no small measure. Arabella Pike at HarperCollins provided the unflagging support that one would expect from the latest in a line of martial types. It was a privilege to be allowed to renew my partnership with Martin Redfern when Arabella left on maternity leave. Carol Anderson was stunningly efficient. Sarah Hopper was her usual brilliant self on the pictures and Sophie Goulden had the patience of a rock as she steered the project home.
Museums and libraries all over the world have been unstintingly generous with their time and advice. Dorian Hayes at the British Library was a great source of suggestions. Valerie Adams at the Public Record Office in Belfast could not have been more helpful. Pieter Van der Merwe at the National Maritime Museum was very good to give up a morning to fire volley after volley of brilliant, if totally unrelated facts and ideas at me. Richard Kemp at the Somerset Military Museum went so far beyond the call of duty that I was embarrassed. Lizzy Shipton at the Rifles Museum, Salisbury, was a great help and Alan Readman, the assistant country archivist, West Sussex, Nora Hague at the McCord Museum, Montreal, Odile Girard at the Library and Archives Canada, and the team at Harvard all made research that little bit easier.
I was blessed with researchers, translators, and givers of advice. The book would not have been written without Gwyneth MacMillan in Quebec. She was efficient, intelligent, generous, and cheerful. Eddie Kolla in Paris was enormously helpful. Michael Manulak was very helpful in the opening stages. My sister, Rebecca Snow, is an expert in her own right and Roger Nixon and David Mendel were stalwarts; the latter walked me around Quebec bringing the eighteenth century alive on every street. Glen Steppler, Laurence Westgaph and Erica Charters were very good to me while Isabelle Pila and Brigitte Sawyer were vital translators.
Shuna and Katie Snow encouraged me and made me laugh through the process. My parents, Peter Snow and Ann MacMillan, were as unfailingly supportive as they have been of all my projects through the years. They read every word and, more importantly, they have always told me I could do it.
PROLOGUE (#ulink_647c0497-e811-5ebe-91ae-f0211c09de93)
AN HOUR BEFORE SUNRISE the hated drummers marched along the rows of tents. Their sticks beat the ‘General’, driving a clear message into the sleeping brains of the men. Even those befuddled by ‘screech’, cheap rum brewed by boiling the sediment from molasses barrels, were dragged from their slumbers. Men clambered over their drowsy comrades and emerged into the open air. Their feet squelched in the urine-soaked ground, for soldiers invariably eased themselves at the entrance to their tents or even inside where they slept. For an hour a mass of figures in the semi-darkness jostled and cursed. But as the light grew so did their regularity. By the time the drummers beat the ‘Assembly’ at 0500 hours the tents had been struck, kit packed, weapons retrieved and the men bundled onto the assembly area to line up by company and regiment, ready for inspection, colours unfurled, sharp new flints securely fastened in the jaws of their muskets. Companies of between 50 and 100 men were commanded by a captain who knew every one of them by name. When he was happy that his men were properly attired, their weapons clean and thirty-six rounds in their cartridge cases he reported to the major or lieutenant colonel and soon the whole force was ready to march.
Groups of light infantrymen and rangers set off first. The British force had been in the heart of Canada for less than a week and they had been given a shocking immersion into the world of insurgency, sniping, ambush and Native American warfare. Bodies of soldiers that strayed from the riverbank were found horribly killed and mutilated, their scalps taken as trophies by Native Americans and the Canadians who had learnt their way of war from them. Civilians in this populous part of Canada were trapped in between. Their farmhouses ransacked, their provisions confiscated by hungry warriors. That very morning a patrol of British light troops had searched one house and finding no one set it on fire. A British officer reported that ‘they were alarmed with bitter shrieks and cries of women and children’. They had, apparently, ‘foolishly concealed themselves among some lumber in a cellar’. British troops ‘very humanely exerted themselves for the relief of those miserable wretches, but their best endeavours were ineffectual…these unhappy people perished in the flames’. The officer wrote in his diary that ‘Such alas! are the direful effects of war.’
