Читать книгу Death or Victory: The Battle for Quebec and the Birth of Empire - Dan Snow - Страница 11

AT FIRST LIGHT a red-and-white chequered flag was raised on the main topgallant masthead of the Lowestoft. As it caught the breeze the thud of a cannon demanded the fleet’s attention. Saunders had given the order for the landings to commence on the Île d’Orléans. A carefully choreographed marine dance now commenced. From all the ships of the fleet small boats detached themselves and made ready to ferry men and equipment ashore according to a carefully prepared schedule. For the first time in the campaign the specially designed flat-bottomed boats were winched out of the ships’ waists and lowered into the water. Four of them were put afloat from the Richmond alone. They had been husbanded by Wolfe and Saunders until now, their use forbidden for mundane tasks, so vital were they to the success of the operation. Smaller ships, schooners and sloops, with shallow draughts crept in close to shore. The flat-bottomed boats all rendezvoused at the Lowestoft and then made for these small ships where light infantrymen and rangers, carrying the minimum of kit, clambered down the sides of the hulls and sat in tightly packed rows, some of them helping the crew of twelve sailors with the oars. By 0500 hours on 27 June the rangers were splashing ashore on the Île d’Orléans, their muskets raised high to keep their powder dry in case the inhabitants or Native Americans were lying in wait. The men moved quickly off the beach and through the empty village of St Laurent, on their backs they carried only a rolled-up blanket and just two days’ worth of food: biscuit and salted meat. Their pouches contained thirty-six rounds of ammunition.¹

The boats backed their oars to clear the shallows and headed out to the ships where they collected the regular infantry. They would land in strict seniority; the regimental numbers denoted the notional order in which they had been established, the smaller the number the older the unit. Amherst’s 15th Regiment of Foot was the senior unit of Wolfe’s army and its men would have the honour of landing first. As the flat-bottomed boats picked up the men of the 15th from the Employment, a London-based transport, other boats made for Blackett, Three Sisters, and Fortitude where the men of the 28th scrambled down into them.

It was the start of the largest military operation in North American history. Not only were vastly more ships and men involved on either side than ever before but the total number of soldiers, sailors, Native Americans, townsfolk, and rural habitants within a ten-mile area of Quebec represented by far the largest concentration of humanity in North America at that time, outnumbering the biggest city, Philadelphia, with its population of 24,000 by quite some distance.²

Previous amphibious operations had relied upon getting the troops to shore in the ships’ existing boats, which were small having been designed for tasks like ferrying supplies to and from shore, laying an anchor, or transporting officers to the flagship when summoned. This had put a major restriction on the number of men that could be sent ashore in the first wave. It also tended to mean that they arrived in a disorderly rabble. In the event of a contested landing, success depended on as many troops getting ashore as quickly as possible, ideally in a condition to fight when they arrived. Good generalship, at its simplest, is the ability to deploy as many soldiers as possible, where you want them, at top speed. The flat-bottomed boats could each hold seventy soldiers, vastly more than the biggest of the ships’ boats. Two prototypes had been built at Woolwich after a failed amphibious assault on the French coast and tested on the Thames in April 1758. The London Evening Post noted that ‘on Wednesday last two boats of a new construction, built for landing His Majesty’s Forces in shallow waters, were launched, and sailed down the Thames. They…are rowed by twenty oars, and go much swifter than any other vessels on the river.’ The First Lord of the Admiralty, George Anson (a brilliant seaman turned politician who had made his name circumnavigating the globe in the early 1740s in the Centurion, with Charles Saunders as his first lieutenant) was watching from a barge and was sufficiently impressed to order as many as could be built within the space of a month.³ They were now employed on the front line for the first time. Every effort had also been made to maximize the number of other types of shallow-draught boats available to the operation. As well as seventeen purposebuilt flat-bottomed boats there were thirteen roomy whale boats, sturdily built and designed to be beached, and cutters, around thirty feet in length, which could be rowed or sailed. There were also 104 small ships that could be used. All together Wolfe could count on 134 small craft of all varieties that could deliver 3,319 men to the landing place in one go.⁴ As the boats crossed the mile and a half gap between the fleet and the shore an army officer, a drummer, and a corporal sat in the stern of each alongside the boat’s coxswain, who steered. The soldiers sat three or four abreast on benches or ‘thwarts’ between the rowers. In the bows naval petty officers attached the boats to the side of transports or secured the boats on the shore while the soldiers jumped into the shallows.

