by Dan Snow
Within hours of these words being written, Wolfe’s light infantry were the first men of his army into the flat-bottomed boats, with Howe’s volunteers in the leading one. Fifty men squeezed onto one boat and when it was full it pushed away from the ship’s side and another took its place. After the light infantry, the regiments embarked in strict seniority. Four boats were required to load the 200 men of Kennedy’s 43rd Regiment from the transport Employment. Once full, the flat-bottomed boats rowed into a designated holding pattern, alongside the Sutherland between her and the south shore. She was showing a single light in her maintopmast shrouds to identify herself. There were thirty flat-bottomed boats in all (plus the feisty Terror of France schooner, which was packed with fifty Highlanders) and a few ship’s boats. These vessels carried the first wave of 1,700 men. Another 1,900 stayed on the frigates, sloops and transports, which would bring them downriver before the empty flat-bottomed boats returned to take in this second wave. Absolute silence was to be observed in the boats. The light infantrymen who had been first into the boats found the anticipation difficult to tolerate. One wrote in his journal that he was ‘waiting impatiently for the signal of proceeding’.106
At about 0200 hours a second light was hoisted into the Suther-land’s shrouds. It was the signal the light infantrymen had been so eagerly looking for. The tide was now ebbing fast, taking the fleet back towards Quebec. The naval officer in command of each boat saw the signal, muttered an order to his expectant men, and hundreds of oars dug into the water. Felt was wrapped around the rowlocks to muffle the groan made by the wooden shaft, and river water was splashed as lubricant on squeaking crutch plates. It was a perfect night. One of the volunteers in the first boat noted: ‘Fine weather, the night calm, and silence over all.’107 Knox remembered that it was a ‘star-light night’ and that the men around him were ‘in high spirits’.108 Johnson, with his flair for hyperbolic jingoism, describes the force as ‘a handful of men’ who ‘were all resolutely determined to a single man to Die or Conquer’.109
THIRTEEN
The Landings
THE BOATS SPED ALONG on an increasingly fast ebbing tide. They had ‘three leagues’ or about ten miles to cover.1 One account relates that they travelled the whole distance ‘without striking with the oars’, such was ‘the force of the tide’.2 At least some rowing would have been required to hold the boats in their respective positions. None of them were allowed to overtake the light infantry who led the flotilla. Wolfe specifically ordered that ‘no officer must attempt to make the least alteration or interfere with Captain Chads’ particular province, lest as the boats move in the night there be confusion and disorder among them’.3 The eight lead boats contained the fit, enterprising light infantrymen who would spearhead the attack. Behind them were six boats with Bragg’s 28th Regiment then four boats with Kennedy’s 43rd Regiment. More boats containing Highlanders, Royal Americans, and others followed them. The men who were not rowing tried to grab a few minutes of uncomfortable sleep while sitting bolt upright in tight rows. They knew it would be the last chance for some time. The moon was in its last quarter, shining in the eastern part of the sky so that just enough light was available to see the north bank of the St Lawrence from the boats. It also meant that any sentries on shore would be looking into it. Just over ten miles away downstream the thunder of the British batteries on Point Lévis was audible. All night they blazed away, keeping the French defenders awake, distracted, and scared.