By the end of the summer an incident like this would barely raise a comment as atrocity fed atrocity and the campaign became a nightmare of terror, retribution, and disease.
This was the first serious push away from the beaches where the British had landed just days before. Major General James Wolfe, their commander, had ordered this force to move west, away from the comforting presence of the fleet anchored in the river, to tighten the noose around Quebec, a fortress said to be impregnable, capital of the vast French North American empire. They were to seize a prominent piece of ground called Point Lévis from where British guns could fire across the river into Quebec. The soldiers knew the French would not let this probing force march with impunity. The terrain favoured the defence with thick woodland and a steep rise overlooking the track. One British officer described the route as ‘no regular road’ but ‘only a serpentine path with trees and under-wood on every side of us’.
Rangers led the column. They looked more like Native Americans than Christian subjects of King George with tomahawks at their waists, moccasins and powder horns, while a few even carried scalps of fallen enemies hanging from their belts. They were nearly all Americans recruited from the frontiers and despite their appearance and their unruly reputation (the French dubbed them ‘the English savages’) their skill in this kind of conflict meant that they could command twice the pay of red-coated regular infantrymen. Some carried the long, accurate rifle but most thought that the Brown Bess musket, possibly with a few inches sawed off the end to make it lighter, was a better weapon for close quarters bush fighting. It was quicker to reload and capable of firing buckshot. Alongside them was a new brand of British regular, the light infantryman. They had been introduced by innovative officers to try to improve the British army’s woeful performance in the wilderness fighting of North America. They were picked men who had been selected for having a sharp mind, an ability to improvise and a true aim. Major General Wolfe had written careful instructions. The light troops were to ‘post detachments in all the suspected places on the road to prevent the columns from being fired at, from behind trees, by rascals who dare not show themselves’. As the column marched past the light troops would then fall in as the rear guard.
They had not advanced far before the woods echoed to the bangs of muskets and rifles, the howls of wounded and the shriek of the Native Americans, allies of the French.
The men of the North American tribes were bred as warriors. Martial prowess was highly prized and even in times of peace young men picked fights with neighbouring groups in order to win acclaim. Prisoners, in Native cultures, could replace relatives who had fallen in battle or could be tortured expertly so that their pain assuaged that of the family of a fallen brave. In the two centuries since Europeans had introduced gunpowder into North America the Native Americans had mastered the musket and rifle and men had honed their marksmanship for hunting as well as war. At close quarters they were just as skilled with tomahawk or knife. Their terrible reputation for savagery, together with expert bushcraft, exotic tattoos, and haunting war cries, had all conspired to send many British units into total panic at even the prospect of an encounter. The Canadians of European descent were no less fearsome. Canada had only just survived in the face of an unforgiving climate and constant hostility from some tribes. Her young men had adapted to the North American way of war and to many outsiders they were indistinguishable from the Native warriors. As the British force pushed along the track the biggest challenge was overcoming the massive psychological inferiority that years of ambush, slaughter, and defeat had bred in the men. The redcoats were edgy. One officer reported an unfortunate ‘friendly fire’ incident in which a light infantryman shot one of his corporals, and the wounded man had to be carried on ‘a blanket with skewers to two poles’. It took six men to carry the casualty and they were ‘relieved every quarter of an hour’.
Wolfe would report to his political masters in London that the force had ‘two or three skirmishes’ but the evidence from those who actually sweated up to Point Lévis, clutching their muskets and scanning the unfamiliar woodland for any movement, suggests that it was not as casual as Wolfe made it sound.
A Highlander who acted as his regiment’s bard gives a graphic description in a Gaelic song: ‘the marshalling was under Beaumont/ those ranks were handsome/ sent up to Pointe Levis/ to test the warriors;/ Indians and Frenchmen/ were very close to us in the bushes/ wrecking the heads/ and the legs that belonged to us!’