Knox and the 43rd Regiment sailed in the white division, which was the first to land its troops. His men were more heavily loaded than the light infantrymen and rangers, with ‘knapsacks, tools, camp necessaries, and 1 blanket of their ship bedding, besides their own blankets, 36 rounds of ammunition…and four days provisions’. Knox would have to forgo some of the luxuries that his rank entitled him to. Wolfe had strictly ordered that the officers ‘must be contented with very little baggage for a day or two’.⁵ Knox had spent the previous day scanning the shore and as he set foot on dry land his positive impressions were confirmed. Île d’Orléans is a long thin island, 21 miles by 5 miles. Along the centre of the island there is a ridge that runs right along the spine, with a continuous, gentle slope leading down to the river on either side. The farms were, and still are, long thin strips on this slope providing every farm with a river frontage. Indeed, there was hardly a farm or settlement in Canada that was not within yards of the St Lawrence or tributary rivers. Well-built farmhouses tended to be positioned near the water so there was an almost continuous band of settlement around the shore with the fields in neat, narrow strips stretching off up the hill behind them. The island appeared ‘fertile and agreeable’ and the ‘delightful country’ was dotted with ‘pleasant villages’ and ‘windmills, water-mills, churches, chapels and compact farm houses, all built with stone and covered some with wood and others with straw’. Knox was ‘inclined to think we are happily arrived at the place, to all appearance, will be the theatre of our future operations’.⁶

The soldiers were extremely pleased to be disembarking from the crowded ships, on which they had been unwelcome interlopers, and finally set their feet on dry land. John Johnson was the Quartermaster and Clerk of the 58th Regiment. Like most sergeants he was literate but he was unusual in that he wrote an account of the campaign. (The vast majority did not.) He described the land as ‘the most agreeable spot I ever saw…it is a bountiful island and well cultivated, and produces all kinds of grain, pasture and vegetables [and] is full of villages’.⁷ The most explicit were the Highlanders. A remarkable song composed by the regimental bard Iain Campbell during the campaign, in his native Gaelic, recounts that, ‘we were glad to be on the land,/ each one of us,/ with a good deal of haste/ went into the long boats/ to go to the island of Orleans’.⁸

The island was deserted. The previous day on the south shore Knox had spotted ‘the country-people…removing their effects in carts’ and being escorted to a place of safety, far from the British invaders.⁹ They crossed the river to the north bank where they sought shelter with friends or relatives. The sheer concentration of British ships caused panic around the Quebec basin, not just on the Île d’Orléans: ‘At the sight of so many English ships,’ recorded one French journal, ‘terror again seized upon the women, most of whom left the town as soon as possible, and retired into the country.’¹⁰

There was certainly no resistance to the landing. Amphibious assaults are terribly vulnerable when the attacking troops are cooped up in small boats just before landing. Wolfe’s men were unable to fire their muskets effectively while afloat and boats full of defenceless men made tempting targets. The French, however, made no move to defend the coast. With such a huge shoreline the Île d’Orléans was impossible to protect while still maintaining their positions along the all-important Beauport shore. Montcalm had to accept that Wolfe would be able to land his army in the area around Quebec. He just had to stop them landing in a place that gave them a springboard for attacking the city itself. The Île d’Orléans was indefensible and Montcalm was content to cede the island knowing that Wolfe would have to make yet another amphibious assault before he could get his forces up to the walls of the city. That next assault, Montcalm planned, would receive a lethal reception.

The night before, on the evening of 26 June, Wolfe had sent Captain Joseph Gorham ashore with forty of his men to scout out the landing place. Gorham was a tough New England ranger who had fought alongside his father and older brother since he was a teenager, protecting the isolated settlements of Nova Scotia against Native American raids. Not encountering any opposition the rangers pushed on to the north side of the island. Here they stumbled upon a large party of the inhabitants who were hiding their valuables in the woods and there was a skirmish. Gorham and his men retreated to the south shore and barricaded themselves into a farmhouse. They had lost a man and when they searched for him the next day they found the corpse ‘scalped and butchered in a very barbarous manner’. They followed a grim trail of blood to the water’s edge on the north shore and realized that the Canadians had made their escape.¹¹ It was a first, gruesome signal that the summer’s fighting was to be conducted along very different lines to what the men could expect on the battlefields of Europe.

For the moment, though, the British troops were told to conduct themselves according to the European norm. Non-combatants were to be protected; Wolfe issued strict orders that ‘no insult of any kind be offered to the inhabitants of the island’. Wolfe also forbade the landing of the numerous bands of women that always accompanied eighteenth-century armies. These soldiers’ wives made themselves useful on campaign, doing all sorts of jobs such as laundry, nursing, and cooking, but Wolfe regarded them as a nuisance. He did not want them getting in the way of what could be a sharp fight to get ashore. They would be allowed to disembark only after order had been established.¹²

