Death or Victory: The Battle for Quebec and the Birth of Empire. Dan Snow
the gateway to Canada’s vast western lands. For the defence of Quebec, one officer estimated that there were the five battalions of the French army, ‘about 1600 men’, ‘about 600 colonial’ regulars and ‘10,400 Canadians, and sailors distributed throughout the batteries’. New France could also call upon allied groups of Native Americans, from the Christianized Abenaki of St François to the more mercenary distant tribes from the west who joined for money, adventure, and booty. Estimates differ on the number of Native Americans present during the summer of 1759, and no doubt the number fluctuated as they came and went much as they pleased, but the same officer counted ‘918 Indians of different nations’. Last, there was ‘a troop of cavalry composed of 200 volunteers taken from different corps and to be posted promptly wherever the enemy should show themselves, to be attached to the general’s suite and to convey orders’. In all he gave the rather precise figure of 13,718 men. The journal comments that
so strong an army was not anticipated, because it was not expected that there would be so large a number of Canadians…but such an emulation prevailed among the people, that old men of 80 and children of 12 and 13 were seen coming to the camp, who would never consent to take advantage of the exemption granted to their age.53
A witness comments that the habitants ‘assembled themselves with so much activity and zeal that, on the field, we make up a body of eleven to twelve thousand men’.54 The people of New France were flocking in unprecedented numbers to help with the defence of their capital.
It was an empire dependent on its capital. Montcalm had told Versailles during the winter, that Canada would fall ‘without a doubt’ if Quebec did. ‘There is not’ he wrote, ‘a second line any place of strength, any spot having in depot any warlike stores or provisions’. Nor could Canada ‘sustain herself by herself and without succours from France’, and Quebec was Canada’s only port. Montcalm was as clear as Wolfe that it was in front of the walls of Quebec that the decisive clash for domination of the North American continent would take place.55
Quebec was derived from Kebec, which in the local Native American dialect meant ‘narrows’. At Quebec the St Lawrence River rapidly shrinks from being more than ten miles wide to just two-thirds of a mile. Here also the St Charles River joins the St Lawrence and in between the two there is a promontory of land surrounded on three sides by steep cliffs and water and on the fourth by an open patch of scrub known as Les Plaines d’Abraham or the Plains of Abraham. On this natural bastion sat the Upper Town of Quebec. Below it a thin strip of land at the bottom of the cliff was, in some places, around a hundred yards wide and was the site of the Lower Town, a few crowded blocks of buildings. Downriver from the narrows the St Lawrence widens out into a basin, the edges of which are very shallow. Large ships were unable to get close in; Quebec was not a natural harbour.
In 1535 the French explorer Jacques Cartier arrived and immediately realized that this was the place to dominate this vast new continent and, he hoped, the route to China. Large ocean-going ships could penetrate this far but little further, and the river was narrow enough to control who came and went. Added to this the site was almost impregnable. Cartier named the cliff which soared more than two hundred feet out of the river, Cap Diamant or Cape Diamond. It is still easy to see why he chose to spend his first winter in Canada on top of this peak. The small French party held out through a vicious Canadian winter in a little stockade protected by a moat built on top of Cap Diamant, the first European fort in Canadian history. Decimated by scurvy and threatened by Native attacks, Cartier abandoned the site in the spring. Several more attempts were made to settle the area, each of which was abandoned as the failure to find valuable raw materials or the hoped for sea-routes to China meant that the will evaporated to overcome the challenges of distance, climate, and the local inhabitants. A permanent settlement was finally established on 3 July 1608 by the father of Canada, Samuel de Champlain, who landed and built a trading post where the Lower Town of Quebec now stands. He promised his king that Quebec was the gateway to the continent and possession of it would make France the most powerful nation on earth.
The experiment in global supremacy did not get off to a great start. The early town was blockaded and captured without a fight in 1629 by the Kirke brothers, two English corsairs who ransacked the town so that when it was returned to the French in the treaty of 1632 it had to be rebuilt again from scratch. In 1690 when the Acadian town of Port Royal, near modern-day Annapolis Royal in Nova Scotia, fell to an English fleet, it was decided that Quebec needed a wall on its western landward side to protect the town from its only vulnerable approach, on the Plains of Abraham, the raised plateau of rolling ground to the west. A wooden palisade was built, protecting the city from an enemy simply capturing it coup de main with the simplest of attacks.
The building work could not have been timelier. On 16 October 1690, thirty-four New English ships arrived off Quebec with around two and a half thousand men on board. They were led by Sir William Phips, an adventurer who had become fabulously wealthy after he salvaged the wreck of a Spanish galleon. These New Englanders were flushed from successes against the French settlements on the Atlantic seaboard and were now intent on conquering New France. Massachusetts had optimistically paid for the expedition on credit to be redeemed with the booty from Quebec. Few, if any, New Englanders had ever seen the stronghold before the expedition; its dominant position must have come as an unpleasant surprise. A messenger was sent to issue an ultimatum to the French governor. The Comte de Frontenac, a proud, aristocratic soldier of France, had to be restrained from hanging him for his impertinence. He gained control of his temper and told the messenger, ‘Tell your master I will answer him with the mouth of my cannons!’ This message of defiance against the piratical New English seamen became a Canadian motto for the next hundred years.
Phips’ assault carried vital lessons for future operations against Quebec. The obvious place for a force to land was along the north shore of the St Lawrence, east of the town on its downriver side. From the St Charles River, which marked the town’s eastern edge, the shoreline ran for five miles to the Montmorency River with its spectacular waterfall. In the centre lay the village of Beauport; the Beauport shore offered numerous low lying coves and beaches on which to land men. This is where Phips sent his troops. They were carried from their transports in ships’ boats, the sailors pulling hard at the oars. As they waded ashore the New Englanders were harassed by Canadians and allied Native Americans. Both of these two groups were highly skilled in the arts of bush fighting and used the woodland as cover from which to launch lightning attacks. Meanwhile, the larger ships attempted to batter the defences of Quebec with their cannon but came off distinctly second best in their duel with the batteries on shore.
Having landed, the New Englanders attempted to march westward along the Beauport shore towards the St Charles River, force a crossing and storm the town. They never made it to the riverbank. The Canadian and Native irregulars kept up a withering fire from the cover of the woods and so demoralized the New Englanders that they retreated in near panic back to the beaches and onto their ships. Around one hundred and fifty of them were killed or wounded, while the Canadians suffered nine dead and perhaps fifty wounded. Sickness swept through the fleet and the shortening nights terrified the sailors of the expedition, who imagined being trapped by ice in the St Lawrence. On 23 October Phips and his fleet weighed anchor and made for Boston. They suffered heavy losses at sea on the way back. It would take more than a fortnight and more than a handful of ships and men to take Quebec.56
Frontenac knew that his defences would not prove as impregnable against a force armed with modern siege artillery; cannon that could hurl a thirty-two-pound ball at 485 yards per second would brush aside a wooden stockade half a mile away as if it were paper. Work started on modern fortifications but soon got bogged down into a bewildering quagmire caused by shortage of funds and a rapid succession of engineers who all without fail utterly condemned their predecessor’s work. Nothing dramatic was achieved until war broke out again with the British in 1744. Louisbourg fell in the summer in 1745 and the government of New France was once again faced with an urgent need to protect their capital. Every able-bodied man from 14 to 60 within forty miles of the city was forced to help with the