by Dan Snow
Montcalm seems to have remained convinced, rightly, that Wolfe was attached to the idea of a landing at Beauport; he wrote to Bougainville saying that although he could see ‘the large movement’ of troops marching west from Point Lévis, ‘M. Wolfe is just the man to double back under cover of darkness.’46 Montcalm could not have guessed that Wolfe had capitulated to his brigadiers. He was certain that the Beauport shore would be the eventual battlefield and he himself remained stationed there. Wolfe’s ‘Family Journal’ asked rhetorically ‘why Mr Montcalm on our going above the town did not move more troops upwards’. The anonymous author of the journal assumed that ‘he was of the opinion that he was inaccessible on that side by the precautions he had taken’. It was also true that the mobility that the navy offered meant that ‘our being in the upper river did not make an attempt near Beauport less practicable, as the tide would set us there in an hour’s time’. The British could still embark miles beyond Quebec and drift downriver to attack below the town. As a result says the mysterious diarist, Montcalm ‘resolved not to diminish his force here as the tenderest part of his line’.47 A French journal agrees: Montcalm was, apparently, ‘invariably of the opinion that the position at Beauport was the essential point to maintain possession of, and the only one by which the enemy could hope to succeed in the conquest of the town of Quebec’.48 Saunders made sure that Montcalm had plenty of evidence to maintain him in his conviction that the attack would come below the town. He regularly anchored ‘3 or 4 casks…to serve as buoys’ off the shore as if to provide navigational markers for amphibious assault ships.49 French boats would row out and remove them every time they appeared.
Like many of the French officers Vaudreuil regarded the upriver zone as inappropriate for a landing. They ‘would not succeed’, he wrote, taking rather more credit than he deserved, ‘because, given the measures I’ve put into place, our retrenchments are well guarded, and, if they want to land above Quebec, they’ll learn their lesson’.50 Montcalm was cutting about this bluster. He told Bougainville that ‘M. de Vaudreuil is more nervous than I am about the right’ or upriver front.51 Ramezay certainly claimed, after the event, to have been concerned. He said that he had ‘given advice’ to Montcalm on 6 September because Montcalm ‘persists in acting with the sure assumption that the enemies cannot attack from anywhere except Beauport, and does not want to move any troops to this side of the city’.52 It is impossible to know whether he actually raised his concerns during the fateful days of early September. In fact, Montcalm did move troops upriver to reinforce Bougainville. One French officer wrote in his journal that ‘troops were drawn off from the left wing which was now no longer in danger of any attack’.53 Another officer wrote that Montcalm ‘stripped his left somewhat and removed the principal part of his forces to the right of his camp’. He moved one of his crack French regular army battalions, the Guyenne, to ‘the heights of Quebec, whence it could repair, in case of need, equally to either Sillery or into the town, or towards the River St Charles’.54 This regiment would act as a mobile reserve, throwing itself instantly at whichever point the British might make their landing.