After landing, the infantrymen marched inland for about a mile and pitched their tents in a long line facing to the north, the direction from which trouble was likeliest. Knox had grabbed the opportunity of having a look around the church in the village of St Laurent, ‘a neat building with steeple and spire’. Inside, ‘all the ornaments of the altar were removed’ and there was a charming note from the local priest addressed to the ‘“Worthy Officers of the British Army”’, begging them ‘from their well known humanity and generosity they would protect his church and its sacred furniture, as also his house and other tenements adjoining to it’. In a very Christian gesture the priest concluded that ‘he wished we had arrived a little earlier, that we might have enjoyed the benefit of such vegetables, viz. asparagus, radishes, etc etc as his garden produced, and are now gone to seed’. Knox commented on the distinctive tone, ‘he concluded his epistle with many frothy compliments, and kind wishes etc consistent with that kind of politeness so peculiar to the French’.¹³

While his officers were sightseeing, pitching the camp, and bringing men and supplies ashore, Wolfe, as always, was pushing forward. Finally giving his curiosity free rein he and a small group of men crossed the island to catch a glimpse of the prize which he had travelled thousands of miles to claim. By his side was one of his most important colleagues: his Chief Engineer, Patrick Mackellar. The 42-year-old engineer was the perfect man for the job. Not only had he served more than twenty years in the Ordnance, the body responsible for the army’s engineering and artillery as well as its logistical and technical support, but he had also been stationed in North America from the beginning of the current war. He had accompanied the ill-starred General Braddock on his drive deep into the Pennsylvania backcountry in 1755, where he was badly wounded in the fiasco on the Monongahela. Mackellar’s war had not improved. He had been captured while attempting to defend the woefully inadequate fort at Oswego the following year. After languishing as a prisoner in Quebec itself for a few months he was exchanged for an officer of equal rank. He had then accompanied Amherst and Wolfe to Louisbourg where the Chief Engineer had been wounded and Mackellar inherited the role. The French fortress fell and Mackellar was now uniquely qualified for the Quebec job. Not only had he proved his ability to conduct a formal siege in North American conditions but he was one of the few living British men who had actually seen Quebec. He wrote a detailed report on the city, but his strict imprisonment had meant that he had been unable to see the landward walls. He had picked up hints from servants and had seen a copy of an old map. These combined with the ‘difficulty they made of our seeing it’ seemed to Mackellar to confirm ‘that the place must be weak towards the land’. An attack from this quarter ‘is the only method that promises success’. Wolfe had so far followed the recommendation in his engineer’s report to the letter. Mackellar had suggested seizing the Île d’Orléans and reorganizing there, threatening the whole north bank of the St Lawrence. This, he wrote, will ‘probably make the enemy more doubtful where the landing is intended, which may be a very considerable advantage’.¹⁴

Wolfe had met Mackellar the year before at the siege of Louisbourg and was, at first, unimpressed by what he saw. At the beginning of the Quebec campaign he had written to his uncle saying that ‘it is impossible to conceive how poorly the engineering business was carried on’ at Louisbourg. The French fortress ‘could not have held out ten days if it had been attacked with common sense’. He bemoaned that his engineers were ‘very indifferent, and of little experience; but we have none better’.¹⁵ It was not the first time Wolfe was unkind in his judgement, nor would it be the last time he would be forced to revise it.

Mackellar’s diary for June 1959 reports that ‘while the troops were disembarking, the General went to the point of Orleans with an escort’. Wolfe, Mackellar, and a company of rangers walked along the road that circles the island and after six miles arrived at the western tip. There Wolfe finally saw Quebec for the first time. From that vantage point Quebec looked spectacular, as it still does. The cliffs are clearly visible, about four miles away across the basin. To the south of the town the narrows can be distinctly seen, with steep wooded hills on either side, looking almost like a gorge. Mackellar would have pointed out the landmarks, identified the massed batteries, and also explained the difficulty of assaulting the Upper Town from the Lower. Quebec looked impregnable enough but Wolfe must have prepared himself for that. What he had not gambled on was the scale of the French defences that stretched along the north shore of the St Lawrence. Mackellar wrote that he and Wolfe ‘saw the enemy encamped along the North shore of the basin in eight different encampments, extending from the River St Charles to within a mile of the Falls of Montmorency, and the coast fortified all along’.¹⁶ The author of Wolfe’s ‘Family Journal’ writes that ‘from the falls of Montmorency to Beauport (which is four miles) the banks are very high and steep’. While ‘from Beauport to the river St Charles the banks are low and level the shore winds here in the form of an amphitheatre’. But this ideal landing place was ‘deeply entrenched, and batteries of cannon at small distances for the whole way’.¹⁷ Wolfe reported to London that ‘we found them encamped along the shore of Beauport…and entrenched in every accessible part’.¹⁸ His heart sank. He would later describe it as ‘the strongest country perhaps in the world to rest the defence of the town and colony upon’.¹⁹ Both he and Mackellar also noticed the small gunboats and floating batteries, providing more mobile firepower.