As the soldiers skirted the shore many caught their first horrifying glimpses of this new kind of war. One young Scotsman was horrified at the sight of several British corpses, ‘all scalped and mangled in a shocking manner’. He wrote that, ‘no human creature but an Indian could be guilty of such inhuman cruelty,’ but changed his journal to read, ‘no human creature but an Indian or Canadian could be guilty of such inhumanity as to insult a dead body’.
His men were uncowed though, if the Gaelic war song is to be believed: ‘when we were fully drawn up/ in line of battle/ and watching them/ to see if they would wait and give us satisfaction/ they sprayed fire into our faces/ but they got it back in return;/ they took fright/ when they recognised us’.
The hit and run tactics of the Canadians and Native Americans could slow the British advance but not stop it. In a series of mini engagements, the light infantry and the rangers edged forward towards Point Lévis. One sergeant called it a ‘sharp skirmish of near two hours’ and said ‘we sustained a considerable loss of killed and wounded’.
An officer wrote that in the end the French forces could not ‘withstand our fire and numbers’ and put the casualty figure at ‘thirty killed and wounded’.
The fighting had been intense enough to make their commander think about turning back.
As the exhausted men fought their way onto the cleared ground around Point Lévis they gazed across the St Lawrence River in awe. There, around half a mile away, was Quebec. It occupied one of the most powerful natural positions of any town or city in the world. Fine buildings with tall sloping roofs and churches with high spires sat above cliffs which soared out of the St Lawrence. The walls atop the cliffs bristled with cannon and beyond the city a great army was camped along the shoreline. Those with telescopes scanned its defences knowing that they could very well be asked to storm its walls. One was dismayed by what he saw: ‘their situation appears to be very strong by nature, and…they are very numerous’. Even from this far away he could pick out lines of trenches and redoubts and, also, ‘throughout their camp there are a continued chain of houses, the windows of which are logged up for the service of musketry’.
It had been a bloody morning. The men who now gazed on Quebec and its defenders realized that it was simply a prologue. Before the waters of the mighty river froze in winter the British force would have to capture Quebec or face an ignominious retreat that could derail the entire British war effort not just in North America but in distant Europe too. Defeat was not an option, yet the soldiers staring out at Quebec knew that they could well pay a terrible price for victory.
ONE (#ulink_4ae8fe66-ccee-50ed-9602-26f71bab80db)
Assault on New France
THERE WERE SHIPS in the St Lawrence. Not an armada, but a squadron powerful enough to dominate the river. Around ten in all, seven of them were obviously warships; their hulls were chequered with gun ports. The largest was a fine man of war with eighty guns, a match for any craft afloat. The air was heavy with fog. The vessels drifted in and out of banks of cloud and cohesion was maintained by the largest ship firing one of its cannon at regular intervals. Sharpeyed officers of the watch saw an eruption of white smoke with a momentary stab of fire at its centre, seconds later came the deep sound of the explosion, echoing back off the banks of the river as the shorelines slowly converged.
The river had grown narrower. After days of sailing up the Gulf of St Lawrence where the land was barely visible on either side, the crews could now see clearly either shore. On the north side it was spectacular: high, near vertical slopes, covered with spruce trees, broken only by the occasional section of cliff, damp with water that gave them a bright sheen during rare bursts of sunshine. On the south side, only twenty-two miles away, the coastline was flatter but beyond it, another mountain range reminded the crews of the vast, wild nature of the country.
There was a large island, separated from the south shore by a gap of just over three miles. With a good natural harbour the Île du Bic had, for centuries, been an easily defensible haven for ships on the passage up or down the river and home to a small community of priests and pilots. Here the largest ship broke out a large plain white flag, or ensign, at its mizzen. It was the ‘Bourbon Banner’, symbol of the Bourbon kings of France. On the shore the inhabitants, who had been keenly examining the ships for clues as to their nationality, broke out into ‘the greatest rejoicing imaginable’.