The full potency of British naval supremacy was now brutally apparent. The river was not a barrier, it was a highway. Wolfe could strike at any point within a dozen miles. Exhausted French troops could only peer out at the ships, or listen on dark nights for the splash of oars and attempt to follow them and stop the landing of men. The situation was unbearably tense. A French journal described it as ‘very critical’ and realized that if the British could cut off ‘the communication between Quebec and the upper country, we must resign ourselves to lose the fruits of three months’ campaign, during which the enemy, notwithstanding his very large land and naval force, had not succeeded in gaining any material advantage’. Supplies in the city were running low. The daily ration was three-quarters of a pound of bread, ‘with a very small portion of brandy’. There were sufficient provisions to last until near the end of September. The 1759 harvest of corn ‘was ripening all over the country’ and in ‘those places where it was out of the reach of the English’ it was ‘the only resource that could save the colony’.55 Montcalm noted in his journal that ‘the people and the troops eat horse meat and every day we live with the threat of dying from hunger…one must be a witness to such events to believe them’.56 Another journal, rich in detail, comes to an end in early September. Its final words reflect the stress of the French position, waiting for an inevitable blow to fall but ignorant as to its place or timing: ‘we do not know what they are looking for. It is to be wished for the good of everybody that they would make their landing as soon as possible. (They have only to come.)’ The author confidently asserts that, ‘I believe they would remember it a long time, from the forces which are preparing to give them a chance to land and then to be at them vigorously.’57
For two days British troops left the camp at Point Lévis and trudged west towards their rendezvous with the fleet of ships above Quebec. A sergeant major in the Louisbourg Grenadiers noted that he and his comrades were allowed ‘to take only one shirt and one pair of stockings, besides what we had on’. He calculated that there were 3,349 men who embarked on the ships and as a result it was ‘very much crowded on board the men of war and transports’.58 Young Malcolm Fraser reported that ‘we are much crowded: the ship I am in has about 600 on board, being only about two hundred and fifty tons’.59 Knox counted his 43rd Regiment as ‘particularly lucky’ as they were ‘put on board the Seahorse frigate where Captain Smith and his officers entertained us in a most princely manner, and very obligingly made it their principal care to render our crowded situation as agreeable as possible’.60
Bringing up the rear was Wolfe. He had not yet entirely shaken off his illness. Knox reported on 5 September that ‘General Wolfe was much indisposed last night; he is better today, but the whole army are, nevertheless, very apprehensive lest his ill state of health should not permit him to command this grand enterprise in person.’61 On the evening of 6 September, accompanied by a detachment of Highlanders, Wolfe made his way upriver and boarded Holmes’ fleet. As he marched along the bank he would have witnessed a bizarre bit of bravado by a British schooner. The aptly named Terror of France, which, Knox reports, was ‘of a most diminutive size’, boldly passed the town in broad daylight, while tacking upwind. He goes on to say that ‘the officers and gunners at the enemy’s batteries were provoked at this small vessel’s presumption in open daylight, which they…looked upon as a contemptuous affront upon their formidable batteries’. They ‘foolishly expended a number of shot at her, but she nevertheless got safe up, with her colours flying’.62 Another eyewitness records that ‘she received five of their shot; one in her jib, two in her mainsail and two in her foresail; but lost none of her hands, nor did she sustain any further damage’.63 Panet wrote that ‘we imagined it was a wager’ because she was so small and seemed to be mainly crewed by officers. The French batteries fired ‘around 100 cannon’ which ‘only pierced their sails’.64 As she joined the fleet in the upper river she anchored and ‘triumphantly saluted Admiral Holmes with a discharge’ from all her little deck-mounted guns. Knox also reports that during the excitement a lucky British cannonball from Point Lévis knocked over a French cannon and careered into a rack of loaded muskets which fell over and discharged, killing two French officers and seven men and wounding four others.65 By the evening of 6 September the men were embarked, Wolfe was well enough to join them, and the Terror of France had provided a morale-boosting display. One officer reported that ‘the army is in great spirits’.66
Wolfe issued a general order to put fight into his men. He told them that he was ‘too well acquainted with the valour and good inclination of the troop to doubt their behaviour’. However, he emphasized the need for ‘vigilance’ and for the men not to disperse ‘and wander about the country’ as soon as they landed. Nor were they to forget that the enemy were ‘irregular, cowardly and cruel’. He finished with the warning that a la
nding was now days, if not hours, away.67 Wolfe and his brigadiers met and drew up an order of battle. Ideally they would land and deploy as a front line and a reserve. Townshend would command the latter. If, however, they were forced to fight on an extended front all the regiments would line up abreast but keep a quarter of their strength in reserve behind each of them. Every battalion was assigned a carefully calculated number of flat-bottomed boats.
