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

As the exhausted men fought their way onto the cleared ground around Point Lévis they gazed across the St Lawrence River in awe. There, around half a mile away, was Quebec. It occupied one of the most powerful natural positions of any town or city in the world. Fine buildings with tall sloping roofs and churches with high spires sat above cliffs which soared out of the St Lawrence. The walls atop the cliffs bristled with cannon and beyond the city a great army was camped along the shoreline. Those with telescopes scanned its defences knowing that they could very well be asked to storm its walls. One was dismayed by what he saw: ‘their situation appears to be very strong by nature, and…they are very numerous’. Even from this far away he could pick out lines of trenches and redoubts and, also, ‘throughout their camp there are a continued chain of houses, the windows of which are logged up for the service of musketry’. 11

It had been a bloody morning. The men who now gazed on Quebec and its defenders realized that it was simply a prologue. Before the waters of the mighty river froze in winter the British force would have to capture Quebec or face an ignominious retreat that could derail the entire British war effort not just in North America but in distant Europe too. Defeat was not an option, yet the soldiers staring out at Quebec knew that they could well pay a terrible price for victory.

THERE WERE SHIPS in the St Lawrence. Not an armada, but a squadron powerful enough to dominate the river. Around ten in all, seven of them were obviously warships; their hulls were chequered with gun ports. The largest was a fine man of war with eighty guns, a match for any craft afloat. The air was heavy with fog. The vessels drifted in and out of banks of cloud and cohesion was maintained by the largest ship firing one of its cannon at regular intervals. Sharpeyed officers of the watch saw an eruption of white smoke with a momentary stab of fire at its centre, seconds later came the deep sound of the explosion, echoing back off the banks of the river as the shorelines slowly converged. 1

The river had grown narrower. After days of sailing up the Gulf of St Lawrence where the land was barely visible on either side, the crews could now see clearly either shore. On the north side it was spectacular: high, near vertical slopes, covered with spruce trees, broken only by the occasional section of cliff, damp with water that gave them a bright sheen during rare bursts of sunshine. On the south side, only twenty-two miles away, the coastline was flatter but beyond it, another mountain range reminded the crews of the vast, wild nature of the country.

There was a large island, separated from the south shore by a gap of just over three miles. With a good natural harbour the Île du Bic had, for centuries, been an easily defensible haven for ships on the passage up or down the river and home to a small community of priests and pilots. Here the largest ship broke out a large plain white flag, or ensign, at its mizzen. It was the ‘Bourbon Banner’, symbol of the Bourbon kings of France. On the shore the inhabitants, who had been keenly examining the ships for clues as to their nationality, broke out into ‘the greatest rejoicing imaginable’. 2

This was the gateway to Canada, the jewel in the crown of New France, a vast French empire that stretched from the North Atlantic to the Rocky Mountains and down to New Orleans at the mouth of the Mississippi. But its great size was matched by its vulnerability and especially now that France was at war. Her ancient rivalry with England, inherited in 1707 by the newly created Britain, had been revived at the end of the seventeenth century and they had fought a series of wars, each greater than the last, separated by periods of unconvincing peace. No longer did Englishmen strive to carve out dynastic empires in France itself; instead, the fighting surged across the almost limitless horizons of newly discovered continents, dragging in the settlers of the adolescent colonial empires. For four years New France had been fighting the British whose colonies in North America clung to the Atlantic Ocean from Massachusetts down to Georgia. At the beginning of each campaigning season when the ice melted in the St Lawrence River, the artery of Canada, the settlers, or habitants , waited nervously to see what help France would send to her North American possessions. This year, it seemed, France had been generous in her aid. The people of Bic rushed into canoes and paddled out to greet the ships, which they assumed were carrying the food, gunpowder, soldiers, and gold which New France so desperately needed to hold back the British and their American colonial allies.

The enthusiastic Canadians scrambled up the towering sides of the hulls on slippery, shallow steps that formed a vertical ladder. But as soon as they reached the deck, their euphoria was instantly extinguished. Rather than receiving a warm welcome from fellow subjects of the Most Christian King, Louis XV of France, they found themselves with British oak beneath their feet, and the muskets and cold steel of red-coated marines pointed at their bellies. The ships were British. It was 23 May 1759: the war had arrived in the heart of the French empire. This Royal Naval squadron under the command of Rear Admiral of the Red, Philip Durell, had been given the task of blockading Canada; to cut it off from any help that France might send, and hasten its capitulation.

On shore the joy of the habitants turned to confusion as they waited for the canoes to return, then to ‘consternation, rage and grief’ as they saw ‘the White colours struck, and the British flags, hoisted in their place’. Apparently, a priest who had been avidly watching the proceedings with a telescope clamped to his eye, ‘dropped down and instantly expired’. 3With an age-old ruse de guerre Durell had lured experienced Canadian pilots on board, men he desperately needed to complete his mission.

The squabbles of European monarchs had poisoned relations between their colonies in the Americas since those continents had been discovered 250 years before. The ambitions of Louis XIV in Germany, the Low Countries, and Spain had pushed England into armed opposition. Fighting had spread from Western Europe to the wildernesses of the Carolinas or northern New Hampshire as it had to West Africa and Asia. But the current conflict was different. Long the victims of Europe’s wars, the colonies now became their instigators. As their size, populations, and economies had all swelled they developed their own ambitions, interests, and points of friction with the colonies of other powers. While Europe would never lose its primacy in policymakers’ minds, by the mid-eighteenth century French and British politicians found themselves increasingly impelled by colonial considerations. In the late 1740s ambitious British colonials had crossed the Allegheny Mountains and started trading with the Native American inhabitants of the Ohio valley. The British colonies had always claimed the entire continent as far as the Pacific but the barrier of the Alleghenies and the hostility of the Native Americans beyond them had prevented them from ever making these claims a reality. Now these adventurers hoped to sell vast swathes of this fertile land to migrants from the colonies, who would then provide a market for manufactured goods that they would supply. Little attention was paid to French assertions of sovereignty in the area, and none at all to those of the Native Americans.

The French regarded these encroachments as an unacceptable violation of the strategic corridor that linked Canada, along the St Lawrence, to Louisiana, a colony that was growing along the length of the Mississippi. New France moved troops into the Ohio valley and started building a chain of forts. This represented a threat not only to the individual British colonies, who believed it their destiny to expand west to the Pacific, but also to British North America as a whole which faced being surrounded by an unbroken ring of French forts from the Gulf of Mexico to the St Lawrence River. Even the British Prime Minister, Thomas Pelham Holles, Duke of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Newcastle-under-Lyme, probably the least belligerent man in George II’s government and no friend to rascally marauders on the fringes of empire, believed that this was intolerable. ‘No war,’ he wrote to the British ambassador at Versailles, ‘could be worse than the suffering of such insults.’ Britain would lose its entire position in America if her colonies were confined to the narrow coastal strip of the eastern seaboard. ‘That,’ he wrote emphatically, ‘is what we must not, we will not, suffer.’ 4