While crossing the Atlantic and sailing up the St Lawrence Wolfe had come up with a plan of operations. He had lightly assumed that ‘to invest the place and cut off all communication with the colony it will be necessary to encamp with our right to the river St Lawrence, and our left to the river St Charles’. This meant landing on the Beauport shore fighting ‘a smart action at the passage of the river St Charles’ and then surrounding the town on the landward side. This plan, like so many others, was predicated on the total inactivity of the enemy. Disobligingly the French commander had fortified the Beauport shore to such an extent that any landing would have to take place in the teeth of a terrible crossfire. Wolfe had written to his uncle that if he found the enemy was ‘timid, weak, and ignorant, we shall push them with more vivacity’. If, however, ‘I find that the enemy is strong, audacious, and well commanded, I shall proceed with the utmost caution and circumspection’.²⁰ In that case the best he could hope for was to pin down as many defenders of Canada as possible and thereby limit the number of men that General Amherst would face on his push north towards Montreal. From his first view of the dispositions of the enemy it looked decidedly like the latter scenario was more likely.

Later in the summer Wolfe would write in his report to the Secretary of State, William Pitt, that ‘the natural strength of the country, which the Marquis de Montcalm seems wisely to depend upon’, had presented him with ‘obstacles’ which were ‘much greater than we had reason to expect, or could forsee’. It was abundantly obvious as he and Mackellar peered through their telescopes and beheld the sheer scale of the trenches, bastions, and batteries and also the numbers of defenders that the French were in a ‘very advantageous situation’. Stunningly, Wolfe, hitherto so eager to get to grips with the defenders of Quebec, even admitted in the report that ‘I could not flatter myself that I should be able to reduce the place.’²¹ His sudden pessimism demonstrated his inexperience as a commander. Word seems to have spread quickly throughout the army. Knox wrote in his journal that he had heard about the strength of the enemy position and that the French are employed ‘in adding every kind of work, that art can invent, to render it impenetrable’.²² It is interesting that even the French journals seem to have got wind of the rumours in the British camp. One goes so far as reporting that ‘we have since learned that as soon as he [Wolfe] had taken an exact reconnaissance…he did not conceal from his principal officers of the army who accompanies him, that he did not flatter himself with success’.²³ The only man on the French side who was not cheered by these rumours was Montcalm; ironically, he was equally disconsolate. ‘It seems like everything points to failure,’ he wrote in his journal as he wrestled with the lack of munitions and the slow pace of constructing his fortifications.²⁴

‘After taking a full view of all that could be seen from this place,’ Mackellar reported that he and Wolfe ‘returned to St Laurent’²⁵ where the army was disembarking and making camp. The hill above the village was seething with activity. Men cleared trees and stumps, others dug trenches for latrines and quartermasters marked out spaces on which their regiments would camp. Parties of men scoured the countryside for fresh hay; Knox reports that they returned with ‘excellent hay to lie upon’.²⁶ That was not all, days later he comments on the ‘great quantities of plunder, that they found concealed in pits in the woods’.²⁷ The arrival of thousands of men, with a sizeable hardened criminal minority, was like a plague of locusts. Not a cupboard, shed, or even suspiciously fresh piece of earth was left unsearched. Meanwhile, the hillside was alive with the noise of hundreds of mallets tapping away at pegs. Neat rows of tents were appearing on the southfacing slope. The British army always pitched them according to the same pattern. The comforting and familiar shape of the camp attempted to create some normality for soldiers who found themselves in utterly alien surroundings. The army would camp ‘in one line’, Knox tells us, ‘with our front to the north-ward’.²⁸ On the northern edge of the camp were around five tents per regiment to house the quarter guard, a security force which men would rotate through to provide a twenty-four-hour watch. A wide avenue separated them from just over ten ‘Bells of Arms’, painted tents where the men’s muskets and bayonets were stored. Wolfe ordered his men not to leave any loaded muskets in these tents as it was known to cause ‘frequent mischiefs [sic]’.²⁹ Behind these were neat double streets of tents for the men of the regiment. The dwellings of officers, non-commissioned officers, and the men were naturally strictly segregated. All the tents were dipped in salt water to stop them getting mildewed but when they eventually reached the end of their useful lives they would be turned into trousers and gaiters for the soldiers. Privates slept with comrades of their own rank, usually six to a tent, but Wolfe had ordered the day before landing that ‘as the months of July and August are generally very warm in Canada, there are to be no more than 5 men to a tent, or if the commanding officer likes it better and has camp equipage enough he may order only four’.³⁰ Most of the officers slept alone but only because they were forced to buy their own tents. The most junior officers, struggling to survive on their tiny salaries, slept two to a tent.