Around two hours after the flat-bottomed boats moved down the river the larger ships weighed anchor and followed them. Rear Admiral Holmes left the Sutherland to keep an eye on enemy forces further up the river and transferred onto the Lowestoft in which he led the Squirrel and Seahorse and several transports. Each ship was packed with infantrymen, having a considerably more comfortable trip down the river than their comrades in the first wave. At the back of the little fleet were the ordnance vessels carrying artillerymen, cannon, and all their equipment. As soon as the infantry secured the beachhead they would get ashore and try to protect it from French counter-attacks. Mackellar recorded that all the ships and boats moved ‘as silently as they could’ and it appeared that ‘the whole [were] seemingly unobserved by the enemy’.4
The soldiers sat quietly and thought of the battle that was to come. The naval officers, though, were wrestling with the greatest challenge of the campaign so far. Holmes later wrote that it was ‘the most hazardous and difficult task I was ever engaged in’. ‘The distance of the landing place,’ he continued, ‘the darkness of the night; and the chance of exactly hitting the very spot intended, without discovery or alarm; made the whole extremely difficult.’ If he failed in his task it ‘might have overset the general’s plan’, which ‘would have brought upon me an imputation of being the cause of the miscarriage of the attack, and all the misfortune that might happen to the troops in attempting it’.5
Wolfe was blissfully ignorant of the challenges the expedition posed to his naval colleagues. He sat in the stern of one of the boats. Legend has it that Wolfe recited a verse of his favourite poem, Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy in a Country Churchyard’. The midshipman who reported this said that Wolfe finished and commented that ‘he would prefer being the author of that poem to the glory of beating the French tomorrow’.6 It is unlikely, although not impossible, that Wolfe would have broken his own, very strict order not to talk. There would have been some communication. Chads adjusted the pace of the boats and the various coxswains had to speak up to control their rowers. The commander of the entire operation would certainly have felt able to give his aides-de-camp last minute instructions or messages. Wolfe had been given a copy of Gray’s poem by his new fiancée before leaving Britain. He had made notes in the book and had underlined the last line of this particular verse:
The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power, And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave, Awaits alike th’ inevitable hour:—The paths of glory lead but to the grave.
This particular path of glory did almost lead to a watery grave. As they crept along the north shore they passed the Hunter sloop which had been patrolling further downriver. One journal suggests that the commander of the sloop had not been ‘apprised of our coming down’ and as a result suspected the boats ‘to be an enemy’.7 A tense standoff developed as the British soldiers attempted to stop the Hunter firing on them with muffled shouts. In the end, however, this near disaster had a very fortuitous conclusion for the British. At 2300 hours that night, just a few hours before, the Hunter’s log tells how the sloop received visitors: ‘Came on board in a canoe two deserters from the French.’8 They brought with them some very useful intelligence. They told the British that ‘the enemy expected some boats down the river that night with provisions’.9 The Hunter passed on this intelligence once they had established that the shadowy boats were British. This allowed the light infantry to answer any challenges that came from eagle-eyed sentries on the north shore by pretending that they were the French convoy.
On 12 September the French had been trying to organize this flotilla which the two deserters had reported. The French authorities needed to resupply Quebec and although it was possible by road it was considerably easier, cheaper, and quicker to do so by boat. A French officer wrote that among the men stationed along the river, ‘the rumour circulated through all the posts in front of which it was to pass, without agreeing among themselves on any rallying cry’. However, ‘some unforeseen event having prevented our bateaux taking advantage of the night tide to sail, their departure was postponed to the following day, and no attention had yet been paid to warn those same posts of the fact’. As a result when the French sentries saw the barges coming down with the ebb they thought they were friendlies. As there was no prearranged signal of passwords, the British were able to shout a hopeful ‘France’ in the direction of the shore and were allowed to pass. Thus he concluded ‘fortune appeared in this emergency to combine with the little order which prevailed among our troops, so as to facilita
te the approach of those barges’.10