The following day the flotilla moved upriver. They worked their way up to Cap Rouge. Townshend thought it was a ‘very good place for landing but the enemy had got at the mouth of the river that flanked the bay, 6 or 8 floating batteries and we saw great numbers of Canadians with some regulars come down and post themselves and immediately began to throw up a breastwork’.68 Knox saw a ‘spacious cove’ with the ‘lands all around us high and commanding’. The bay swarmed with floating batteries and ‘a large body of the enemy are well entrenched’ on the shore. The French forces ‘appear very numerous’. He spotted Montcalm’s cavalry for the first time, ‘clothed in blue, and mounted on neat light horses of different colours’. As soon as the British fleet had dropped anchor ‘their whole detachment ran down the precipice with a ridiculous shout, and manned their works. I have often reflected upon the absurdity of this practice in the French.’ Knox concluded that this kind of overt aggression ‘must tend to defeat all regularity and good order among themselves, because their men are thereby confused and are rendered incapable of paying attention to their officers or their duty;—it is a false courage’. By contrast, he mused,
how different, how nobly awful, and expressive of true valour is the custom of the British troops! They do not expend their ammunition at an immense distance; and, if they advance to engage, or stand to receive the charge, they are steady, profoundly silent and attentive, reserving their fire until they have received that of their adversaries, over whom they have a tenfold advantage.69
At two in the afternoon some of the warships pushed into the bay and tried to engage the floating batteries. Townshend reports that ‘the tide was too far spent before they got up their anchor and could get in’.70 There was some firing, though, as the Squirrel’s log reports that ‘five floating batteries engaged us’. ‘One of the enemy’s shot went through our main mast’ and parts of her rigging were shot away.71 The infantry were sent into the flat-bottomed boats, which were rowed ‘up and down, as if intending to land at different places, to amuse the enemy’ according to Knox. He assumed that this was a feint, ‘calculated to fix the attention of the enemy on that particular part while a descent is meditated elsewhere, perhaps lower down’.72
It is unclear whether or not the Cap Rouge demonstration was intended as a feint. Either way it was very clear that the French had the firepower and the defences to make any attack extremely costly. Later that afternoon, perhaps as a consequence of what he had witnessed, Wolfe went on a reconnoitre along the north coast. His ‘Family Journal’ suggests that he examined the coast ‘at less than 200 yards distance all the way up to [Point aux Trembles] and there fixed on a place for the descent, and gave orders in consequence’.73
On the following day, 8 September, the weather collapsed. The rain poured. In the French camp nervousness about the moves Saunders was making off the Beauport shore meant that despite the awful weather troops were kept up all night in their positions rather than seeking shelter in tents and billets. On board the packed British men of war and transports the soldiers stoically endured the onset of a dampness that would last for days. The inclement weather brought with it some easterly winds which meant yet more transports and supply vessels swept past the batteries of the town that since the foundation of Quebec had been relied upon to seal off the interior of the continent. Ships were now passing at will; the batteries on shore had been seriously damaged by fire from ships and the British batteries on Point Lévis. One French journal reports that this further reinforcement brought the fleet above Quebec to around twenty ships, ‘which created exceeding great anxiety, and the more, because no conjecture could be formed of what were their designs—whether they meant to ravage the country, or cut off the communication’. Either way, in the hopeful opinion of the author, ‘they seemed to have renounced the hope of carrying the place’.74
Townshend wrote in his journal that ‘it continued to rain all this day. The troops ordered to land tomorrow morning at 4 O’clock.’75 Mackellar reported in his account of the campaign that Wolfe had chosen ‘a place a little below Point aux Trembles for making a descent’.76 Meanwhile the 2nd/60th Royal Americans and the light infantry would go to Pointe aux Trembles itself and pretend to land there. In the event neither the feint nor the real attack went ahead. The weather was still bad during the early morning of 9 September. The troops had made the now familiar climb down into the flat-bottomed boats at 0300 hours. They sat tightly packed together in the rain as the boats wallowed in the fast moving St Lawrence. They were in total ignorance of where and when the attack was to be made or even if the operation would go ahead at all. On board the Adventure transport, designated the hospital ship and told to raise her colours at her foretopmast head so that she was readily identifiable, surgeons prepared for the influx of casualties.
