Death or Victory: The Battle for Quebec and the Birth of Empire. Dan Snow
href="#litres_trial_promo">14 The Goodwill’s captain, Killick, and this pilot did not get on. The former considered it an insult, the latter, ‘gasconaded at most extravagant rate, and gave us to understand it was much against his inclination that he was become an English Pilot’. Knox goes on to describe the pilot’s dark predictions:
The poor fellow assumed great latitude in his conversation; said, ‘he made no doubt that some of the fleet would return to England, but they should have a dismal tale to carry with them; for Canada should be the grave of the whole army, and he expected in a short time to see the walls of Quebec ornamented with English scalps.’ Had it not been in obedience to the Admiral, who gave orders that he should not be ill used, he would certainly have been thrown over-board.15
An hour later the Goodwill was in the Traverse, ‘reputed a place of the greatest difficulty and danger’. Knox was fascinated by the terrible Cap Tourmente on the north shore, ‘a remarkably high, black looking promontory’, as the ship glided past on the flood tide. Meanwhile the relationship between Killick and the pilot had not blossomed. ‘As soon as the pilot came on board today, he gave his direction for the working of the ship.’ A mistake clearly; Killick’s word alone was law on the Goodwill. The captain ‘would not permit him to speak; he fixed his mate at the helm, charged him not to take orders from any person except himself, and, going forward with his trumpet to the forecastle, gave the necessary instructions’. Knox’s commanding officer protested to Killick and the pilot ‘declared we should be lost, for that no French ship ever presumed to pass there without a pilot’. Killick replied casually, ‘Aye, aye my dear, but damn me I’ll convince you, that an Englishman shall go where a Frenchman dare not show his nose.’ Knox joined the captain at the bows where Killick pointed out the discolorations of the water, ripples and swirls that showed him the best route. Before one gives Killick too much credit for his supernatural ability to see what lay beneath the surface, it is worth remembering that Saunders had placed ships’ boats to act as navigational markers. As Knox reported, ‘soundings boats…lay off each side, with different coloured flags for our guidance’. Even so Killick’s seamanship is commendable, the product of a lifetime spent in the Thames Estuary. ‘He gave his orders with great unconcern’ and even ‘joked with the sounding boats’. He said wryly, ‘aye aye my dear, chalk it down, a damned dangerous navigation—eh, if you don’t make a sputter about it, you’ll get no credit for it in England’. Having brought the Goodwill safely through the channel, which Knox said ‘forms a complete zig-zag’, he shouted to his mate, ‘Damn me, if there are not a thousand places in the Thames fifty times more hazardous that this; I am ashamed that Englishmen should make such a rout about it.’ The pilot asked Knox if Killick had ever sailed these waters before; ‘I assured him in the negative, upon which he viewed him with great attention, lifting, at the same time, his hands and eyes to heaven with astonishment and fervency.’16
Not all the ships were as lucky as the Goodwill. At least three ships grounded in the approaches or in the Traverse itself. Bad weather would have wrecked them as certainly as the trading schooner that Knox watched break up. The next day it was the Lowestoft’s turn to get through the Traverse. After lending one of her anchors to the transport Ann and Elisabeth who had lost all hers during the passage, she was forced to go to the assistance of one sloop and one schooner who both hit ledges. Cargo would have been loaded into the ships’ boats and the drinking water pumped over the side. The lightened ships then refloated as the tide rose. The Traverse took three hours to clear. By the end the Lowestoft fired a gun to catch their attention and signalled the rest of its division to make more sail and increase speed, seemingly in an attempt to clear the passage before the weather changed. Both on the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth the onset of evening was marked with ‘violent’ squalls, ‘incessant rain, thunder and lightning’.17
At 0400 hours on 26 June Saunders ordered the last division of the fleet to weigh, but they had to anchor again almost immediately. By the afternoon they were ready to take on the Traverse. Montresor commented on the boats moored with flags to mark the route. ‘Boats were appointed with red flags and white ones to guide the fleet—directions to keep the red flags on the starboard and the white ones on the larboard sides.’ This was exactly as laid down by Saunders before leaving Halifax. In Montresor’s blue division the wind turned unfavourable and it was ‘obliged to make several tacks within it’. It was a stunning display of seamanship.18
The British were ecstatic. Journals, letters, and accounts are virtually unanimous in their praise for the seamen and a swaggering pride in their achievement. One senior officer boasted that although the Traverse was ‘reckoned dangerous’, the British ships were not only able to sail through it but even did so into the teeth of a ‘contrary wind’. He wrote that ‘this piece of seamanship surprised the enemy a good deal, for we were perhaps the first that ever attempted to get through in that manner’. He concluded that ‘it must be observed that we found the navigation of the river much less difficult than we could expect from the accounts given of it’.19 A marine officer paid tribute to ‘the great abilities, required of a British admiral to steer his squadrons with safety in so intricate a navigation as that of the River St Lawrence, and so little known to Englishmen’.20 Another officer wrote that ‘the French account of the navigation of the river St Lawrence we found to be a mere bugbear’.21 Another described it as ‘an entertaining navigation’.22 Captain Killick, of course, told Knox that having sailed up all the principal rivers of Europe, ‘he esteems the River St Lawrence to be the finest river, the safest navigation, with the best anchorage in it, of any other within his knowledge; that it is infinitely preferable to the Thames or the Rhone, and that he has not yet met with the least difficulty in working up’.23 It comes across as a bravado born of enormous relief. Interestingly the only person who makes no mention of the navigational feat is Wolfe. His diary and subsequent letters and dispatches to London are all silent on the matter. He was desperately impatient. He had pushed ahead to be in the vanguard of the fleet and clearly regarded Saunders’ methodical creep up the St Lawrence as overly cautious. The anonymous ‘Family Journal’ written by someone close to Wolfe, contains a scathing indictment of the support he received from the navy. In the very last lines of the journal the author writes that the foremost ships could not be persuaded to ‘go up to the basin of Quebec’ because ‘fire ships, rocks and floating batteries had taken such possession of them, that there was an universal tremor among them’. It ends with the phrase ‘how much is the General to be pitied whose operations depend on naval succour’.24 This was a grossly unfair critique of the navy. Saunders had brought hundreds of ships up an unknown and hugely treacherous river, in which one Anglo-American expedition and countless other ships had been lost in the past. It was one of the epics of eighteenth-century maritime history, an achievement that was to help cement Britain’s reputation as the world’s foremost naval power for centuries to come. Wolfe’s total lack of understanding of the sea and his impatience to get his men onto dry land made him a poor commander of an amphibious operation which was dependent for its transport, supply, command and control, and much of its firepower on the ships of the Royal Navy.
Unlike Wolfe and his clique, the French were in no doubt about the scale and importance of the achievement. Bougainville had written two years before with utter certainty that ‘the shoals, with which the river is filled, and the navigation, the most dangerous there is, are Quebec’s best defense’.25 Now this certainty was shattered. It was humiliating that, in the words of one officer, ‘the traverse, a channel so difficult to cross, if our pilots are to be credited, was cleared without any trouble by the English squadron’.26