This was the gateway to Canada, the jewel in the crown of New France, a vast French empire that stretched from the North Atlantic to the Rocky Mountains and down to New Orleans at the mouth of the Mississippi. But its great size was matched by its vulnerability and especially now that France was at war. Her ancient rivalry with England, inherited in 1707 by the newly created Britain, had been revived at the end of the seventeenth century and they had fought a series of wars, each greater than the last, separated by periods of unconvincing peace. No longer did Englishmen strive to carve out dynastic empires in France itself; instead, the fighting surged across the almost limitless horizons of newly discovered continents, dragging in the settlers of the adolescent colonial empires. For four years New France had been fighting the British whose colonies in North America clung to the Atlantic Ocean from Massachusetts down to Georgia. At the beginning of each campaigning season when the ice melted in the St Lawrence River, the artery of Canada, the settlers, or habitants, waited nervously to see what help France would send to her North American possessions. This year, it seemed, France had been generous in her aid. The people of Bic rushed into canoes and paddled out to greet the ships, which they assumed were carrying the food, gunpowder, soldiers, and gold which New France so desperately needed to hold back the British and their American colonial allies.
The enthusiastic Canadians scrambled up the towering sides of the hulls on slippery, shallow steps that formed a vertical ladder. But as soon as they reached the deck, their euphoria was instantly extinguished. Rather than receiving a warm welcome from fellow subjects of the Most Christian King, Louis XV of France, they found themselves with British oak beneath their feet, and the muskets and cold steel of red-coated marines pointed at their bellies. The ships were British. It was 23 May 1759: the war had arrived in the heart of the French empire. This Royal Naval squadron under the command of Rear Admiral of the Red, Philip Durell, had been given the task of blockading Canada; to cut it off from any help that France might send, and hasten its capitulation.
On shore the joy of the habitants turned to confusion as they waited for the canoes to return, then to ‘consternation, rage and grief’ as they saw ‘the White colours struck, and the British flags, hoisted in their place’. Apparently, a priest who had been avidly watching the proceedings with a telescope clamped to his eye, ‘dropped down and instantly expired’.
With an age-old ruse de guerre Durell had lured experienced Canadian pilots on board, men he desperately needed to complete his mission.
The squabbles of European monarchs had poisoned relations between their colonies in the Americas since those continents had been discovered 250 years before. The ambitions of Louis XIV in Germany, the Low Countries, and Spain had pushed England into armed opposition. Fighting had spread from Western Europe to the wildernesses of the Carolinas or northern New Hampshire as it had to West Africa and Asia. But the current conflict was different. Long the victims of Europe’s wars, the colonies now became their instigators. As their size, populations, and economies had all swelled they developed their own ambitions, interests, and points of friction with the colonies of other powers. While Europe would never lose its primacy in policymakers’ minds, by the mid-eighteenth century French and British politicians found themselves increasingly impelled by colonial considerations. In the late 1740s ambitious British colonials had crossed the Allegheny Mountains and started trading with the Native American inhabitants of the Ohio valley. The British colonies had always claimed the entire continent as far as the Pacific but the barrier of the Alleghenies and the hostility of the Native Americans beyond them had prevented them from ever making these claims a reality. Now these adventurers hoped to sell vast swathes of this fertile land to migrants from the colonies, who would then provide a market for manufactured goods that they would supply. Little attention was paid to French assertions of sovereignty in the area, and none at all to those of the Native Americans.
