Death or Victory

by Dan Snow

  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 17
58 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.

  Saunders had no choice. Working the ships in these conditions was unimaginably tough. The sails were ‘stiff like sheets of tin’, making them impossible to furl, while the ‘running ropes freeze in the blocks’. The ‘topmen’ were suffering the most. These young, agile seamen were responsible for the setting and furling of these highest sails and faced frequent climbs up into the frozen rigging. The weather made this impossible. Durell reported to London that, in conditions such as these, ‘the men cannot expose their hands long enough to the cold to do their duty’.30 Having been buffeted with ‘contrary winds and hard gales’ and now ‘stopped with a body of ice’ from getting into Louisbourg, Saunders had to head south-west, away from the Gulf of St Lawrence and towards the British base at Halifax.31 The risks to his fleet from a further period at sea in the blizzard conditions waiting for the ice to melt were too great. He was already undermanned and the grim realities of eighteenth-century seafaring were further depleting his crews.

  Lack of access to fresh provisions, the freezing weather, and physical exertion left the men, who slept in hammocks fourteen inches apart slung across a gun deck, prone to debilitating sickness. The year before HMS Pembroke had sailed from Portsmouth to Halifax and due to a rather circuitous route the voyage had lasted seventy-five days. Twenty-six men had died on the passage and a large number were put in hospital as soon as she arrived; five desperate men deserted in one of her small boats just after they dropped anchor.32 Things were not as bad for Wolfe on the flagship, Neptune, but even so he chafed at the delays. He was a very poor sailor. The year before he had written to his father, ‘You may believe that I have passed my time disagreeably enough in this rough weather; at best, the life, you know, is not pleasant.’33 On this crossing he wrote to a senior officer that ‘your servant as usual has been very sensible of the ship’s motions’.34

  As the battered fleet entered the bay at Halifax on 30 April Wolfe’s frustration turned into rage. There sitting at anchor was Durell’s North American squadron which should by now have been blockading the St Lawrence. The seamen of the fleet would have noticed immediately that Durell’s ships were riding at just one anchor and were therefore clearly ready to sail on the first fair breeze but the landsman Wolfe was livid. To his political superiors in London he was measured but to Major General Jeffrey Amherst, the senior British commander in North America, he wrote that, having arrived in ‘tolerable good order, the length of our passage considered’, he was ‘astounded to find Mr Durell at anchor’.35 This was positively diplomatic compared to comments recorded in a remarkable and recently discovered private journal written by one of Wolfe’s close ring of aides. This straight-talking account, the so-called ‘Family Journal’, is more outspoken in its condemnation of Durell and his late departure from Halifax: ‘Nothing could astonish Wolfe more than on our arrival at Halifax’ to discover Durell riding at anchor, and ‘nothing could be more scandalous than their proceedings’ when ‘all the bellowing of the troops at Halifax could not persuade them to leave that harbour for fear of the ice’. The diarist writes that Wolfe, who ‘knew the navy well’, had feared since leaving Britain that they would be late to leave thanks to ‘an aversion to run the hazards of the river’. He went on to say that ‘much time, according to custom was spent in deliberation, and at length they determined that it would be more agreeable to sail up the river when the spring was well advanced than during so cold a season’. The ‘Family Journal’ makes it clear that Wolfe believed this was a setback of the most serious kind: had they got into the river when they were supposed to have done ‘supplies [would have] been intercepted’ and ‘the enemy would not have been able to fire a gun’. In short, concludes the journal, ‘Canada would certainly have been an easy conquest, had that squadron gone early enough into the river.’36

  Saunders, for whom sadly little personal correspondence exists, was kinder to his subordinate, writing to London on 2 May that he found Durell ‘unmoored, and ready to sail…He waits only for a wind, and, I hope, will sail tomorrow.’37 He did sail on 3 May but ‘the wind proved contrary’ and ‘they were obliged to anchor’ just outside the harbour until 5 May.38 As a result Durell entered the St Lawrence just days after the precious convoy from France. Wolfe would never forgive his naval colleagues for this failure. It was the first crack in a relationship upon which combined operations depended and the resultant schism was almost as detrimental to the British cause as the arrival of succour to his enemies.

