Death or Victory: The Battle for Quebec and the Birth of Empire. Dan Snow
for the shore. But by the time they arrived the shadowy Canadian marksmen had melted further into the thick forest where the redcoats feared to follow.
One man who spent more time in the sounding boats than any other was the master of the Pembroke, James Cook. The man who was to become the first European to explore the east coast of Australia, Hawaii and great swathes of the Pacific was 30 years old and a newcomer to the navy. He had grown up in a family of landlubbers, twenty miles from the North Sea in Yorkshire. His father had worked his way up to farm manager and the farmer paid for young James to go to school. After a brief stint as a shopkeeper’s boy, he went to sea at age 18. He served Mr Walker, a Quaker from Whitby, who made his money delivering coal from north-east England down to London where a nascent industrial revolution was firing a demand for coal that employed 400 ships a year making the dangerous journey from the Tyne to the Thames. Treacherous enough with GPS, charts, weather forecasts, navigation marks, and engines, the east coast of England was a harsh nursery of seamanship. If Cook could learn how to avoid the East and West Barrow in the Thames Estuary, the sandbanks off Ipswich, the North Sea fogs and the violent squalls he could face any waters in the world. It was a ruthless meritocracy which ensured only the competent survived. Cook became a talented seaman. Walker offered him command of a ship in his late twenties but Cook made a surprising decision. Perhaps driven by a thirst for adventure he elected to join the Royal Navy as a lowly able seaman. War had just broken out with France and Cook would have his fill of action. Within a month his skills were recognized and he was promoted to Master’s Mate. He faced the enemy for the first time in May 1757 on board the Eagle; she captured a valuable French merchantman but only after a stiff fight in which she was shot to pieces. Skill was prized above birth in the navy, for the same reason as it was on the colliers, and promotion beckoned if he could pass his exams. Cook sat and passed for the position of Master in late 1757. The next year he was in North American waters, Master of the sixty-four-gun ship Pembroke. The job has no modern equivalent and was already dying out in Cook’s time. Traditionally the King’s government had hired ships to fight in times of war. The Master came with the ship to sail it. The officers were gentlemen put on board to fight it. The post had survived into the age of full-time naval ships and it still had responsibility for navigation, pilotage, log keeping, and other technical aspects of being at sea. Masters did not wear uniforms but their high degree of technical know-how made them one of the most important men on the ship even if they lacked the lace of an officer.
The Pembroke had supported the operations off Louisbourg during the siege in the summer of 1758. During a trip ashore Cook had a chance meeting with Samuel ‘Holland’ that was to change his life. Holland was a Dutch engineer and excellent draughtsman. He had been sent to map parts of the coastline. With his skipper’s permission Cook set about learning the art of mapmaking. He produced his first chart in the autumn of 1758 and during the winter of 1758/9 together with Holland he tried to build a picture of the St Lawrence from existing, fragmentary French charts found at Louisbourg and the results of their own soundings on an autumnal cruise along the north shore of modern New Brunswick and into the Gulf of St Lawrence itself. Holland wrote years later, ‘during our stay in Halifax, whenever I could get a moment of time from my duty, I was on board the Pembroke where the great cabin, dedicated to scientific purposes and mostly taken up with a drawing table, furnished no room for idlers’. Together they produced a chart and Holland claimed that ‘these charts were of much use, as some copies came out prior to our sailing from Halifax for Quebec in 1759’.1
After arriving off Bic, Durell had ordered Captain William Gordon of the Devonshire to take with him the Pembroke, Centurion, Squirrel, and three transport ships and press on up the St Lawrence. Cook has traditionally been given all of the plaudits for the pilotage, but although his role was to grow as the summer went on, at this point he was just one of the several masters who all share the credit for providing information about where the channel lay. Men like Hammond, Master of Durell’s flagship, the Princess Amelia, spent long days in the open boats with sounding equipment. This was essentially a long line with a twelve-pound lead weight on the end. Along the line were coloured markers at intervals of one fathom (six feet), allowing the men to gauge the depth. The bottom of the lead was hollowed out and filled with rendered beef or mutton fat, tallow, which collected a sample of the riverbed. Slowly they developed an accurate idea of the depth of water and whether the bottom was rock, sand or shale.2
This advance guard moved up the St Lawrence, feeling their way and praying their anchors would hold through the ebb tide and frequent squalls. The routine of shipboard life continued. The logs went on recording the state of the stores and the frequent occasions on which the ships ‘exercised great guns and small arms’.3 By the afternoon of 8 June 1759 the mighty Cap Tourmente loomed on their starboard bows and they were at the start of the Traverse, the most treacherous part of the St Lawrence. On the ninth the Devonshire signalled ‘for all boats manned and armed in order to go and sound the channel of the Traverse’. Cook and the other masters, with their mates, plus sailors to row them and soldiers to protect them, spent their time feeling out the bottom of the river with their lead lines. On the tenth Cook in his tiny, neat hand wrote in the Pembroke’s log, ‘all the boats went a sounding as before’.4
To the astonishment of the officers the legendary Traverse was found to be wider than expected. By 11 June it seems that Cook ‘returned satisfied with being acquainted with the Channel’.5 On 13 June the Centurion weighed anchor at 1700 hours and three hours later dropped it on the eastern tip of the Île d’Orléans on the far side of the Traverse, becoming in the process the largest ship to have ever passed through it. The final, supposedly impassable barrier to Quebec had been penetrated in less than a week. Buoys were laid and, together with the anchored boats, were used to guide the following ships and the process of getting the rest of the fleet through could now commence.
As the first British ships anchored off the Île d’Orléans some French officers had begged to be allowed to try to take the fight to the invaders. Groups of Canadian and Native American troops were sent out to lie in ambush for British landing parties and met with mixed success. A request was made by François-Marc-Antoine le Mercier, the commander of the artillery around the city, to place cannon on the island. The confused chain of command meant that he was dispatched by Vaudreuil without Montcalm’s knowledge.
He took four cannon with him to the Île d’Orléans. It was a small battery but he would have stood a chance of doing real damage to the British ships if he had been able to fire red-hot shot. This was a complicated business. To make the shot red hot the iron cannonballs were heated in a portable forge. A charge of gunpowder was placed in the mouth or muzzle of the cannon and then rammed all the way down the barrel to the breech at the end. Then a ‘wad’ was put in, made of wood to separate the powder from the red-hot shot which was placed in next after some wet rags to protect the wood and prevent the heat of the shot immediately igniting the powder. Last, the shot was picked out of the forge with a ‘scoop’ and placed in the muzzle, where it rolled down and came to rest on the wadding. The powder charge was pricked by prodding it through a touch-hole on top of the barrel with a sharp priming iron, more powder was tipped into the touch-hole and then a linstock or portfire, essentially some lit match, was applied to the powder in and around the touch-hole, which burst into flame and in turn ignited the main charge which blasted the shot out of the muzzle of the cannon. The shot could do fatal damage to a wooden ship. As well as the physical destruction of the iron projectile passing through the ship, the heat of the iron shot meant that if it lodged in the hull it would almost definitely start a fire on board. Fire was a dreadful prospect on the wooden ships packed with flammable materials. Many eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century fleet actions were illuminated by an inferno as one or two unlucky ships caught fire and burnt down to the waterline.
Saunders’ ships would not face this threat at least. In a bitterly critical tone, one of the leading French journals recounted that ‘in the whole corps of artillery belonging to the colony, not