The French regarded these encroachments as an unacceptable violation of the strategic corridor that linked Canada, along the St Lawrence, to Louisiana, a colony that was growing along the length of the Mississippi. New France moved troops into the Ohio valley and started building a chain of forts. This represented a threat not only to the individual British colonies, who believed it their destiny to expand west to the Pacific, but also to British North America as a whole which faced being surrounded by an unbroken ring of French forts from the Gulf of Mexico to the St Lawrence River. Even the British Prime Minister, Thomas Pelham Holles, Duke of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Newcastle-under-Lyme, probably the least belligerent man in George II’s government and no friend to rascally marauders on the fringes of empire, believed that this was intolerable. ‘No war,’ he wrote to the British ambassador at Versailles, ‘could be worse than the suffering of such insults.’ Britain would lose its entire position in America if her colonies were confined to the narrow coastal strip of the eastern seaboard. ‘That,’ he wrote emphatically, ‘is what we must not, we will not, suffer.’
With only a handful of British regular troops in North America it was left to the colonies to counter the French threat. Virginia took up the challenge and in true British style wrote a strongly worded letter to the French commander in the Ohio valley. It was delivered by eight men. Their leader was in his early twenties, a tall, hardy, rather conservative officer in the Virginia militia who owed his appointment to his connections to Lord Fairfax of Cameron, one of Virginia’s leading landowners. His name was George Washington. Given his later titanic reputation it is perhaps surprising that he stumbled rather than strode onto history’s stage. There was little sign of future greatness, indeed he was lucky to survive. He delivered his letter but the French commander was contemptuous. The following year Washington led a motley force over the mountains, planning to use gunpowder and steel where ink had failed. The first shots of the Seven Years War were fired in a glen near present-day Uniontown in Fayette County, Pennsylvania. In an action that did him no credit, on 28 May 1754, Washington ambushed a small force of French troops who were coming to warn him away from French land. Ensign Joseph Coulon de Villiers de Jumonville and nine of his men were killed. The French responded quickly, defeated Washington, sending him limping back across the Alleghenies. His actions had made war inevitable. He and his men were fortunate that they did not spend the whole of it as prisoners.
The fighting triggered the sending of reinforcements to North America by both the British and the French. Britain moved first by lunging into the Ohio country, trying to capture Fort Duquesne at the Forks of the Ohio River. A force under General Braddock was cobbled together from different units and sent out from Britain. It was raw, unused to American conditions and its men were utterly terrified of the Native Americans. Braddock made some attempt to adapt to local conditions but was unwilling to listen to colonial advice and as far as Native Americans were concerned, he told Benjamin Franklin that ‘it is impossible that [they] should make any impression’ on his disciplined troops.
Braddock’s men wilted as they hacked their way through thick forest, travelling between three and eight miles a day. The supply train collapsed as wagons broke up on the brutal road and horses dropped dead. Dysentery tore through the ranks. It was hugely impressive that the expedition got as far as it did. On 9 July 1755, the British force of approximately fifteen hundred men crossed the Monongahela River, nine miles short of the French Fort Duquesne. Their reward for such grit was blundering straight into a terrible ambush by 108 Canadian colonial troops, 146 militiamen, and 600 Native Americans. Braddock’s force was utterly routed. The French poured fire into the thickly packed column, while sharpshooters picked off the officers. Without leadership, the men simply herded together like terrified animals desperately seeking a false sense of security in numbers. The column eventually broke and flooded back along the road they had made. Native Americans swooped down on the wounded, killing many, saving others to torture later, and claiming others as prisoners to induct into their tribes and replace fallen family members. Braddock was mortally wounded, Washington was hurt and had several horses shot from under him. Two-thirds of the British force were killed or captured. The French suffered less than fifty dead and injured. Of the 150 men in the colonial Virginia Regiment 120 became casualties. Monongahela ranks with the battle of Isandlwana of the Anglo-Zulu War and the massacre of the British army between Kabul and Jalalabad during the First Anglo-Afghan War as an epic tragedy in the military history of the British Empire. The French captured money, supplies, and artillery but the psychological consequences of the defeat were the most serious. It shook the confidence of the British army in North America for years to come and created a myth of the Native American as a superhuman savage.
