Death or Victory
Page 26
At sunrise, according to her log, the Diana was ‘still aground’. More guns were thrown overboard, pushed out through the gun ports. Various attempts were made to attach hawsers to the other ships and eventually, just after midnight the following night, as the flood tide forced more water under her keel the Diana responded to the tow ropes and refloated. She was aground for just over twenty-four hours. At 0300 hours her exhausted crew dropped anchor by the western tip of the Île d’Orléans. Lacking most of her artillery, and damaged by rocks and enemy gunboats, she was in no shape to continue operations in the St Lawrence and was soon sent back to Boston for repairs accompanied by around twenty-five empty American transport ships, ones that had been most seriously damaged by the storm at the end of June.
Despite costing one of the frigates, the operation to get British ships up the St Lawrence beyond Quebec was an important success. Wolfe had broken out of the prison that was the basin in front of the town. Miles of undefended coastline beckoned. The opportunity now existed to get ashore on the north bank of the St Lawrence and march overland to threaten the town’s weakest, landward side. The attack on the Beauport shore was called off and Wolfe and his commanders pondered their expanded list of options. The threat was clear to the French. Montcalm visited the batteries the following morning and noted that the most exposed had ‘lost a lot of people’ from the fire of the British ships. Then, in one of the most candid sections of his journal, he admitted that the passing of the enemy squadron caused ‘consternation’. ‘Were we wrong?’ he desperately asked himself. ‘If the enemy decides to go up the river and land at any point they will block our supply route for food and munitions.’107
EIGHT
Competing Ideas
IT WAS EVENING, and Major General James Wolfe was ‘cheerful’ according to Tom Bell, his aide-de-camp.1 They had spent the day after the ships had passed the narrows reconnoitring the banks of the river beyond Quebec, which the navy had now brought within striking distance of Wolfe’s army. The shore was steep on either side. The river was just under a mile wide, with both banks heavily wooded. At various points on the north side small roads or paths ran down from the plateau above to the foot of the cliffs. Any attempt to land would have to be made up one of these. It would be no easy task to push men up these tracks, let alone drag cannon, and it would be a hundred times more challenging if they were defended by a group of determined soldiers. At present though there was only a sprinkling of Canadians and Native Americans along the bank.
Wolfe regretted that he had not followed through with his planned attack above Quebec in the first few days of July. In his own diary he noted that ‘if we had ventured the stroke that was first intended we should probably have succeeded’. The word ‘infallibly’ was originally written instead of ‘probably’ but Wolfe, reining in his excitement, crossed it out and made the more sober judgement.2 He remained excited enough to write to Monckton and tell him that the blow that was to have fallen on the Beauport defences below the town would now be redirected above the town. Monckton was to row upriver in flat-bottomed boats, ‘until you perceive three lanterns, hanging abreast’ from the Sutherland. The force would then push ashore on the north bank and capture the high ground above the bank along which the road to Quebec ran and start building fortifications. Artillery would be rushed ashore to turn the outpost into yet another impregnable fortress. As Wolfe wrote, ‘if we can take four or five good posts and keep them till our friends arrive, it may bring on a very decisive affair’.3 On the way back to Point Lévis Wolfe halted where a small river, the Etchemin, entered the St Lawrence. He looked long and hard at one particular encampment of Native Americans and Canadians on the north shore. There was a steep path leading down to a small indentation that hardly deserved the title of l’anse or cove. Wolfe used a spy glass to watch people climb up and down and saw people washing and doing laundry in the St Lawrence. As they trudged into the camp at Point Lévis later in the day, Wolfe said to a young engineer lieutenant, Samuel Holland, who had accompanied him on the reconnoitre, ‘There, my dear Holland. That will be my last resort.’ The cove’s name was L’Anse au Foulon.4
Monckton was busily preparing his men for the new assault but by that very afternoon Wolfe’s confidence deserted him. He penned another note to Monckton saying that ‘Particular circumstances make it necessary to delay our attempt for a few days, and to keep it secret. In the mean while we shall make all the diversion we possibly can.’5 Yet again the French had forestalled him. Refusing to play the passive part allotted to them in Wolfe’s plan, they rushed men above Quebec to defend the shoreline.