There are many variations on this story of responding to the French sentries. Historians have tried to piece together exactly who said what to whom, but it is more likely that various French-speaking officers in the British boats shouted replies to challenges from different watchmen throughout that busy night. Townshend reports that as the first wave was ‘passing down the north side of the river and the French sentries on the bank challenged our boats, Captain Fraser who had been in the Dutch service and spoke French, answered, “La France” and “vive le Roi” on which the French sentinels ran along the shore in the dark crying, “let them pass, these are the men with the provisions”’.11 One of the light infantrymen in the first boat confirms that a Captain Fraser answered a sentry ‘in the French tongue’ and he cautioned ‘the sentry to be silent, otherwise he would expose us to the fire of the English man of war’.12 There were three Captain Frasers serving in the 78th Highland Regiment; one of them, Simon, had fought for the Dutch, like so many other Highlanders when the British state deemed them untrustworthy rebels and denied them opportunities. He had seen action and had been wounded at the siege of Bergen-op-Zoom. During the Seven Years War, when Britain reversed its policy and began recruiting clansmen, he immediately joined the Highland Regiment. He had been made a captain in April of 1759 and served in the light infantry under Howe during the siege. He later had a successful military career and ended up a brigadier. His luck, and Britain’s, would run out at that moment of imperial nemesis at Saratoga during the American Revolution.13 Knox tells a similar story about a Captain Donald MacDonald who tricked a French sentry as the British troops landed. There was a Captain MacDonnell in the Highlanders who had served in the Royal Ecossois, a French regular army regiment that had served under the Jacobite banner at Culloden in 1746. He seems to have made good use of his French to trick enemy sentries as the two sides floundered around in the murky dawn light.14
With a luck and timing that had been so obviously absent from previous British attacks Wolfe’s boats arrived off Foulon almost exactly on schedule at about 0400 hours as a faint light crept into the sky. The journey had taken them around two hours; there was about an hour till the sun actually rose. Saunders reported to London that ‘considering the darkness of the night and the rapidity of the current, this was a very critical operation; and very properly and successfully conducted’.15 Yet again the navy had overcome massive difficulties to land the army where it wanted.
Anse au Foulon was protected by a small force commanded by Captain Louis Dupont de Chambon de Vergor. He was illiterate, ugly, and avaricious, and in no way suited to independent command. Nevertheless, thanks to the fortunes of the French service, and some advantageous connections, he appeared again and again in the events of the Seven Years War. The 46-year-old had served in North America since he was 17. In October 1750 he had been in command of a brigantine which was attacked by a British sloop commanded by John Rous, the same man who now commanded the Sutherland. Vergor fought the British ship despite his inferior armament and after a full day of battle only seven of his fifty men were still able to operate the guns. The masts and rigging had been shot away and his little vessel was sinking. He surrendered but won acclaim in France and became a Knight of the Order of Saint Louis shortly after.
In 1754 he was in command of Fort Beauséjour on the Chignecto Isthmus protecting Nouvelle Acadie from the British forces in Nova Scotia. On the outbreak of war Monckton easily captured Beauséjour after a very poor attempt at defence by Vergor. The latter was court-martialled in Quebec, and although he performed badly on the stand he was acquitted, almost certainly thanks to his useful connections. During the siege he had watched over Quebec’s back door with his small body of troops and some years later, in search of a pension, he gave the French government his version of what happened on the night of 12/13 September 1759. He began by blaming the confusion about the supply convoy. His sentries were told that the boats ‘were on their way to Quebec with provisions’. But as they reached the sentry posts, he said, they did not continue their journey downstream, instead they turned and, to Vergor’s horror, he ‘noticed that they were coming round and trying to enter the cove’. The French levelled their muskets and, according to his own account, ‘did their utmost to prevent the enemy coming ashore’.16 Wolfe’s ‘Family Journal’ agrees that not a shot was fired until the boats ‘drew in towards the Foulon’.17 Above the beach, on the Heights, was a five-gun battery at Samos that now opened fire as well. As the first shots rang out from musket and cannon the covert phase of the operation had come to an end. Now everything depended on both sides reacting; getting as many men as possible towards the beachhead as quickly as they could. Vergor’s force occupied a strong natural position. A primitive road ran along a stream that over millennia had drained water off from the Heights above and had carved a canyon into the face of the steep escarpment. When people had complained to Montcalm about the lack of troops at Foulon, and a very similar position upriver at the next cove of Sillery, he had replied that ‘I swear to you that 100 men, well posted, could stop the whole army and give us time to wait for daylight and then march to our right to that sector.’18
As the sailors pulled for the shore it became clear that the powerful tides of the St Lawrence had one more trick to play on the British that summer. Townshend later explained to Pitt that ‘the rapidity of the ebb hurried the boats a little below the intended place of attack’. The light infantry in the leading boats had gone too far. They were totally unperturbed, however, and began their ‘scramble up a woody precipice in order to secure the landing of the troops’.19 Howe turned this accident into an advantage because it would allow his men to reach the Heights and then attack the rear of the French troops blocking the winding road up from the beach. So confidently did he and his men launch up this treacherous climb that it is possible that Townshend was wrong and the landing further down was deliberate. Mackellar had noted on his reconnoitre of the Foulon that there ‘appeared to be a slope in the bank’ which was ‘about 200 yards to the right’ of the Foulon road.20 It is possible that Wolfe always intended Howe to land there and send his volunteers to outflank the defenders.