The war in North America continued to go badly. In Europe the news was scarcely better. The British were forced to shoot one of their admirals, John Byng, on his own quarterdeck to, in Voltaire’s memorable words, ‘encourage the others’. A court martial determined that Byng had been insufficiently aggressive when he withdrew his fleet after an indecisive battle off Minorca, allowing a French force to capture the vital island. On the Continent Britain’s woes were added to not by an absence of aggression but by a surfeit. Britain’s ally, Frederick II of Prussia, ignited a general war by invading Saxony, thus triggering a series of alliances that united Russia, Austria, and France against him, all three determined to punish Prus-sia’s temerity with annihilation. King George II’s hereditary possession in Germany, his beloved Electorate of Hanover, was rapidly overrun by French troops.
Britain’s fortunes did slowly improve from this nadir. French colonies were picked off in West Africa and the Caribbean. The French army was driven out of Hanover and then held at bay by an allied army paid for by London but commanded by a Prussian, Frederick’s brother-in-law, Ferdinand of Brunswick. Frederick won a series of stunning victories that would earn him the epithet ‘the Great’ but even so Prussia was never far from dismemberment. There was unequivocally good news from India where Robert Clive routed the Nawab of Bengal and his French allies at the battle of Plassey in 1757. This battle turned the British East India Company’s zone of influence into an empire. Fighting moved to the Carnatic where British forces sought to wipe out French power as they had in Bengal. But in North America there were years of defeat. Regular troops were trounced as they struggled with unfamiliar terrain and enemies while the civilians of the frontier were murdered, tortured, or captured by war parties of Native Americans and Canadians. 1758 had finally seen some success when a British amphibious force had seized the French stronghold of Louisbourg perched on the rocky Atlantic coast of Cape Breton Island.
Everything suggested that 1759 would be the decisive year. Britain was to make a massive push for victory in North America. Austria and Russia seemed to have Frederick on the brink of defeat and France, frustrated by her lack of progress in Germany, was assembling an invasion force to cross the Channel and knock Britain out of the war. She would then regain those colonies lost on the battlefield at the negotiating table.
For Britain the year began in crisis. London’s financial community were terrified by the spectre of invasion. Everyone knew that Le Havre was awash with shipwrights, its harbour filling inexorably with shallow-draught invasion barges. Forty thousand soldiers had been moved to France’s north-west coast. Lord Lyttelton, an opposition politician, wrote from London that ‘we talk of nothing here but the French invasion; they are certainly making such preparations as have never before been made to invade this island since the Spanish Armada’.
Government bonds sold at the steepest discounts of the war. The national debt was larger than anyone could have imagined possible and any new taxes had little chance of getting through a House of Commons packed with country gentlemen who, while patriots, had no wish to fund a perpetual war for the benefit of London financiers, merchants, and American prospectors. The cost of the navy alone jumped from £3.3 million in 1758 to £5 million in 1759. In all the Duke of Newcastle would have to find £12 million in 1759, over half of which he would need to borrow and as the markets lost confidence in the progress of the war the cost of that borrowing crept up.
The campaigning season opened with defeats for Ferdinand in Germany. He was driven back to the borders of Hanover itself. Frederick suffered sharp setbacks and later in the year he was so badly beaten by the Russians and Austrians at Kunersdorf that he thought the war lost. In Britain, by the start of summer the Chancellor of the Exchequer had asked to resign, government stock had plunged, and Newcastle was thinking about suspending seamen’s wages. The Prime Minister wrote a memorandum in which he admitted that ‘we are engaged in expenses infinitely above our strength…expedition after expedition, campaign after campaign’. He suggested that Prussia should be warned that Britain might not be able to continue the war for another year.
Attempts were made to fortify strategic points in southern England. Chatham, Portsmouth, Dover, and Plymouth were given earthworks and batteries were erected along the coast. They were futile gestures. The country was stripped of regular troops. The commander in chief of the British army told his colleagues that only 10,000 men would be available to meet an invasion on the south coast. So many of Britain’s Royal Engineers had been sent to America there were only five qualified engineers left in the country.
