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

Even as Wolfe and many of his senior officers had met in Portsmouth, in southern England in February 1759 there was already a sense of great urgency. Previous attacks on Canada had petered out as the gales and frosts of September and October had heralded the onset of the terrible winter. Surviving letters to these officers from the bureaucrats and politicians in London are laced with exhortations of speed. On 1 January the Admiralty Secretary had written to the port admiral at Portsmouth telling him ‘in the most pressing manner’ to get the ships ready for service in North America, ‘with all the expedition that is possible’. 16Wolfe was in overall command of the army; Rear Admiral Charles Saunders would command the fleet, including Durell’s ships as soon as he arrived in North American waters. Saunders assured the government that ‘the least delay’ was unacceptable. 17

The red-coated soldiers who would do the bulk of the fighting were already in America, but Wolfe and Saunders were bringing civilian ships hired by the navy to act as transports to get the men and supplies up the St Lawrence. There were 20,000 tons of shipping in all, each ton costing 12 s . 9 d . and was ‘victualled’ or supplied with food for four months. Many of these ships came straight from the collier trade that brought the coal from north-east England down to London, a city which even by 1759 was insatiable in its appetite. Over Christmas officers were sent up the Thames to chase dawdling ships carrying powder and shot. The Admiralty demanded an account of the readiness of the transports ‘every other day’. 18

Accompanying these transports and protecting them from French interference, Saunders commanded an overwhelmingly powerful naval task force. The Royal Navy was the strongest on the planet. It outnumbered the French navy, enjoying an advantage in battleships or ‘ships of the line’ of approximately 120 to 55. But whereas Britain had naval commitments across all of the world’s oceans, France was concentrating her ships to launch an invasion of Britain. Despite this threat Saunders was given fourteen battleships to protect the convoy of troop ships across the Atlantic, supported by six smaller frigates, three bomb vessels, and three fireships. These would join Durell’s American squadron of ten ships of the line and four frigates which had wintered in North America. This vast concentration of naval firepower would then be the strongest single fleet in the world. 19

Portsmouth was booming. It was the crucible of Britain’s naval effort and was packed with sailors, many with spare cash from enlistment bounties and their share of the prize money awarded for capturing enemy ships. The navy was larger than it had ever been before, with unprecedented investment being poured into ships and shore facilities like the Haslar Hospital in Gosport, opened in 1753, with a capacity for 2,000 patients, four times greater than Guy’s and St Thomas’s in London, the next biggest in the country. For years to come Haslar would be the largest brick building in Europe. A visitor to Portsmouth in 1759 commented that, ‘The streets are not the cleanest, nor the smells most savoury; but the continuous resort of seamen &c makes it always full of people, who seem in a hurry.’ 20It was here that Wolfe was joined by his subordinate, Brigadier George Townshend, who recorded the event in his journal, ‘I embarked on the Neptune ,the Admiral’s ship, on the 13th of February on board of which was also the General.’ 21

On 15 February Saunders sent an advance party of fifteen warships, a mix of ships of the line and frigates, plus sixty-six transports to New York to round up the troops who had wintered in the American colonies and collect fresh supplies. 22The same day he received a promotion. He was made Vice Admiral of the Blue, and the Neptune immediately raised a blue ensign. 23The next day Saunders was able to ‘acquaint the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty that I am now working out between the Buoys, with the wind at East’. 24Townshend confirmed the journey’s auspicious start, writing that ‘we had a fine wind down the channel’. 25Given that the prevailing winds in the Channel are south-west it must have seemed like a happy omen for the Atlantic crossing that lay ahead.

It did not last. After hitting calms off Cornwall the weather turned rough. Although ships could make the eastern seaboard of America in around a month, 26the large convoy was held up by the pace of the slowest vessels. Thanks to ‘strong gales and thick hazy weather’ they lost contact with the Dublin with ‘three of the victuallers, two transports and a bomb tender’. Even though Saunders had ‘no doubt of their getting safe to America’, these incidents were pushing the operation into ever greater delays. 27Other ships lost masts and spars in the heavy weather.

Navigation was an imperfect art. Fixing a ship’s longitude with any accuracy in 1759 was impossible. Seven years before, the University of Göttingen in Hanover had published a longitudinal table which allowed a careful navigator to work out his longitude to within sixty nautical miles but it is not known how many of the British ships carried the means to use even this rudimentary method. Cracking longitude was the great civilian and military challenge of the time, what the race to jet engines and harnessing the power of the atom was to the twentieth century. The Royal Navy was edging closer to a solution; two years later in 1761 the Deptford would sail for Jamaica with John Harrison’s chronometer on board and would stun his detractors by arriving just over one nautical mile out from her calculated position. 28

Such a revolution was a distant dream for the officers of Saunders’ fleet as they lined the quarterdeck every day at noon, praying for a gap in the clouds to get their reading from the position of the sun. Meanwhile ships lost topmasts, sails were shredded, and many of the transports parted company. In these northern latitudes they came across ‘floating islands of ice’. 29They were aiming for Louisbourg, until the year before a French possession on Cape Breton Island that had guarded the mouth of the St Lawrence. It had fallen after a siege in the summer of 1758 and would now be a base for attacking Canada rather than defending it. Two miserable months after leaving Portsmouth the fleet neared Louisbourg but as it did so it ran into a thick shelf of ice miles wide that stretched out from the shore. The harbour at Louisbourg was completely enclosed. Saunders dispatched smaller boats to try to find passages through the ice but to no avail.

Saunders had no choice. Working the ships in these conditions was unimaginably tough. The sails were ‘stiff like sheets of tin’, making them impossible to furl, while the ‘running ropes freeze in the blocks’. The ‘topmen’ were suffering the most. These young, agile seamen were responsible for the setting and furling of these highest sails and faced frequent climbs up into the frozen rigging. The weather made this impossible. Durell reported to London that, in conditions such as these, ‘the men cannot expose their hands long enough to the cold to do their duty’. 30Having been buffeted with ‘contrary winds and hard gales’ and now ‘stopped with a body of ice’ from getting into Louisbourg, Saunders had to head south-west, away from the Gulf of St Lawrence and towards the British base at Halifax. 31The risks to his fleet from a further period at sea in the blizzard conditions waiting for the ice to melt were too great. He was already undermanned and the grim realities of eighteenth-century seafaring were further depleting his crews.

Lack of access to fresh provisions, the freezing weather, and physical exertion left the men, who slept in hammocks fourteen inches apart slung across a gun deck, prone to debilitating sickness. The year before HMS Pembroke had sailed from Portsmouth to Halifax and due to a rather circuitous route the voyage had lasted seventy-five days. Twenty-six men had died on the passage and a large number were put in hospital as soon as she arrived; five desperate men deserted in one of her small boats just after they dropped anchor. 32Things were not as bad for Wolfe on the flagship, Neptune , but even so he chafed at the delays. He was a very poor sailor. The year before he had written to his father, ‘You may believe that I have passed my time disagreeably enough in this rough weather; at best, the life, you know, is not pleasant.’ 33On this crossing he wrote to a senior officer that ‘your servant as usual has been very sensible of the ship’s motions’. 34