  The hysteria of Wolfe’s circle is perhaps attributable to the slow realization of the scale of the challenge and the paucity of their resources. Troop ships from New York trickled in slowly. The first to arrive was the Ruby, on 1 May, carrying ordnance, gunpowder, and shot. She told of storms, dismastings, and delays afflicting the rest of the fleet.39 As the other ships did start to arrive it soon became clear that they were carrying numbers of men who were consistently below what Wolfe had been expecting. In Britain, he had been promised battle-hardened regiments of the British army in North America; however, nobody had considered that winter would leave these units decimated. Three thousand reinforcements were supposed to have been sent out from Britain, a mix of new recruits and soldiers drafted in from other regiments.40 However, these men had been diverted to bolster a bogged-down campaign in the French-owned Caribbean islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe. Vague promises were made to transfer these men back up to Wolfe’s army after they had conquered the islands, but these assurances must have rung hollow to Wolfe. It was a fact that service in the Caribbean ruined any unit sent there. Microbes broke armies in the Indies more surely than enemy steel. From 1740 to 1742 a British and colonial American army outside the walls of Cartagena had lost 10,000 of its 14,000 men, about one in ten of them as a result of enemy action, the rest from disease. Wolfe, as a boy soldier, had been earmarked for the expedition but had been saved from an almost certain death by a delicate constitution that was so overwhelmed by the germs of Portsmouth that he was sent home to recuperate with his mother. The Spanish boasted that disease provided a surer defence than ships, forts, and men. They morbidly celebrated yellow fever, as fiebre patriótica, ‘patriotic fever’, because it attacked outsiders with such jingoistic fervour.41 Criminals were granted a reprieve from the death penalty in Britain if they agreed to serve in the tropics. Soldiers were often given the choice when being punished for a grave offence: 1,000 lashes or service in the Caribbean; they usually chose the former.42

  Wolfe would have known it would be a miracle if the troops arrived back in the North Atlantic in time to be of any use even if they were not eviscerated by disease. He would have to make do with the regiments already in theatre. At least every regiment had seen action. British regular soldiers had been fighting in North America since 1755. Each summer’s fighting had been on a larger scale than the year before. Early in the war the men had been so raw that many of them had been taught how to use muskets on decks of transports by officers who had learnt their trade through reading manuals. Now every unit had served through at least one operation and had survived one tough winter. On the downside the campaigns and climate had exerted a powerful attritional effect. Men had used the dispersal to billets over the winter as an opportunity to desert and disappear along the vast and unregulated frontier. Disease could be just as bad among the snow as it was in the tropics. The absence of fresh fruit and vegetables over the winter meant that men lacked vitamin C and scurvy was a constant threat. The year before Wolfe had written at the start of the campaigning season that ‘some of the regiments of this army have 3 or 400 men eaten up with scurvy’.43 This terrible disease appeared first as liver spots on the skin and then quickly
led to spongy gums and haemorrhaging from all mucous membranes. Sufferers became listless and immobilized and the advanced stages saw the loss of teeth and suppurating wounds. It is famously associated with long sea journeys, but such was the isolation of garrisons in the backcountry during the winter, that it was just as common along the frontier.

  Wolfe wrote a barrage of letters to superiors in London and New York, describing the condition of the four battalions that had spent the winter in Halifax. They were ‘in good order’, but ‘are at a very low ebb’. Measles had recently ‘got amongst them’, and they would have suffered far worse had it not been for the ‘more than common care of the officers that command them’. Their officers had attempted to obtain fresh provisions where possible, maintain good hospitals, and lay on plenty of the local anti-scorbutic, ‘spruce beer’, a mildly alcoholic drink brewed from molasses and spruce tips and a good source of vitamin C. These precautions, combined with strict discipline, had ‘preserved these battalions from utter ruin’, without them, ‘these regiments would have been utterly annihilated’. Even so, Wolfe warned that their numbers were still well below expectations. Many of the battalions at Halifax numbered around five hundred men each, just over half their ideal complement. Wolfe feared that the two battalions left further north in Louisbourg, cut off from the outside world over the winter, were ‘in a worse condition’. He stated glumly that ‘the number of regular forces can hardly exceed the half’ of 12,000 that London had promised him during the planning phase. Any losses during the sail up the St Lawrence or a bad outbreak of disease during the campaign would result in ‘some difficulties’, and Wolfe was convinced that the risky nature of this amphibious assault meant that they were ‘very liable to accidents’. He would fight this campaign with no reserve, no margin for error. However, he told his superiors in London, ‘our troops, indeed, are good and very well disposed. If valour can make amends for want of numbers, we shall probably succeed.’44