Behind this mass of canvas were the tents of the majors and lieutenant colonels, closest to the river. Each regiment was easily identifiable, their uniforms and equipment bore their distinctive colour. The linings of the men’s jackets, the drums, the colours the regiment carried in battle would all be in this colour. White was the so-called ‘facing colour’ of Kennedy’s 43rd. Knox wore white cuffs and had white facings on his red jacket. The little camp colours that fluttered above their tents were white. These were little flags, eighteen inches square, on which was also emblazoned the number of the regiment. They were flown on poles that the regulations very precisely specified were to be seven feet six inches long except those by the quarter guard which were to be nine feet tall. They were erected by the Quartermaster to mark out where the tents should be pitched and from then on distinguished the regiment from the others in the encampment. The Bells of Arms were painted in the facing colour too and emblazoned with the royal cipher, the crown, and the number of the regiment.

Throughout his career Wolfe had been notably conscientious. His professionalism had won him many admirers in a peacetime army in which units were often left to go to seed. He had always insisted on strict discipline and sartorial correctness from his men. But he was just as hard on officers. He took the patriarchal duties of leadership very seriously indeed and expected his fellow officers to do likewise. In his writings on military life, gathered together and published years later, there are constant reminders to subalterns to pay attention to the welfare of their men. Much of it reads like a very modern manual with the emphasis on leading men into battle rather than driving them. When it came to setting up camp Wolfe insisted ‘that all colonels and commanding officers see their regiments encamped before they quit them: and all captains and subalterns to see their men be encamped before they pitch their own tents’.³¹ It was an influential work in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, read by young men desperate to learn their trade in the absence of any comprehensive training.³²

From the road Wolfe and Mackellar would have been able to get a very good sense of the size of the army. The larger regiments like Fraser’s Highlanders or Webb’s 48th had many more tents than the understrength 15th or 28th. Wolfe wrote to his uncle just before entering the St Lawrence and said quite plainly that ‘the army under my command is rather too small for the undertaking’. However, he believed it was ‘well composed’. The troops were ‘firm’ having been ‘brought into fire’ at the siege of Louisbourg the year before.³³

These regiments were the basic building blocks of the British army. Bigger units, such as brigades, existed only as ad hoc tactical formations. The regiment recruited the men, trained them, clothed, armed, and disciplined them and occasionally even paid them. Each one had a colonel at its head. Colonels had once literally owned the regiment, paying for its recruitment and weapons and hiring it out to the crown. By the eighteenth century a prolonged assault on this ramshackle late medieval system by Georges I and II had modernized the British army and the colonels’ role had been circumscribed. By 1759 they tended to be senior army officers, and occasionally important politicians, who kept an eye on the regiment on behalf of the crown. It was very rare for one of these colonels to command a regiment in the field. Instead lieutenant colonels or even majors would lead the unit on campaign, where they were known as battalions. A few regiments had second or even third battalions. Two of Wolfe’s battalions belonged to the same regiment, the 2nd and 3rd Battalions of the 60th Royal American Regiment. Traditionally regiments had simply been known by the names of their colonels. During the 1740s the regiments had been given numbers which, in theory, reflected their seniority. Numbers and colonels’ names were interchangeable throughout the 1750s, although technically the number had become the official method of labelling the regiment.

Nine battalions had disembarked and were putting up their tents; one, the 3rd Battalion of the 60th Royal American Regiment (the 3rd/60th), had stayed on board the ships to give Wolfe the option of striking a blow at another point on the St Lawrence. Wolfe also had a force of marines. Lieutenant Colonel Hector Boisrond commanded twenty-five officers and 577 of these sea soldiers. There could have been as many as a thousand others divided up between the naval ships. They hung their hammocks between the officers and the men, guarded the supplies of rum and the door to the captain’s cabin. Serving at sea prevented them from becoming fully effective soldiers. Crack infantrymen had to be able to run unthinkingly through a set of complicated drills for marching, loading and firing their muskets. Drill was practised again and again until it was second nature. At sea opportunities for this kind of training were limited. There was neither the space nor the numbers to replicate training on land. These marines did, however, represent a reservoir of semi-trained manpower which could free up army units for other duties. Wolfe feared that the shortage of regular troops meant that he could well be forced to stand them in the line of battle. To prepare for that eventuality orders in Wolfe’s army frequently included instructions to the marines to ‘be out at exercise as often as they conveniently can’.³⁴

Alongside the regular infantry Wolfe had a force of rangers. These were Anglo-American colonial troops who had been recruited from frontiersmen, who, it was hoped, would have the necessary skills to challenge the Native Americans in irregular warfare. Unlike Canada the British colonies in America were not brimming with hardened backcountry men. Anglo-Americans were farmers and tradesmen, not hunters and trappers. Perhaps as a result, the rangers had rarely delivered on some of the more extravagant promises of their advocates. Wolfe was utterly dismissive of his rangers, full of a regular officer’s contempt for his more unorthodox colleagues. The year before he had watched them in action and wrote that ‘the Americans are in general the dirtiest most contemptible cowardly dogs that you can conceive. There is no depending on them in action. They fall down dead in their own dirt and desert by battalions, officers and all. Such rascals as those are rather an encumbrance than any real strength to an army.’³⁵ The following year had not given him cause to adjust his rather unambiguous position. He wrote from Louisbourg before departing for Quebec that he had ‘six new raised companies of North American Rangers—not complete, and the worst soldiers in the universe’. To Pitt he wrote that ‘they are in general recruits, and not to be depended upon’.³⁶ Like so many other British officers sent to North America Wolfe underestimated both the threat posed by the Canadians and Native Americans and the potential utility of irregular troops to combat them. The siege of Louisbourg had largely been a conventional, European-style campaign with limited involvement by the Native troops. The forests, rivers, and hills around Quebec held very different challenges.

