Death or Victory: The Battle for Quebec and the Birth of Empire. Dan Snow
boats there were thirteen roomy whale boats, sturdily built and designed to be beached, and cutters, around thirty feet in length, which could be rowed or sailed. There were also 104 small ships that could be used. All together Wolfe could count on 134 small craft of all varieties that could deliver 3,319 men to the landing place in one go.4 As the boats crossed the mile and a half gap between the fleet and the shore an army officer, a drummer, and a corporal sat in the stern of each alongside the boat’s coxswain, who steered. The soldiers sat three or four abreast on benches or ‘thwarts’ between the rowers. In the bows naval petty officers attached the boats to the side of transports or secured the boats on the shore while the soldiers jumped into the shallows.
Knox and the 43rd Regiment sailed in the white division, which was the first to land its troops. His men were more heavily loaded than the light infantrymen and rangers, with ‘knapsacks, tools, camp necessaries, and 1 blanket of their ship bedding, besides their own blankets, 36 rounds of ammunition…and four days provisions’. Knox would have to forgo some of the luxuries that his rank entitled him to. Wolfe had strictly ordered that the officers ‘must be contented with very little baggage for a day or two’.5 Knox had spent the previous day scanning the shore and as he set foot on dry land his positive impressions were confirmed. Île d’Orléans is a long thin island, 21 miles by 5 miles. Along the centre of the island there is a ridge that runs right along the spine, with a continuous, gentle slope leading down to the river on either side. The farms were, and still are, long thin strips on this slope providing every farm with a river frontage. Indeed, there was hardly a farm or settlement in Canada that was not within yards of the St Lawrence or tributary rivers. Well-built farmhouses tended to be positioned near the water so there was an almost continuous band of settlement around the shore with the fields in neat, narrow strips stretching off up the hill behind them. The island appeared ‘fertile and agreeable’ and the ‘delightful country’ was dotted with ‘pleasant villages’ and ‘windmills, water-mills, churches, chapels and compact farm houses, all built with stone and covered some with wood and others with straw’. Knox was ‘inclined to think we are happily arrived at the place, to all appearance, will be the theatre of our future operations’.6
The soldiers were extremely pleased to be disembarking from the crowded ships, on which they had been unwelcome interlopers, and finally set their feet on dry land. John Johnson was the Quartermaster and Clerk of the 58th Regiment. Like most sergeants he was literate but he was unusual in that he wrote an account of the campaign. (The vast majority did not.) He described the land as ‘the most agreeable spot I ever saw…it is a bountiful island and well cultivated, and produces all kinds of grain, pasture and vegetables [and] is full of villages’.7 The most explicit were the Highlanders. A remarkable song composed by the regimental bard Iain Campbell during the campaign, in his native Gaelic, recounts that, ‘we were glad to be on the land,/ each one of us,/ with a good deal of haste/ went into the long boats/ to go to the island of Orleans’.8
The island was deserted. The previous day on the south shore Knox had spotted ‘the country-people…removing their effects in carts’ and being escorted to a place of safety, far from the British invaders.9 They crossed the river to the north bank where they sought shelter with friends or relatives. The sheer concentration of British ships caused panic around the Quebec basin, not just on the Île d’Orléans: ‘At the sight of so many English ships,’ recorded one French journal, ‘terror again seized upon the women, most of whom left the town as soon as possible, and retired into the country.’10
There was certainly no resistance to the landing. Amphibious assaults are terribly vulnerable when the attacking troops are cooped up in small boats just before landing. Wolfe’s men were unable to fire their muskets effectively while afloat and boats full of defenceless men made tempting targets. The French, however, made no move to defend the coast. With such a huge shoreline the Île d’Orléans was impossible to protect while still maintaining their positions along the all-important Beauport shore. Montcalm had to accept that Wolfe would be able to land his army in the area around Quebec. He just had to stop them landing in a place that gave them a springboard for attacking the city itself. The Île d’Orléans was indefensible and Montcalm was content to cede the island knowing that Wolfe would have to make yet another amphibious assault before he could get his forces up to the walls of the city. That next assault, Montcalm planned, would receive a lethal reception.
The night before, on the evening of 26 June, Wolfe had sent Captain Joseph Gorham ashore with forty of his men to scout out the landing place. Gorham was a tough New England ranger who had fought alongside his father and older brother since he was a teenager, protecting the isolated settlements of Nova Scotia against Native American raids. Not encountering any opposition the rangers pushed on to the north side of the island. Here they stumbled upon a large party of the inhabitants who were hiding their valuables in the woods and there was a skirmish. Gorham and his men retreated to the south shore and barricaded themselves into a farmhouse. They had lost a man and when they searched for him the next day they found the corpse ‘scalped and butchered in a very barbarous manner’. They followed a grim trail of blood to the water’s edge on the north shore and realized that the Canadians had made their escape.11 It was a first, gruesome signal that the summer’s fighting was to be conducted along very different lines to what the men could expect on the battlefields of Europe.
For the moment, though, the British troops were told to conduct themselves according to the European norm. Non-combatants were to be protected; Wolfe issued strict orders that ‘no insult of any kind be offered to the inhabitants of the island’. Wolfe also forbade the landing of the numerous bands of women that always accompanied eighteenth-century armies. These soldiers’ wives made themselves useful on campaign, doing all sorts of jobs such as laundry, nursing, and cooking, but Wolfe regarded them as a nuisance. He did not want them getting in the way of what could be a sharp fight to get ashore. They would be allowed to disembark only after order had been established.12
After landing, the infantrymen marched inland for about a mile and pitched their tents in a long line facing to the north, the direction from which trouble was likeliest. Knox had grabbed the opportunity of having a look around the church in the village of St Laurent, ‘a neat building with steeple and spire’. Inside, ‘all the ornaments of the altar were removed’ and there was a charming note from the local priest addressed to the ‘“Worthy Officers of the British Army”’, begging them ‘from their well known humanity and generosity they would protect his church and its sacred furniture, as also his house and other tenements adjoining to it’. In a very Christian gesture the priest concluded that ‘he wished we had arrived a little earlier, that we might have enjoyed the benefit of such vegetables, viz. asparagus, radishes, etc etc as his garden produced, and are now gone to seed’. Knox commented on the distinctive tone, ‘he concluded his epistle with many frothy compliments, and kind wishes etc consistent with that kind of politeness so peculiar to the French’.13
While his officers were sightseeing, pitching the camp, and bringing men and supplies ashore, Wolfe, as always, was pushing forward. Finally giving his curiosity free rein he and a small group of men crossed the island to catch a glimpse of the prize which he had travelled thousands of miles to claim. By his side was one of his most important colleagues: his Chief Engineer, Patrick Mackellar. The 42-year-old engineer was the perfect man for the job. Not only had he served more than twenty years in the Ordnance, the body responsible for the army’s engineering and artillery as well as its logistical and technical support, but he had also been stationed in North America from the beginning of the current war. He had accompanied the ill-starred General Braddock on his drive deep into the Pennsylvania backcountry in 1755, where he was badly wounded in the fiasco on the Monongahela. Mackellar’s