Death or Victory

by Dan Snow

  Murray decided to wait for low water so that there would be a large open strand for his men to form up on, hopefully out of range of musket fire from the trees along the shoreline. His troops climbed into the ship’s boats and waited for the command. The three companies of light infantry were to land first when ‘the signal was made’. At ‘a wave of the brigadier’s hat’ the boats surged forward towards ‘a little point above Pointe au Trembles’, about twenty miles upriver of Quebec, which was ‘the only place within reach free from precipices, and wood’.24 The Sutherland blasted the distant shore with its broadside but yet again the St Lawrence dashed the British plans. Boats ran into rocks and reefs which held them up exactly as they had done during the attack at Montmorency. The boats carrying the Highlanders got closest in to the beach and they clambered out and attempted to wade ashore. One eyewitness comments that they looked back and saw the other boats lagging and attributed ‘the cause to shyness, when in reality it was owing to two boats running on the reef of rocks formerly mentioned’. They waited where they were for ‘about 16 minutes’ with most of the company ‘three feet deep in water, being tide of flood which damaged part of their ammunition’.25 The French had shadowed the Sutherland with her escorts as they sailed along the river. The length of time it took to load the British redcoats into boats gave the French ample warning of an attack and Bougainville summoned reinforcements and began lining the shore with infantrymen, safely ensconced among the trees. As soon as the British boats lumbered into range the French opened up. A ‘pretty smart’ enemy fire now came from the wooded banks, which caused casualties even though, in their excitement, the French troops were shooting ‘at too great a distance’. Bougainville was in the thick of the action, marshalling the French troops. In his journal he records that his horse was hit under him.26 Possibly it was hit by shot from a ‘swivel gun’, which were small cannon mounted in the bows of the British boats, small enough to be swivelled in a bracket. The sailors bombarded the shore in an attempt to support their hard-pressed comrades.

  Murray later told Wolfe that he had ‘imputed the retardment, the sunken rocks had occasioned, to fear’ and, therefore, ‘in hopes to animate the rest I instantly joined the Highlanders’. But his men had not lacked the will, simply the means. After hauling boats across shallows and splashing through deep pools, many of the troops finally caught up with their brigadier and the Highlanders. Murray looked ahead and saw Bougainville’s men ‘powering from all sides to reinforce the body defending the shore’. His attack had become disjointed; he saw that the tide was now on the flood and wide pools still needed to be negotiated before he reached dry ground. It was, he told Wolfe, ‘the same situation you was in near the Montmorency’ and Murray made the same decision: ‘I beat the retreat.’ Drummers, waist deep in water, rattled the instantly recognizable rhythm on their drums and the soaking men heaved themselves into the boats. Unlike his commander, Murray had nothing but praise for the naval support. ‘Some of the boats gave us notable aid on this occasion with their swivels, and the behaviour of the men and officers cannot be too much commended,’ he wrote.27

  Yet again a British attack had been frustrated by the river and the alacrity of the French defence. Murray, however, was determined to make another attempt. ‘I resolved to wait till near high water,’ he wrote, ‘then to attack them without any interruption to my boats.’28 This time the boats made it into the shore, but the French were waiting for them and unleashed a terrible storm of musketry. The first attack had been met by about five hundred men but Mackellar, in his journal, records that for the second attack, ‘the numbers of the enemy were greatly increased, the woods were everywhere lined, all the houses of the village occupied, a considerable body of regulars drawn up behind a church, and a body of cavalry dismounted near the shore’.29 Murray admitted that he had been ‘mistaken’. The defenders were ‘everywhere in force and carefully concealed, till we were too far engaged’.30 One British eyewitness saw ‘an officer on horseback’ on the shore, possibly Bougainville, coordinating the defence.31

