Dan Snow - Death or Victory - The Battle for Quebec and the Birth of Empire

The soldiers found themselves in a different world, with its own language, hierarchy, mores, and even calendar. They had to know how to behave. To save their red coats from the harsh climate they wore them inside out. On the passage across the Atlantic Knox had almost been fired upon by an American privateer when they saw a deck full of men wearing off-white coats, the colour worn by the French infantry. Wolfe had ordered the soldiers to ‘be as useful as possible in working their ships’. Wooden ships carried great quantities of pitch, tar, gunpowder, and canvas, and were, as a result, horribly vulnerable to fire. Soldiers who were unused to life afloat had to be made aware of this threat. An order to men crossing the Channel to Flanders during the previous war stated that ‘a sergeant, a corporal and 12 men of each transport to be as a guard to keep things quiet and to place sentries on the officers’ baggage and to suffer no man to smoke between decks’. 83Wolfe was equally careful to ensure discipline and fire prevention on board ship and zealous in the preservation of his men’s well-being: ‘when the weather permits the men are to eat upon deck, and be as much in the open air as possible. Cleanliness in the berths and bedding and as much exercise as their situation permits, are the best preservatives of health.’ 84

For a landsman, his first passage in a tall ship was extraordinary. Upon entering this new realm for the first time one young man wrote: ‘Nor could I think what world I was in. Whether among spirits or devils. All seemed strange; different language and strange expressions of tongue, that I thought myself always asleep or in a dream, and never properly awake.’ 85Their lives were now regulated by ‘watches’. Every half hour a petty officer would turn the hourglass and strike the bell. At ‘eight bells’ the four-hour watch had come to an end and half of the crew could go below and sleep. All the watches were four hours, apart from two watches of two hours each, known as the ‘dog watch’, between 1600 and 2000 hours. At four bells in the morning watch, 0600 hours, the bosun would pipe, ‘Up Hammocks’, at which point the watch below roused themselves and brought up their hammocks on deck to stow in the netting which ringed it. There was no chance of a lie-in. The bosun patrolled the gun deck with a knife and would simply slice through the ropes holding a hammock to the deck beams if its occupant was slow to wake up. The ships were cleaned every morning. The bilges were pumped out, and the decks washed with seawater and holystones. Hours of maintenance and odd jobs followed until the bosun’s pipe signalled dinner, a large meal in the early to mid-afternoon followed by the doling out of the grog ration. In the evening the crew would practise ‘Beating to Quarters’ or going to their action stations. Rich captains, who had supplemented the ship’s gunpowder supplies out of their own pocket, would practise the crew at firing their cannon at this time; those of more moderate means had less opportunity to do this since the navy was stingy with its powder allocation and it had to be hoarded in case of an action with the enemy.

Sailing as part of a massive fleet, close to the shore, in largely unknown waters was a challenge to those in command. Constant adjustments to the course of the ship and the sail plan were made as winds varied, or other transports came too close. Collisions were not unusual. Knox’s religious observations were interrupted when on Sunday, 10 June, ‘as we were going to prayer, about ten o’clock, we got foul of another transport, which obliged us to suspend our devotions’. 86Other accounts are full of near misses. Exhausted captains could expect not to leave their quarterdecks for days in such conditions.

Soldiers provided useful muscle on the passage. Under the command of a quartermaster they formed teams to ‘attend to the braces’, pulling the yards around to optimize the position of the sails in relation to the wind. They could not be forced to climb the rigging and work aloft. That was the province of the topmen, men with a fixed conviction in their own immortality. A seaman wrote that this job ‘not only requires alertness but courage, to ascend in a manner sky high when stormy winds do blow…the youngest of the topmen generally go highest’. 87They handed and made sail, reefed and carried out repairs, all while balancing precariously up to one hundred and fifty feet above the deck. Inshore waters demanded the keeping of a good lookout, which along with extensive use of a line with a lead weight on the end to measure the depth, was the basis of all navigation. Sharp-eyed members of the crew stayed high in the rigging reporting every sighting to the deck. Rewards were given to those with the keenest eyes.

Since the days of Drake there had been an informality born of intimacy on board naval ships; he had always emphasized that officers should lend a hand and haul on ropes. The eighteenth-century navy was a far more harmonious community than has often been assumed; examples of hanging and flogging were exceptional. Many officers had started their careers as common seamen and were promoted, if not always to the highest ranks, through aptitude. The safety of the ship and the lives of everyone who sailed in her depended on officers knowing their business. There was far less opportunity than in the army for venality or the well-connected incompetent. Intruders from the more hierarchical army world were often surprised. Knox was shocked to hear the master of his transport crossing the Atlantic using ‘some of the ordinary profane language of the common sailors’. 88

By the second week of June the expedition had reached the Gulf of St Lawrence, the largest estuary in the world. It was named by explorer Jacques Cartier who had arrived here for the first time on the feast day of St Lawrence. Nearly two thousand miles inland lay its furthest headwater in today’s Minnesota. It drains nearly four hundred thousand square miles, an area which includes the Great Lakes, the world’s largest system of freshwater lakes. Underneath Saunders’ ships 350,000 cubic feet of water a second discharged into the North Atlantic.

The St Lawrence is the greatest tidal river in the world. It is hugely difficult to sail up thanks to the torrent of water surging to the sea, south-westerly winds that tend to prevail in the summer months and a vast amount of local variation in conditions caused by shallows, reefs, and islands. The amount of deviation that compasses will experience from true north varies and squalls regularly tear down off the high ground. Even the easterly winds that Saunders was praying for were often a mixed blessing as winds from that direction were often accompanied by rain and fog.

Captain John Montresor was a 23-year-old engineer on the expedition. He was the son of an engineer and had been raised on that rocky outcrop of empire, Gibraltar, where he had learnt his trade from his father. They had both been sent to America on the outbreak of hostilities and he was already the veteran of several abortive operations, picking up a wound in the Pennsylvanian backcountry at the hands of the Native Americans. Although his age belied his experience, Wolfe had been unimpressed when he had met him the year before during the Louisbourg expedition, describing him, rather hypocritically, as just a ‘boy’. 89Engineers were scarce in the British army and even scarcer in North America and Wolfe would have to tolerate Montresor’s youth. The young engineer kept a careful journal of the passage up the St Lawrence, recording the weather each day and all the important landmarks, headlands, and islands that guided the expedition into the river mouth. On the evening of 11 June, a gale blowing hard out of the Gulf of St Lawrence scattered the fleet. The gale continued until dusk on 12 June when the ships were suddenly becalmed, left to drift east-north-east with the tide. By the fourteenth the fleet saw land in the distance on both sides. On the north shore it was ‘very craggy, irregular’ while the south was ‘very high being mountains of Notre Dame’. The ships took frequent soundings with eighty fathoms of line (480 feet) and ‘found no bottom’. Montresor could tell because the depth, like everything else, was communicated to the fleet. If an ensign fluttered at the main topmast of the Neptune the depth was over forty fathoms (240 feet); if a yellow pendant was hoisted in its place the depth was five fathoms (thirty feet), if it was hoisted twice in succession the depth was six fathoms (thirty-six feet), three times, seven fathoms (forty-two feet), and so on. 90