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

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.’4

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.5 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’.6 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.7

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.8 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.9

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’.10 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 1758.11

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’.12 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.13 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.14

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’.15

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’.16 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.17

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’.18

Accompanying these transports and protecting them from French interference, Saunders commanded an overwhelmingly powerful naval task force. The Royal Navy was the strongest on the planet. It outnumbered the French navy, enjoying an advantage in battleships or ‘ships of the line’ of approximately 120 to 55. But whereas Britain had naval commitments across all of the world’s oceans, France was concentrating her ships to launch an invasion of Britain. Despite this threat Saunders was given fourteen battleships to protect the convoy of troop ships across the Atlantic, supported by six smaller frigates, three bomb vessels, and three fireships. These would join Durell’s American squadron of ten ships of the line and four frigates which had wintered in North America. This vast concentration of naval firepower would then be the strongest single fleet in the world.19

Portsmouth was booming. It was the crucible of Britain’s naval effort and was packed with sailors, many with spare cash from enlistment bounties and their share of the prize money awarded for capturing enemy ships. The navy was larger than it had ever been before, with unprecedented investment being poured into ships and shore facilities like the Haslar Hospital in Gosport, opened in 1753, with a capacity for 2,000 patients, four times greater than Guy’s and St Thomas’s in London, the next biggest in the country. For years to come Haslar would be the largest brick building in Europe. A visitor to Portsmouth in 1759 commented that, ‘The streets are not the cleanest, nor the smells most savoury; but the continuous resort of seamen &c makes it always full of people, who seem in a hurry.’20 It was here that Wolfe was joined by his subordinate, Brigadier George Townshend, who recorded the event in his journal, ‘I embarked on the Neptune,the Admiral’s ship, on the 13th of February on board of which was also the General.’21

On 15 February Saunders sent an advance party of fifteen warships, a mix of ships of the line and frigates, plus sixty-six transports to New York to round up the troops who had wintered in the American colonies and collect fresh supplies.22 The same day he received a promotion. He was made Vice Admiral of the Blue, and the Neptune immediately raised a blue ensign.23 The next day Saunders was able to ‘acquaint the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty that I am now working out between the Buoys, with the wind at East’.24 Townshend confirmed the journey’s auspicious start, writing that ‘we had a fine wind down the channel’.25 Given that the prevailing winds in the Channel are south-west it must have seemed like a happy omen for the Atlantic crossing that lay ahead.

It did not last. After hitting calms off Cornwall the weather turned rough. Although ships could make the eastern seaboard of America in around a month,26 the large convoy was held up by the pace of the slowest vessels. Thanks to ‘strong gales and thick hazy weather’ they lost contact with the Dublin with ‘three of the victuallers, two transports and a bomb tender’. Even though Saunders had ‘no doubt of their getting safe to America’, these incidents were pushing the operation into ever greater delays.27 Other ships lost masts and spars in the heavy weather.

Navigation was an imperfect art. Fixing a ship’s longitude with any accuracy in 1759 was impossible. Seven years before, the University of Göttingen in Hanover had published a longitudinal table which allowed a careful navigator to work out his longitude to within sixty nautical miles but it is not known how many of the British ships carried the means to use even this rudimentary method. Cracking longitude was the great civilian and military challenge of the time, what the race to jet engines and harnessing the power of the atom was to the twentieth century. The Royal Navy was edging closer to a solution; two years later in 1761 the Deptford would sail for Jamaica with John Harrison’s chronometer on board and would stun his detractors by arriving just over one nautical mile out from her calculated position.28

Such a revolution was a distant dream for the officers of Saunders’ fleet as they lined the quarterdeck every day at noon, praying for a gap in the clouds to get their reading from the position of the sun. Meanwhile ships lost topmasts, sails were shredded, and many of the transports parted company. In these northern latitudes they came across ‘floating islands of ice’.29 They were aiming for Louisbourg, until the year before a French possession on Cape Breton Island that had guarded the mouth of the St Lawrence. It had fallen after a siege in the summer of 1758 and would now be a base for attacking Canada rather than defending it. Two miserable months after leaving Portsmouth the fleet neared Louisbourg but as it did so it ran into a thick shelf of ice miles wide that stretched out from the shore. The harbour at Louisbourg was completely enclosed. Saunders dispatched smaller boats to try to find passages through the ice but to no avail.