  Murray paints a gruesome scene. Yet again the brave landing force approached the shore but this time ‘our boats were thrown into confusion, [and] many of the seamen killed and wounded’. Mackellar wrote that the fire was so ‘heavy’ that the ‘sailors could not sit at their oars’. This ‘obliged most of the boats of the light infantry to retreat, or lie an inactive object to the enemy’s fire’, reported Murray. Oarsmen lay dead or wounded in the bilges of their boats, survivors cowered in terror at the whine of musket balls speeding overhead. Showers of splinters were thrown up as others thumped into the gunwales. Yet again Murray had to make a tough decision. ‘When I saw,’ he reported, ‘that they had lined the windmill, houses, church…that the tide was now beginning to ebb, and would soon leave the boats dry, I gave it up and ordered the troops on board.’ The soldiers in the boats ‘did not hear’ the signal, ‘being under the fire of the enemy’, but had taken matters into their own hands anyway; they had ‘seized the oars, backed water, and drew off from the fire’. It had been a bloody repulse. Mackellar records that ‘we had about 140 men killed and wounded including 30 seamen’.32 Panet reports that Bougainville told him that ‘he saw seven barges each of which could carry 50 men, and that he did not notice in each more than four or five capable to row’.33

  The French had yet another victory to celebrate. One journal rejoiced that Bougainville had ‘repulsed them vigorously’. It boasted that the British ‘need not have taken the trouble’ to attack the second time since it met with the same fate.34 It was a depressingly familiar story for the British. At both Montmorency and Pointe aux Trembles the redcoats and seamen had behaved with exemplary courage. Both times, however, they were frustrated by a withering fire from defenders on the banks, in good strong positions. The tide was proving inflexible and troublesome. It was nigh impossible to organize complicated amphibious assaults at exactly the right moment of time, wind, and tide, in such a way that allowed the troops to even set foot on dry land, let alone achieve a modicum of surprise. Those hoping that the riverbank above Quebec was the soft underbelly of Montcalm’s defences were cruelly disappointed. British blows had now been parried at various points along a thirty-mile front.

  The French forces might have been holding on tenaciously to their positions around their capital, but elsewhere the defences of New France were finally penetrated. The day after the people of Quebec were cheered by reports of victory at Pointe aux Trembles, they were hit with dark tidings from the pays d’en haut. A messenger arrived from the upper country with the terrible news that Fort Niagara, the bridge to the massive expanse of French-dominated lands in the west, had fallen to the British.

  In June Brigadier John Prideaux had led a British force to Oswego. There it had been met by Sir William Johnson, the infamous ‘Mohawk Baronet’. Johnson was an Irishman, a native of County Meath, who had emigrated to North America at age 22. He had managed to build one of the largest fortunes in the colonies acting as a deal broker between the British and the Native Americans of the Iroquois Confederation, the most powerful Native grouping in eastern America. Iroquois lands formed a buffer between New York and Canada and stretched along the southern side of Lake Ontario. Johnson genuinely straddled the ethnic divide, sitting on the New York governing council while also glorying in his status as an honorary sachem or chief. He cohabited with a Mohawk princess and was as happy in the log house as he was in Manhattan. Johnson was one of the first self-appointed agents of imperial expansion, a Cecil Rhodes of his day, who created facts on the ground which dragged the crown further and further into the American interior. Through his career he would exploit both the British crown and the Native Americans to make vast amounts of money. He sold British metalwork and muskets to the Iroquois, and particularly the Mohawk, one of the six nations of the Iroquois Confederation, and in return bought up their agricultural surplus and turned Oswego into the principal fur-trading post in British America. He soon found himself in polit
ics. During the War of Austrian Succession he had tried to encourage the Iroquois to drop their strict neutrality in wars between Britain and France. In 1755 as the two powers again went to war Johnson was made ‘Sole Agent and Superintendant [sic]’ of the Iroquois. His position was cemented by his relationship with Molly Brant, one of the most powerful figures in the matrilineal Iroquois Confederation, with whom he had several children. He had commanded the force which in 1755 fought an indecisive battle around Lake George, during which Montcalm’s predecessor, Jean-Armand Dieskau, was wounded and captured. An empire starved of good news turned Johnson’s skirmish into a major victory. He was feted as a hero in New York and made a baronet by the King. In spring 1759 he convinced around 940 Iroquoians to join Prideaux’s expedition to Niagara. The Iroquois seem to have been persuaded to drop their neutrality believing that the British would support their claims of ownership over the Ohio valley and other lands south of Lake Ontario. Rolling back French influence would deal a serious blow to the Iroquois’ competitors in these lands; the French-allied Miamis and the Munsees. Johnson met Prideaux at the head of his Native American troops and became second in command of the expedition.