The French had watched with horror as British ships had passed Quebec. Yet another pre-war certainty had been shown up as a mirage. The cannon of the town had signally failed to block the narrows. Suddenly there were British ships and men upriver of the town, where they were a step closer to Quebec’s most vulnerable side and potentially able to strike at her supply route from the rest of the colony. One diarist appreciated the full menace of this development: ’[the British] could, at pleasure, make excursions on either of the two coasts; and thus become Masters of the entire navigation of the river, whilst awaiting the opportunity of disembarking the whole of their army at this place, which it was now in their power to effect’.6 Montcalm responded quickly to this new threat. Dumas was sent with 600 men and Native Americans to keep an eye on the British ships. Le Mercier, the artilleryman, followed with two 18-pound cannon and a mortar. Montcalm, who despised him, was disparaging about his efforts. ‘He pretends to have strongly inconvenienced a frigate,’ he wrote sneeringly in his jour-nal.7 But British accounts suggest that his guns were successful in driving off their ships. The Squirrel’s log records that while she and the other British ships ‘cut out’ or captured two small French ships near the bank, the French ‘began firing from a gun and bomb battery which they erected on the hill and haled [put pressure on] us’. They shot through a key piece of rigging and ‘wounded our main mast’.8 They moved further upriver out of range. One French journal confirms that the French ‘set up a fine battery which compelled the ships to go some distance down the river’.9
Wolfe was dismayed by these French moves. He later reported to Pitt that on reflection the shoreline above the town presented the same ‘great difficulties’ as it did below owing to the ‘same attention on the enemy’s side…the nature of the ground, and the obstacles to our communication with the fleet’. ‘But what I feared most,’ he admitted, ‘was that if we should land between the town and the river Cape Rouge, the body first landed could not be reinforced before they were attacked by the enemy’s whole army.’ The few ships above the town were incapable of landing enough men to take on Montcalm’s entire force. To do that more and more transports would have to pass the narrows and this would require the confluence of darkness, wind, and tide. Essentially, reported Wolfe, Monckton’s attack had been called off because ‘the enemy were jealous of the design, were preparing against it, and had actually brought artillery and a mortar…to play upon the shipping’. The whole attack ‘seemed so hazardous that I thought it best to desist’.10
Murray was furious about the decision to abandon this attack. He was certain, he wrote in a letter to Wolfe, that it was possible to ‘strike a decisive blow in that quarter’ because of the ‘enemy’s inattention to every thing above the town’. He assured Wolfe that ‘I as ardently wish you success, as if you had done me the honour to employ me in procuring it, I am too much a Briton to be insincere in this respect, and am too much a soldier to grumble that I am left here inactive.’ He finished by saying, ‘however strong my inclinations to quit this place may be, I shall check it, and as patiently as I can remain at the post you are pleased to assign to me, I should have thought myself very fortunate had it been a more active one’.11 Wolfe soothed Murray who was clearly desperate to thrust himself into the middle of the action. He wrote that communications between the fleets above and below the town were uncertain and ‘the admiral is of opin
ion that the flat boats cannot pass the town without danger and difficulty and the night tides do not favour us for the present’. In short Wolfe cautiously asserted that ‘I chose to look about me a little before we undertook.’12
Wolfe’s indecision might have been poor leadership but his caution was not. It was justified a few days later when two ships, the frigate Lowestoft and the sloop Hunter, attempted to pass the town but were forced to turn back by a combination of wind and enemy gunfire. The log of the Dublin asserted that a ‘floating battery fired on one of our frigates which attempted to go above the town’. The battery managed to put ‘one shot in the hull, and damaged some of her rigging’. It was not fatal but ‘little wind obliged her to come back’.13 The Hunter’s log says that they waited until 0300 hours to pass the narrows but ‘when abreast of the town the wind took us short and the French firing at us from their quarters in the town, we could not sail to windward of Point Levy; was obliged to put back’.14 Malcolm Fraser on the shoreline described it as such a ‘smart cannonade’15 that he was certain it would damage them badly while a sergeant wrote that the French ‘fired so hot at them, they were obliged to turn back’.16 It was a welcome success for the French. ‘Our fire this day was well served’17 records one journal while another said that ‘no sooner were they within range of our cannon, than all the batteries played upon them so vigorously, as compelled them to tack about, and return to their former stations’.18 Neither French source makes any mention of the part played by the dying breeze.