The only other troops available were a half-assembled militia of amateur soldiers. In a clash with veteran French infantrymen there would be no doubt as to the result. In desperation the population clung to reassuring jingoism. A great favourite was ‘Rule, Britannia’, with words by James Thomson and music by Thomas Arne, a song which had become wildly popular during Charles Edward Stuart’s Jacobite uprising of 1745-6. Another hit at the time was ‘Great Britain For Ever’.
Defiance alone never repelled an invasion. Britain’s real defence was her fleet. But her politicians had left little margin for error. The First Lord of the Admiralty reported to a small de facto war cabinet in February that the majority of British battleships had been dispatched around the globe to poach French possessions. Forty-one were left in home waters. The French were thought to have forty-three, although some of these were in her southern ports in the Mediterranean. The number of French ships that were in a condition to get to sea, let alone last long in the Channel, would be far smaller but the Royal Navy was also weaker than its paper strength, lacking nearly ten thousand men; many of its capital ships were hardly able to weigh their anchors.
The government had taken a terrible gamble. Britain itself was at risk and yet men, ships, and treasure had been sent abroad. Vast resources were committed to the invasion of Canada, the most important operation yet undertaken in the war. Failure would place the North American colonies in danger, threaten the creditworthiness of the British government, and almost certainly destroy Newcastle’s administration. The fate of the expedition would be felt from the log cabins of the American frontier to the palaces of Whitehall and Versailles.
If Durell’s Royal Naval squadron in the St Lawrence could block French supplies to Canada the prospects for the British attack would be rosy indeed. But he also had another task, almost as important. The river was unknown to British seamen. With its reefs, currents, rocks, and other hazards it was Canada’s first and, many thought, strongest line of defence. Durell was charged with finding a route up the river. The French authorities had made desultory attempts to chart the river but the results were unimpressive and, it seems, at best only partially available to the British. For generations the French had relied on pilots, each expert in a small stretch of river. So important was their knowledge that one British officer discovered that ‘it is a rule with the inhabitants of Quebec not to let any pilots have the whole navigation of this river’.
Durell had tricked these men aboard by showing them the Bourbon Banner. It was a perfectly legitimate ruse according to the rules that governed eighteenth-century warfare, and it had brought these vital pilots straight to him.
Durell was typical of the fighting admirals of the mid-century navy. He was 52 years old and had been at sea since he was 14. Like so many naval officers he had joined a ship thanks to the patronage of a family member, his uncle Captain Thomas Durell of the Sea Horse, although rather more unusually he had joined as an ordinary seaman. Serving his time on the lowest rung of the Georgian navy had given him an unbeatable training in what it took for men to sail and fight a ship. He had spent the rest of his teenage years in North American waters and was made an officer at 24 and a captain by his early thirties. War had made him rich. In the maelstrom of battle naval officers could fight for something more tangible than honour: prizes. Naval officers were incentivized by the guarantee that they would receive a proportion of the value of any enemy ship captured. In the 1740s he had helped take two French merchantmen, returning from the East Indies packed with valuable goods. But wealth had not dampened his ambition; he had continued at sea and had fought in large fleet actions against the French in European waters until returning to North America for good in 1758.
Durell had had an awful winter. He had written to the Admiralty in London in March 1759 from the British naval base of Halifax in Nova Scotia telling them that ‘the winter has been the severest that has been known since the settling of the place’, vessels attempting to get up the coast ‘have met with ice eighteen or twenty leagues from the land, so were obliged to return, after having had some of their people froze to death, and other frost bitten to that degree, as to lose legs and arms’.