The slope up which Howe’s men most probably scrambled is extremely steep and free from trees. In places shrubs and fissures provide handholds while in others the climber is forced to cling on to bare rock, after clearing away a loose covering of dry topsoil or shale. To the right and the left are sections of sheer cliff and beyond them heavily wooded slopes which, despite the handholds provided by tree trunks, are even harder to climb. The men slung their muskets on their backs but it was impossible to stop them sliding around to their sides and getting the butts entangled in their legs. Water bottles, cartridge boxes, and the swords of the Highlanders thumped against legs. Feet slipped out from under them as their totally inappropriate footwear failed to grip the loose rock and scree. One soldier described it in a letter home that was printed in a local newspaper. He wrote that he had ‘mounted a hill one hundred yards high, being forced to creep on our hands and knees up it, and hold by the bushes that grew on it’.21
Saunders later wrote that ‘the difficulty of gaining the top of the hill is scarce credible, it was very steep in its ascent, and high, had no path where two could go abreast but they were obliged to pull themselves up by the stumps and boughs of trees that covered the declivity’.22 High praise came from an enemy officer who wrote that they climbed up the ‘immensely steep’ slope with ‘great difficulty and danger’.23 The popping of muskets and the occasional thud of a cannon told them that the battle for Foulon had begun. Unless the light infantrymen could reach the top and drive the French guards off the road Wolfe’s assault force might be penned in on the beach.
Those troops coming ashore in the cove itself a little further upstream were exposed to French fire and were taking casualties. Knox wrote that the French resistance was certainly not as effective as it could have been because surprise was almost tota
l. The landing was a shock to the enemy, ‘who from the natural strength of the place, did not suspect, and consequently were not prepared against so bold an attempt’. Even so the musket fire ‘galled us a little, and picked off several men and some officers’. In a footnote he wrote that ‘in the boat where I was, one man was killed; one seaman, with four soldiers, were slightly and two mortally wounded’.24
The situation was precarious. Groups of men fired at each other in the semi-darkness. The terrain was utterly unsuitable for traditional infantry tactics. If the French could maintain control of the narrow track up from the beach then it was possible they could delay the landings until reinforcements arrived and they could drive the British back into the river. Everything depended on Howe’s men struggling up the loose rock of the near precipice. With an effort that was to become one of the most celebrated military achievements in British imperial history, his men made the summit. An eyewitness reported that ‘the light infantry commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Howe…sustaining themselves by the stumps and branches of trees—bushes—roots and vines ascended—dislodged the guard and formed up on the height’.25
‘On their gaining the summit,’ wrote another witness, ‘the signal was a loud huzza.’ With a roar they burst into the midst of the French defences. The British light infantrymen ran through the camp in which half-awake Canadian militiamen were still looking for their weapons. It was the worst possible situation for the defenders. There was no chance at all of organizing any kind of effective response. Howe’s men stormed down the road towards the abatis. Defenders were utterly shocked to find British troops behind them and scattered. One of Howe’s volunteers wrote that ‘after we got up we only received one fire, which we returned briskly, and took a prisoner, the remaining part of the enemy flying into a field of corn’.26 The road to the Heights was open. Down on the beach, the British witness who had heard the huzzaing wrote that these cheers were ‘joyfully answered’.27 Knox relates the skirmishing came to an end when ‘our light infantry got up to dislodge them’.28