Wolfe and his senior commanders peered at the sky through dripping rigging at first light and made the decision to call off the attack. At 0600 hours the men, with drenched clothes clinging to them, clambered back on board their transports.77 Knox described the ‘extreme wetness’.78 Wolfe was now worried that the packed, soaking transports would prove a cradle for disease and he ordered around half of the men ashore to dry out and stretch their legs. They would leave their baggage aboard the ships and take only their blankets, kettles, and two days’ provisions. The signal for getting them back on board ship, Knox reports, was ‘two guns fired fast, and two slow, from the Sutherland; the signal by night will be three lights at the main-top-gallant mast head of the same ship and two guns’. Knox also reports that two officers from the 43rd were ill on board ship and when Wolfe found out, he offered the use of his own barge to take them to the camp at de Lévis where they could recuperate. The officers gallantly declined, ‘assuring the general that no consideration could induce them to leave the army, until they should see the event of this expedition’.79
By the end of the day the wind had shifted, the weather was clear and Wolfe’s fatalism had disappeared with the bad weather. He was again the aggressive, cocksure young commander. That day he had boarded a schooner and, as his ‘Family Journal’ says, ‘reconnoitred close by the shore from Carrouge [Cap Rouge] down to the town of Quebec’. During his absence this fiercely loyal account of the campaign remarks that ‘Mr Murray and Townshend came aboard the admiral and behaved very seditiously in respect of Mr Wolfe.’80 Sadly the author does not enlarge on their activities. What is certain is that Wolfe returned from his exploring having had an epiphany. He was now very clear about where he wanted to land his army. Mackellar reported in his journal that he ‘found another place more to his mind, and thereupon laid aside all further thoughts of that at Point aux Trembles’.81
Mackellar wrote in his journal that ‘the place that the General fixed upon for the descent is called Foulon’.82 The Anse au Foulon was, in fact, the cove Wolfe had mentioned to the engineering officer, Samuel Holland, back in July after his first reconnoitre upriver as a possible site for landing his army in the final resort. That eventuality having arrived, Wolfe took a closer look and decided it would indeed serve his purpose. Over the centuries myths, stories, and folklore have attached themselves to Wolfe’s decision to attempt a landing at Foulon. Tourists are told that a careless laundry woman wandered down to wash clothes in the river and Wolfe caught sight of her and realized that this was a usable route up the cliffs that lined the St Lawrence. Other stories have, without any foundation, ascribed the decision to French agents who, for various corrupt reasons, wished their colony to fall to the British. These fanciful tales involve a web of conspirators, deserters, and even a beguiling
lady who lured key French commanders into her bed at vital moments. Perhaps one day a smoking gun will be found to support such exciting theories but in the meantime it should be stated that Foulon was a rather obvious choice, a place Wolfe himself had contemplated throughout the summer and regularly mentioned in French sources as one of the few routes by which an army landing above Quebec could gain the high ground. There was an obvious break in the steep escarpment, where a road led down to the beach. At the top a force of at least a hundred men, encamped in highly visible tents, guarded it and had built an abatis across the road. This tangle of tree trunks with sharpened branches, if resolutely defended, was a serious and visible obstacle. This was no secret route nor was it given away by the much maligned, but thankfully anonymous, washerwoman. Another advantage to Foulon was that after the troops on the ships had been landed, the flat-bottomed boats could row across to the south shore where the rest of Wolfe’s army would be waiting. Two battalions had stayed behind to guard the camps on Point Lévis and the Île d’Or-léans and there were other troops for whom there was no space on Holmes’ ships. Around a thousand men therefore would march two miles from the Point Lévis camp along the beach at low tide and wait to be ferried across. Added to Wolfe’s force on the ships this would bring the total number of troops to something like four thousand five hundred. Foulon allowed Wolfe to maximize his chances of getting every single one of his infantrymen into the action.