On leaving Louisbourg Wolfe had divided his army into three brigades each commanded by a brigadier general. He had written to his uncle describing them as being ‘all men of great spirit’.³⁷ But it had not been his choice of team. When he had been given command of the expedition Wolfe had rather petulantly demanded that he should appoint these three key officers. He had written to the commander in chief of the British army, Lord Ligonier, saying that unless, ‘he would give me the assistance of such officers as I should name to him he would do me a great kindness to appoint some other person to the chief direction’. He attempted to usurp London’s power of appointment because of his experience at Louisbourg the summer before. He blamed the lack of certain key people as the reason for the length of time it had taken to capture the French stronghold. He wrote that ‘so much depends upon the abilities of individuals in war, that there cannot be too great care taken in the choice of men, for the different offices of trust and impor-tance’.³⁸ But as so often London was not prepared to surrender its vital powers of patronage to the commander in the field. It was one of the few ways in which the high command could influence the course of a campaign before the advent of telegraph, steamships, and railways. Wolfe moaned in a letter that his demand ‘was not understood as it deserved to be’.³⁹

But he had little cause for complaint. Two of his three suggestions had been acceded to. One of them was his second in command, Robert Monckton, who was six months older than his commander. Monckton was the second son of the 1st Viscount Galway and had joined the prestigious aristocratic bevy of the 3rd Foot Guards as a boy of 15. Like Wolfe he had fought at Dettingen and he had seen action at Fontenoy as well. He had entered the House of Commons in 1752 and his strong political connections may have helped gain him a command in North America where it was clear that war could not be long avoided. When hostilities did break out he moved swiftly against two French forts on Chignecto Isthmus, Beauséjour and Gaspereau, which he captured in June 1755. It was the only real victory for British arms in three barren years of failure.

That summer Monckton carried out his orders to forcefully remove French-speaking Catholic Acadians from modern-day Nova Scotia after their refusal to take the oath of allegiance to King George II. France had ceded Acadia to Britain at the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 but the loyalties of the French settlers had remained understandably Francophile and their new British masters lacked the means or the desire to grasp the issue and coerce their allegiance. With the outbreak of war in 1755 and the arrival of troops from Britain the Governor of Nova Scotia finally had the military means to solve the problem by a wholesale removal of the settlers. Monckton’s men burnt villages, rounded the inhabitants up and herded them on board ships which transported them to the British colonies on the Atlantic coast or back to France. Some Acadians made their way to Canada where their harrowing tale of ethnic cleansing put iron into the souls of the Canadians, who now doubly feared the consequences of defeat. Some Acadians made their way to the French colony of Louisiana where their name would eventually be corrupted and become Cajun.

Monckton had gained the reputation as a serious, efficient professional. Wolfe seemed genuinely pleased to have him as second in command and wrote to him that ‘I couldn’t wish to be better supported, your spirit and zeal for the service will help me through all difficulties—I flatter myself that we set out with mutual good inclinations towards each other, and favourable opinions. I on my side shall endeavour to deserve your esteem and friendship.’⁴⁰

The most junior brigadier was also the oldest. James Murray was 39 years old and had soldiered for well over half his life. He was short, his eyes burnt brightly as if with a constant grievance and he had a fiery temper. He and Wolfe had known each other for some time and that winter Wolfe requested that Murray command a brigade on the St Lawrence expedition. He was the fifth son of Lord Elibank but his aristocratic family had harmed rather than advanced his career thanks to some impolitic choices made by his brothers. Two of them had embraced the cause of the House of Stuart and ruined the family reputation. Murray’s family was one of many throughout Britain which had been split down the middle when in 1688 the Catholic Stuart King James II had been forced from the thrones of England, Ireland, and Scotland by his nephew and son-in-law William of Orange. Ever since then he and his male descendants had been barred from the throne and had launched a series of violent attempts to press their claim. Brothers had faced each other across the field of Culloden, the last stand by the Jacobite cause in Britain which saw hundreds of stunningly brave Highlanders slaughtered on a sleet-blasted moor outside Inverness in April 1746.