Durell had stationed one of his quickest, most manoeuvrable ships, the frigate Sutherland under Captain John Rous off Canso, to bring him news of the ice melting. Rous was also in his fifties and knew the waters off the coast of Newfoundland and the Gulf of St Lawrence as well as any Briton or American. He had been a New England privateer, preying on French merchantmen, before a commodore in the Royal Navy recruited this ‘brisk, gallant man’ for the King’s Service.
When planning his campaign Durell had decided not to risk taking his full squadron into the gulf to lie in wait for the enemy. He had spent years in these waters, time which included a vain search for the French in similar conditions in 1755, and reckoned that his chances of finding them at sea were small and the cost to his crews and ships from the cold too high. Far better, he decided, to wait for the ice to melt in Halifax, and then sail up the St Lawrence and intercept the French in the confined waters of the river.
But Durell had been unable to leave Halifax until 5 May, trapped by ice and contrary winds. By the time he had arrived at Bic he had found out that his gamble had failed. As one British officer on the ships wrote,
near the isle of Bic we took a small sloop…who gave us the disagreeable news of the arrival of many transports and some frigates from Old France, which they left early in March and were deeply loaded with provisions and warlike stores. Had we sailed at the time you so earnestly wished, we had most certainly intercepted them, as they were not more than 10 days before us.
This was a disaster; the bold attempt to sever the umbilical cord to France had failed and with it any prospect of an easy campaign of conquest. These French supplies would enable Canada to fight on and nothing short of a full military campaign would bring the colony to its knees. Another British officer wrote, ‘this, you may imagine was mortifying news to us’.
It was mortifying enough for the sailors on the ships, but Durell would have known that for one man in particular it would be the most unwelcome news imaginable. The man whose job it was to command the soldiers that would do the fighting once the fleet delivered them up the St Lawrence into the heart of Canada, whose army would attempt to bring about the ruin of New France, to kill, capture, or scatter its defenders and batter its strongholds into submission. For this man, it would be by far the greatest test of his short career but he had been confident of success, as long as the British ships could stop French supplies from reaching the Canadians. Now his plan had misfired before he had even entered the St Lawrence. This commander was Major General James Wolfe.
While Durell secured pilots and intelligence, James Wolfe had spent the spring chafing to follow him up the river. Wolfe was charged with threatening, and ideally capturing, the principal towns of Canada, particularly its capital, Quebec, perched on a plateau, protected by cliffs which plunged down to the St Lawrence. Quebec was a great prize that had eluded British soldiers for generations. On paper he had a considerable force but his chances were lessening by the day as the expedition suffered delay after delay. The campaign season in North America was short; the onset of winter put a stop to any military activity as the river froze and the temperatures plunged far below zero. Every minute counted.
Even as Wolfe and many of his senior officers had met in Portsmouth, in southern England in February 1759 there was already a sense of great urgency. Previous attacks on Canada had petered out as the gales and frosts of September and October had heralded the onset of the terrible winter. Surviving letters to these officers from the bureaucrats and politicians in London are laced with exhortations of speed. On 1 January the Admiralty Secretary had written to the port admiral at Portsmouth telling him ‘in the most pressing manner’ to get the ships ready for service in North America, ‘with all the expedition that is possible’.
Wolfe was in overall command of the army; Rear Admiral Charles Saunders would command the fleet, including Durell’s ships as soon as he arrived in North American waters. Saunders assured the government that ‘the least delay’ was unacceptable.
The red-coated soldiers who would do the bulk of the fighting were already in America, but Wolfe and Saunders were bringing civilian ships hired by the navy to act as transports to get the men and supplies up the St Lawrence. There were 20,000 tons of shipping in all, each ton costing 12s. 9d. and was ‘victualled’ or supplied with food for four months. Many of these ships came straight from the collier trade that brought the coal from north-east England down to London, a city which even by 1759 was insatiable in its appetite. Over Christmas officers were sent up the Thames to chase dawdling ships carrying powder and shot. The Admiralty demanded an account of the readiness of the transports ‘every other day’.