  Prideaux and his force of about 3,300 regulars, provincials, and Native allies paddled for four days along the south shore of Lake Ontario. They arrived at Fort Niagara, in present-day Youngstown, NY, in the first week of July to the utter consternation of the defenders. Pierre Pouchot, the garrison commander, was an experienced officer, with a powerful fort, built along European lines. But he had made a fateful gamble. Relying on the local Native Americans to warn him of any approaching attack, he had sent the vast majority of his garrison to François-Marie Le Marchand de Lignery, French commander in the Ohio valley, to reassert French influence there, after the loss of Fort Duquesne, and launch renewed frenzied assaults on the frontiers of Virginia and Pennsylvania. This, it was hoped, would divert British men and supplies from the thrusts on New France. The French had then been hugely unlucky. Their Native American allies had not detected the British advance. Neither had the force bound for the Ohio which had just missed stumbling upon Prideaux’s by a few days. Of the two French ten-gun ships on Lake Ontario, which could have blasted the hurriedly constructed British boats and rafts out of the water, one was out of service and the other did not spot them. Through a mixture of good luck, organization, diplomacy, and stealth Prideaux and Johnson had managed to get the British force into a position to start the siege. As they opened fire on 19 July a shell exploded prematurely at the mouth of a mortar and killed Prideaux. Johnson took over.

  Despite its modern fortification, Niagara could not hold out against the hail of shot and shell that levelled its walls and outworks. Accounts of the siege tell of terrible French suffering. Defenders were overwhelmed by an avalanche of explosives and were unable to sleep for days on end. The only thing that could save the fort was a relieving force. On 23 July that force arrived: Lignery with the army of the Ohio. The British had anticipated them and had built a barricade across the road two miles south of the fort near a portage over the Niagara River. At 0800 hours on the twenty-fourth with enormous courage but little judgement 600 French troupes de la marine and Canadian militiamen threw themselves at the barricade. Behind it just under five hundred regulars and provincials fired volley after volley. Within seconds the ground was thick with corpses; the French force broke and was hunted down by the Iroquois. Only a hundred survivors lived long enough to be taken prisoner and most of them were wounded. Lignery died of his wounds three days later.

  The fort’s position was hopeless, Pouchot’s men were driven to the point of mutiny, and he surrendered on 25 July. French links to the pays d’en haut were severed. Any heavy supplies going to the Illinois country or the Mississippi had to go via the portage route at Niagara; canoe routes further north were for transporting people only. The isolated outposts of New France were now cut off from any substantial succour. Worse still for Montcalm, British troops now threatened the heart of the colony from the west as well as the south and east.35

  On 9 August news of the capitulation reached Quebec. It followed the news that French forces under Bourlamaque had carried out a controlled withdrawal in front of Amherst’s army on Lake Champlain, blowing up Forts Carillon and St Frederic before making a stand at the Île aux Noix on the Richelieu, which was uncomfortably close to Montreal. A journal records that the fall of Niagara ‘increased considerably the dejection which the news of the evacuation of Carillon and St Frederic had already spread among the people…Montréal…was at the moment bare of every sort of defense.’36

  Montcalm was forced to dispatch de Lévis with around a thousand men, mainly Canadians but with a sprinkling of regular troops. Ramezay wrote that ‘we witnessed M. Le Chevalier leave with great sadness, as we have the highest confidence in him’.37 As they marched west one journal commented that ’a force so superior in three different places, and the comparatively small number that we had to oppose them, created an exceeding great dread that the fatal moment was fast approaching, when the whole colony would pass under the yoke of the English’.38 Other witnesses were cheered by the recent victories and believed the inexorable onset of winter would save New France.