Wolfe had been at that battle and had stayed on afterwards as part of an army of occupation. Many of the men fighting under him at Quebec had served with the rebels or had family members who had. Murray’s brother was a close adviser to Charles Edward, the mercurial Bonnie Prince Charlie, the grandson of James II. Murray believed that his brother’s treason had stalled his career. He had joined a Scottish regiment in the Dutch army at the age of 15 and regarded it with pride as the tough crucible of his professionalism. He liked to boast that there he had ‘served in all ranks except that as a drummer’.⁴¹ He had enrolled in the British army and had served on the ill-fated Cartagena expedition in 1740. The disease that tore through British ranks helped Murray by clearing the next few rungs on the ladder of advancement and he returned a captain and still only 20 years old. He campaigned in the West Indies, Flanders, and France and by the early 1750s was a lieutenant colonel in the 15th Regiment. The size of the British army meant that most officers knew or knew of each other. Wolfe referred to Murray when they served alongside each other on the Louisbourg campaign as ‘my old antagonist’, possibly because of a falling out in Scotland in the 1740s or an altercation after the failed amphibious operation against the French town of Rochefort, the post mortem of which had divided the officer corps. However, Wolfe praised Murray during the Louisbourg campaign, writing that he ‘acted with infinite spirit. The public is indebted to him for great services in advancing by every method in his power the affairs of the siege.’⁴²

For his final brigadier Wolfe had requested the Yorkshireman Ralph Burton, commanding officer of Webb’s 48th Regiment. Like Murray and Monckton he was a lifelong, professional soldier, although not nearly so well heeled. Both the place and exact date of his birth are unknown but he was an old friend of Wolfe’s and had served in North America from the beginning of the current war. At Monongahela he had been wounded, unsurprisingly given that only six out of twenty-four officers of the 48th had survived the battle unscathed. Lord Loudoun, a previous commander in chief in North America, had written of him: ‘Burton I did not know before, but he is a diligent sensible man, and I think will be of great use here.’⁴³ Wolfe valued his professionalism; his ‘Family Journal’ describes him as ‘a good officer, and is esteemed a man of spirit and sense’.⁴⁴

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

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

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

II. Later that year Pitt helped to secure him a job on the Quebeccampaign.⁴⁵ The gossip and prolific letter writer Horace Walpole wrote that, ‘the expedition, called to Quebec, departs on Tuesday next, under Wolfe, and George Townshend, who has thrust himself again into the service, and as far as wrongheadedness will go, very proper for a hero’.⁴⁶

Wolfe sent a distinctly ungenerous note to Townshend on his appointment. There was some very faint praise: ‘such an example in a person of your rank and character could not but have the best effects upon the troops in America and indeed upon the whole military part of the nation’. There was condescension: ‘what might be wanting in experience was amply made up, in an extent of capacity and activity of mind, that would find nothing difficult in our business’. This was more than mildly offensive to a man who had stood on more battlefields than Wolfe himself. There was an attempt to play the role of intimate but stern commanding officer: ‘I persuade myself that we shall concur heartily for the public service—the operation in question will require our united efforts and the utmost exertion of every man’s spirit and judgement.’⁴⁷ Wolfe was clearly not pleased by having this ‘political general’ foisted upon him. It is true that Townshend’s military experience had mainly been in staff jobs, and he had spent limited time actually commanding units. But Wolfe, who had served on the staff of a general, ought to have known better than denigrate Town-shend’s experience. Furthermore to resent a man for advancing swiftly through political connection is curious for Wolfe whose entire career was shaped by his father’s influence and those of powerful mentors, not least the son of the King, the Duke of Cumberland, but also Lord John Sackville, the colonel of the 20th Foot which Wolfe had commanded as Lieutenant Colonel. Wolfe wrote to the latter in sycophantic terms and never hesitated to bring friends to the notice of this powerful patron. Wolfe was no radical, he did not seek to change the rules governing advancement in the eighteenth-century army; he was just piqued that someone else was better placed to take advantage of them.

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

At 1400 hours of the day of the landing the gentle easterly breeze suddenly strengthened and veered violently. It seemed like the prayers of the French and Canadians might be answered. Within minutes the ships were hit by a full westerly gale. Montresor says vividly that it ‘rose with great violence together with a great swell which occasioned almost all the fleet to drive from their anchorage and running foul of one another’. He remembers it lasting between three and four hours, during which time, ‘there was nothing but cutting of cables—ships running one against the other, others driving and bearing away before the wind in order to run aground on the island of Orleans if possible which several ships were obliged to do’.⁴⁸ Anchor cables parted, others were desperately jettisoned by their crews as the anchors dragged or loose ships threatened to collide with them and drive them ashore or tear away rigging. In a letter to his father Montresor wrote that ‘several vessels lost their masts’.⁴⁹