The force upriver was not strong enough to take on the French army by itself and clearly reinforcing it was going to be difficult. It could make itself useful, though, as Wolfe described to Pitt, to ‘divide the enemy’s force, and to draw their attention as high up the river as possible, and to procure some intelligence’. To do this Wolfe sent Colonel Carleton ‘to land at the Pointe aux Trembles, to attack whatever he might find there, bring off some prisoners, and all the useful papers he could get’.19 Carleton landed there, twenty miles above Quebec, on 21 July, drove off some Native Americans, searched in vain for military stores to destroy and left, taking with him a haul of civilian prisoners, including, according to a French source, ‘200 women’.20 Montcalm sneered that he only detained the ‘pretty ladies’.21
It was a rare skirmish with the Native Americans that did not produce a worrying butcher’s bill and this was no exception. The commander of the 3rd/60th Major Augustin Prevost was shot in the head and had to be immediately evacuated to New York. Remarkably he survived a trepanning and carried the scar on his forehead the rest of his life, earning the nickname ‘bullet-head’ from his family. He was exactly the kind of man Wolfe could not afford to lose. Few knew more about warfare in North America. Along with his brother, Colonel Jacques Prevost, he had been integral to founding the 60th Royal Americans. The two brothers had constantly drilled their men in the skills suitable for North America such as scouting and sharpshooting. Wolfe needed men like Prevost to provide that irreplaceable backbone of expertise and experience which could make useful soldiers out of novices.22 On this occasion Wolfe let his delight at the arrival of a boat load of women overcome his sorrow at losing Prevost. He personally debriefed them. A French journal reports that ‘His Excellency’, as the officer referred to Wolfe, the enemy commander, with impeccable etiquette, ‘received his prisoners very graciously, entertained them for two days, and then sent them back, greatly charmed with his politeness, and the genteel treatment they had met with’.23 Having been released, the ladies were full of praise for Wolfe. Some had dined with him, and he had ‘joked considerably about the circumspection of our generals’. He had told the ladies that ‘he had offered very favorable opportunities for an attack [by Montcalm] and had been surprised that no advantage had been taken of them’. The women ‘spoke equally well of the treatment they had received from the English officers’.24
Panet says that these well-born Quebec women, including ‘Madames Duchesnay, De Charney, her mother, her sister, mademoiselle Couillard, the family, Joly Mailhot, Magnan’, were ‘treated with all the possible politeness’. In return the women paid Wolfe ‘many compliments’. Indeed, the British come out of things far better than the allies of New France. According to Panet, ‘the saddest part of this story is that the English did not do them any wrong, but the savages pillaged their houses and almost all of the goods of these refugee families’.25
The women were sent into Quebec under the terms of a six-hour truce, during which time Wolfe received Montcalm’s permission to bring his sick and wounded from Montmorency and Point Lévis to the hospital on the western point of Île d’Orléans. The women were landed at 1500 hours, ‘brought back’, according to Panet, ‘with much politeness’. He says that ‘each officer had given his name to the beautiful prisoners that they had taken. The English had promised not to cannon or bombard until nine o’clock at night to give the women time to retreat back to where they judged necessary, but that, past this time, they would fire with ease.’ ‘They kept their word,’ he wrote, ‘at nine o’clock; they fired, each quarter of an hour, ten to twelve bombs, some of which were filled with explosives. They set fire to the Parish Church and M. Rotot’s house, as well as the houses from M. Duplessis until M. Imbert, and all of the houses behind, including mine…wereconsumed by the flames.’26
It was a curious moment, gentility entwined with barbarism. This uneasy relationship could not last. In a fascinating snippet one journal hints at the erosion of traditional military values between the two sides. It claims that ‘Captain Smythe, aide de camp to General Wolfe, [was] not politely used by the French in town’ as he escorted the civilians back.27 As a messenger Smythe should have been treated with respect and dignity. Yet the inhabitants of Quebec, their homes incinerated, were losing patience with the niceties of European warfare. The bonds of civilization were weakening for those who remained in the shattered town. Frustrated ‘with the considerable theft that is going on in Quebec, committed equally by the sailors, soldiers and militia’, Panet began to lobby Vaudreuil and Bigot to ‘create an Ordinance in order to hang the thieves without delay’. The suggestion was approved, a commission was established and Panet was named the Secretary. His associate, François Daine, was given the power to have looters hanged the same day they were caught. On 29 July a man was hanged for theft.28
Wolfe experienced the brutal realities of North American warfare just days after his pleasant dinner with the French ladies. Tales of fords across the Montmorency had sparked his interest. If these were ‘practicable’ then he could march across the river and drive the French troops from the Beauport shore altogether. It is easy to see how his frustration with the navy boosted his enthusiasm for finding one of these fords. A straightforward attack across the Montmorency would be an army operation alone. There would be no need for the kind of cooperation with the navy that he obviously found so irksome. On 26 July, therefore, Wolfe set out to look for the ford. Mackellar records that he took ‘Brigadier Murray, with Otway’s 35th Regiment, five companies of Light Infantry, and one of the Rangers, and two field pieces’. The two cannon were probably six pounders which were more mobile than the heavier pieces. Even so, Mackellar continues, ‘after we had gone about a mile and a half the field-pieces were sent back to camp, the road being too bad to get them on’.29
It was thick woodland. As they pushed further upstream the roar of the falls grew ever quieter. This was the terrain which suited the Canadians and Native Americans perfectly. The latter’s relationship with the French had been strained by their inactivity. Around that time Vaudreuil wrote to de Lévis describing them as ‘too lively’ and hoping that the latter had found a way to make them ‘less impatient’.30 Now Wolfe was offering a solution. His men had marched well before dawn and in the semi-darkness, at 0400 hours, with the sunrise still an hour away, the sound of muskets and high-pitched war cries heralded a first attack on the column. Wolfe’s ‘Family Journal’ describes it as a ‘skirmish with about 20 Indians’.31 The
y fell upon the lighter troops who were to the front and flanks of the main column. These light infantrymen and rangers skirmished tenaciously and allowed the march to continue.