  Montcalm and de Lévis decided to take advantage of the latter’s move upcountry by attacking Murray’s unsuspecting force on the way. French observers had spotted that Murray’s men did not bother fortifying their camp because they were certain the French would never attempt to cross the river, since it was guarded by the ships of the navy. Yet again luck intervened to save the British detachment from the horrors of a night attack. One French officer wrote that ‘nothing was better combined, but the bad weather deranged all’.39 A period of ‘very heavy rain’, a journal explained, ‘put a stop to the execution of this project’.40 With the river running too fast to risk a crossing, de Lévis reluctantly abandoned the plan and marched his troops west.

  Montcalm could cope with the loss of men. Supplies were a much bigger problem than manpower. Now that the British controlled the river between Batiscan and Quebec ‘no course was left but to have them brought by land, which was still not unattended by difficulties’. This was achieved with the aid of ‘young children, women [and] old men’, who were the only people still living in the countryside, the men of military age all having been called up. Despite a bad road and a shortage of vehicles, ‘700 barrels of pork or flour were conveyed on 271 carts from Batiscan to the army’, a distance of well over fifty miles. This brought around two weeks of supplies into the town but ‘from that moment, alarm was felt at the difficulties that service would eventually encounter; a number of carts were already broken; the women and children who guided them, rebuffed by such rude labor, left no hope of being able to support it long’. Unsurprisingly ‘regret was begun to be felt at having placed the army’s stores at so great a distance’.41 Appeals were made for all Quebecers to hand in specie in return for bills of exchange. This hard currency allowed the government to buy wheat from farmers, who were otherwise hiding it. One report states that ‘beef was never wanting…This the farmers could not hide as they did their wheat.’42 Even in Montreal de Lévis witnessed terrible shortages. There was an ‘extreme state of famine’, he wrote in his journal. ‘To survive they had to utilise the crops which had not yet been harvested.’ To do this he sent 400 of his own troops into the fields ‘because there was no one else to bring in the harvest’. He ordered ‘women, nuns, priests, and everyone in the town’ to help ‘directly or indirectly with this work’.43

  While Canada attempted to avoid starvation, Brigadier Murray cruised the upper river looking for an opportunity to win laurels. His force was encamped on the south shore of the river near the church at St Antoine. He wrote to Rear Admiral Holmes, the commander of the little flotilla above Quebec, explaining ‘that the enemy are stronger than I am’ and, therefore, ‘what I attempt against them must be by surprise’. However, ‘I can never surprise them by moving with the fleet or in the day’
because ‘their motions on shore must be quicker than yours by the tide’.44

  One of his patrols was shot at while patrolling. Mackellar confirms that ‘a captain and four men [were] wounded’. In accordance with Wolfe’s announcement at the beginning of the campaign Murray put a notice on the church door saying that ‘since they had fired several times upon our troops…All the houses in the parish should be burnt.’45 On 12 and 13 August the entire parish was destroyed. This act of brutal retaliation was not isolated. The huge column of smoke billowing from St Antoine joined several others. Along the length of the St Lawrence valley palls of smoke hung in the hot, motionless August air. Wolfe had lost patience with the people of Canada. His efforts frustrated near the town, his troops harassed by insurgents, he lashed out against Canadians in a vicious campaign of terror designed to punish them for their loyalty to France and undermine their way of life to the point of utter destruction.

  On 25 July Wolfe’s rage was fanned by a terrible rumour. He wrote to Monckton saying that three grenadiers had been captured by the enemy and apparently burnt alive by the Native Americans. Burning was a common punishment for prisoners of Native warriors, who prided themselves on their ability to burn someone just slowly enough that it would inflict the maximum conceivable amount of pain before the victim eventually expired. It was a communal experience, members of the tribe gained solace for lost loved ones through the hideous suffering of one of their hated enemies. Wolfe, however, had no interest in the anthropological niceties of native society. Burning of prisoners of war was an unacceptable crime. He told Monckton that if these rumours be true, ‘the country shall be one universal blaze’.46 In a heated, but scrupulously polite, written exchange Barré wrote to Vaudreuil on behalf of Wolfe. The British general, he wrote, demanded ‘to know what has become of [the captured grenadiers], so as to regulate his conduct in future accordingly’. He gave Vaudreuil a stark warning: