Death or Victory: The Battle for Quebec and the Birth of Empire. Dan Snow
The next day the sick were finally sent ashore and those men too old or disabled to have a hope of recovery were sent aboard a transport for the crossing back to Britain. Wolfe and Saunders announced that they were intent on ‘sailing on the first fair wind’. Instructions were left at Louisbourg for any latecomers to follow the fleet into the St Lawrence.74
The laborious process of weighing anchor began in the early morning of 4 June. On the biggest ships like the Neptune it was a Herculean task. Ten sailors worked each of fourteen wooden bars that slotted into a giant winch or ‘capstan’ on the middle gun deck just forward of the mainmast. Below them another ten men worked each of twelve bars on a ‘trundlehead’, essentially another capstan working on the same axis. These teams, 260 strong, could lift approximately ten tons. Depending on the length of cable, the wind and tide, an anchor could take six hours to raise. In emergencies, the captain could order the crew to ‘let slip’ and simply leave the anchor and cable behind on the seabed. The twenty-four-inch cable was made from the intertwining of three regular ropes and was too wide for the capstan and so a smaller ‘messenger’ rope was attached to the cable with ‘nipper’ cords that had to be slid along at regular intervals as the cable came in. To lighten the load on the seamen, if the wind favoured it, ships could set some sail to bring them ‘a-peek’, a point at which they were vertically above the anchor. Once it was raised almost out of the water, it had to be ‘catted’: another team of men hauled on a tackle which brought it up out of the water, while keeping it away from the hull, making sure the heavy flukes did not puncture the wood, and lashed it to the side of the forecastle. Meanwhile, the cable was stored right down in the bottom of the ship, below the waterline. When it dried off the soft manilla rope made an excellent mattress and sleeping in the cable tier became a perk of the senior members of the ship’s company.
Knox watched the operation from the 337-ton, London-based transport ship, the Goodwill, under its colourful master, Thomas Killick. One hundred and seventy-nine officers and men of the 43rd Regiment were on board. He watched the transports as they ‘got their anchors a-peek’, with the soldiers on board sweating at the capstans alongside the seamen. The time it took to get the entire fleet out of the harbour meant that the brief window of favourable weather was missed. It turned ‘foul, with a thick fog [and] little or no wind’. Those ships not already out of the harbour had to drop their anchors again and wait for the weather to change. One of Wolfe’s senior officers recorded that the wind remained ‘contrary’ until the sixth, ‘during which time the Admiral kept in the offing’, sailing backwards and forwards off Louisbourg until the rest of the fleet could get out of harbour.75
At 0400 hours on 6 June it was the Goodwill’s turn to crawl out of Louisbourg. By 1000 hours she joined the waiting fleet. The weather was fair, with a variable, light breeze. ‘Now that we are joined, imagination cannot conceive a more eligible prospect,’ enthused Knox. ‘Our whole armament, naval and military, were in high spirits,’ he recorded, and despite the grave challenges ahead he had no doubt that under ‘such Admirals and Generals’ together ‘with so respectable a fleet’ and ‘such a body of well-appointed regular troops’ there would be ‘the greatest success’. He reported that ‘the prevailing sentimental toast among the officers is—British colours on every French fort, port, and garrison in America’.76 Not everyone shared Knox’s enthusiasm. Fraser made an ominous entry in his diary: ‘I hear a Lieutenant on board one of the men of war has shot himself—for fear I suppose the French should do it.’ Fraser was surprised to hear of the suicide given the dangers that certainly beckoned. ‘If he was wearied of life, he might soon get quit of it in a more honourable way.’77
Wolfe was relieved to be underway and finished a dispatch that day on board the Neptune in which he was upbeat about the prospects for the operation. He attached a return of the troops embarked at Louisbourg and wrote that he expected ‘to find a good part of the [French] force of Canada at Quebec’, but his army was ‘prepared to meet them. Whatever the end is, I flatter myself that his Majesty will not be dissatisfied with the behaviour of his troops.’ A senior member of Wolfe’s staff wrote that the ‘whole force was now assembled’ and ‘amounted to 8,535 soldiers, fit for duty, officers included’. It was far short of the 12,000 that Wolfe had been promised and it would almost certainly be fewer men than the French could muster to defend Canada.78
It was the largest naval expedition in North American history: forty-two men of war, fourteen of which carried sixty guns or more and were known as ‘ships of the line’. In the eighteenth century, the weight, accuracy and range of cannon meant that ships were designed to carry many of them firing at ninety degrees to the direction of the vessel. As a result action was joined when the enemy was alongside rather than in front or behind. The mighty capital ships of powers like Britain and France would form lines and exchange crashing broadsides with their opponents. The Neptune, on whose quarterdeck Wolfe and his staff took their daily exercise, was one of the most powerful ships of the line in the world. Weighing nearly two thousand tons, she was 171 feet long and crewed by just under eight hundred officers and men. She had twenty-eight cannon on her lower gun deck, each firing a thirty-two-pound ball, termed 32 pounders, and on her middle and upper deck another sixty 18 and 12 pounders. In a second the Neptune was capable of blasting a ton of lead into the hull and rigging of an enemy ship. Other warships had different roles; lighter, quicker frigates could harass an enemy’s merchant fleet or provide support for land forces in shallower waters. Some ships carried mortars or acted as scouts. Saunders was well supplied with all varieties.79
The main role of the naval vessels was to protect the vast array of civilian vessels on which the success of the operation relied. In all there were between one hundred and twenty and one hundred and forty transport ships of all rigs and sizes. They were carrying not just the troops but all the supplies that would allow the force to sail deep into enemy territory. It had to be assumed that no food would be available around Quebec and so the expedition was forced to bring every sack of flour as well as every spade and ounce of gunpowder with it. The Hunter, Resolution, and Scarboro from Boston carried cattle; ships like the Phoenix, Martha, and Hannah had all the paraphernalia associated with artillery in their holds: siege guns, spare carriages and ramrods, in all 163 pieces of artillery of all shapes and sizes. Other ships carried just powder and shot. The expedition’s 75,000 cannonballs sat low in the holds, providing extra ballast. The Industry and Sally from the south coast of England carried some of the 65,000 shells for the mortars. There were 1.2 million musket cartridges, 10,862 barrels of powder, and even 250 primitive rockets. The New England-based Good Intent and Peggy & Sarah weighing in at just over a hundred tons were designated sounding vessels: shallow-draught ships that could go ahead of the main fleet and check the depth of water by taking regular soundings using a lead weight thrown over the side and measuring the depth on a marked line.80
Such a massive fleet needed tight organization if it was to avoid the twin perils of getting scattered across the North Atlantic or of crashing into each other. Saunders had issued a long set of sailing instructions at Louisbourg.81 The fleet would travel in three divisions: white, red, and blue. Wolfe’s army had been divided into three brigades and appropriately enough, each brigade was assigned to one of the divisions. Every single ship would fly ‘vanes’ (long, thin flags) denoting which division they were in and exactly what or who was on board. The twenty-eight-gun frigate Lowestoft would command the lead, white division and would ‘wear a white broad pendant’ during the day and a light on the stern of her poop deck and another at the top of her mainmast at night. All the transports in the division were distinguished by smaller white vanes. Each regiment had a slight variation. Ships carrying Knox and his fellow soldiers of the 43rd had white vanes with one red ball. Malcolm Fraser in the 78th sailed in a ship with a white vane with two