Small boats, heavily loaded with stores for the landed army, were caught in the open. Many were swamped by the waves or driven inexorably into the shallows, their rowers unable to combat the gale. The crews of the warships worked quickly to ‘strike’ or dismantle their exposed yards and topmasts and then, where possible, sent men to the transports to help them avoid destruction. The transports were particularly vulnerable having fewer sailors on board than the men of war. The log of the Lowestoft gives us a glimpse of the pandemonium. Early in the gale she was hit by a ‘transport that came foul of us’ and tore away her ‘gibb boom sprit sail yard’, and one of her catheads, used to secure the anchor when raised (often decorated with the face of a cat), which sent their best anchor to the bottom. But there was still more damage as the afternoon wore on; two hours later she ‘came foul of another transport which carried away our spare anchor, larboard main chain and our barge cutter, and one flat bottomed boat, all lost’. At 2200 hours a schooner drifted onto the Lowestoft’s anchor cable and then got entangled with her, ripping away some timbers from the outside of the hull and the hand-rails around the most forward part of the ship. The schooner lost her mast in the encounter. It took an hour and a half to separate the two ships.⁵⁰ The Third Lieutenant of the Diana recorded ‘hard gales’ in his log and reported ‘a great deal of damage done among the shipping’ especially the loss of ‘yards and topmasts’.⁵¹

The damage could have been catastrophic. Countless amphibious operations throughout history had been destroyed by storms which grateful defenders attributed to divine intervention. The expedition suffered real damage but it was not terminal. Pembroke’s log reports that ‘in the height of the gale seven sail of transports parted from their anchors and run on shore upon the island’. Wolfe’s journal agrees that the wind ‘drove several ships on shore’.⁵² All but two seem to have been refloated. The journeys of the vulnerable boats packed with troops, most of whom could not swim, were immediately suspended according to Wolfe’s ‘Family Journal’. It records that ‘at this time the debarkation of the army was not completed; by good fortune none of the troops were lost; the remaining troops landed the succeeding day’. The loss of a few empty transports, and damage to many others, was unimportant. Several accounts mention the loss of anchors, which would limit shallow-water operations. One says that the storm caused ‘great damage to many of the transports; they lost above ninety anchors and cables’.⁵³ But the real blow to the expedition was the loss of many of the small open boats and flat-bottomed craft. Some had been swamped, others had been washed ashore and their fragile frames stove in on the rocks. The Pembroke’s log says that ‘several of the flat bottomed boats and others belonging to the transports broke adrift and drove on the south shore, and was afterwards burnt by the enemy’.⁵⁴ The engineer Mackellar, who had accompanied Wolfe to the end of the Île d’Orléans that morning, wrote in his journal that, although there was a ‘good deal of damage among our transports…the only loss we felt sensibly was that of our boats, which affected our motions throughout the whole campaign’.⁵⁵ Other reports all agree that the loss of flat-bottomed boats was potentially very serious.

Wolfe seems to have regarded the unfortunate episode as yet another example of naval incompetence. Despite the heroic efforts of Saunders’ men to keep the vast majority of the ships from running aground Wolfe, in his journal, criticizes the navy. He described a ‘multitude of boats lost and strange neglect of the men-of-war’s crews’.⁵⁶ It is almost impossible to believe that the naval crews had showed neglect. On the contrary it is almost certain that a greater disaster was avoided only by the attention and skill of Saunders’ sailors. Saunders himself wrote to the Admiralty telling them that he had sought to give the transports the ‘best assistance in my power’.⁵⁷ Given his extremely impressive record both before and after the gale it is very likely that he spoke the truth.

The French were euphoric as the gale tore down the St Lawrence valley. The first reports in Quebec were that there had been huge losses. Montcalm wrote in his journal that he hoped the British fleet would be badly damaged. He noted bitterly that a French fleet would have ‘perished’ in such conditions.⁵⁸ When ‘the truth came to be ascertained’ reported a diarist in Quebec, and it appeared that the only damage was ‘two small vessels wrecked, and five or six of the same size driven on shore’ which ‘were easily pulled off’, there was enormous disappointment. The diarist bemoaned that, ‘if the gale of wind had lasted only one hour altogether, perhaps two thirds of the English fleet would have been destroyed’. Apart from the fickle wind he blamed the French leadership. He wrote that there had been ‘upon this island 1200 men, Canadians and Savages, who undoubtedly might have been extremely troublesome to the English during their debarkation, and particularly whilst the tempest lasted’, because the British ‘were in a state of disorder and dismay’. However, the force was no longer there thanks to orders, ‘sent the preceding night from the Marquis de Vaudreuil for it to evacuate the island and pass over to the Beauport coast’. An equally good opportunity was missed, ‘in not having kept upon the South Shore 3 or 400 Savages, who remained in Quebec, where they did nothing but create disturbances and who might with the greatest ease have destroyed vast numbers of the English left upon the shore, in consequence of the stranding of their vessels upon the coast’.⁵⁹ A British account hints at guerrilla activity that was progressing as the storm caused havoc among the fleet, recording that ‘a ranger killed and scalped, and a stake drove through his body’.⁶⁰

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