.
as a prisoner in Quebec itself for a few months he was exchanged for an officer of equal rank. He had then accompanied Amherst and Wolfe to Louisbourg where the Chief Engineer had been wounded and Mackellar inherited the role. The French fortress fell and Mackellar was now uniquely qualified for the Quebec job. Not only had he proved his ability to conduct a formal siege in North American conditions but he was one of the few living British men who had actually seen Quebec. He wrote a detailed report on the city, but his strict imprisonment had meant that he had been unable to see the landward walls. He had picked up hints from servants and had seen a copy of an old map. These combined with the ‘difficulty they made of our seeing it’ seemed to Mackellar to confirm ‘that the place must be weak towards the land’. An attack from this quarter ‘is the only method that promises success’. Wolfe had so far followed the recommendation in his engineer’s report to the letter. Mackellar had suggested seizing the Île d’Orléans and reorganizing there, threatening the whole north bank of the St Lawrence. This, he wrote, will ‘probably make the enemy more doubtful where the landing is intended, which may be a very considerable advantage’.14
Wolfe had met Mackellar the year before at the siege of Louisbourg and was, at first, unimpressed by what he saw. At the beginning of the Quebec campaign he had written to his uncle saying that ‘it is impossible to conceive how poorly the engineering business was carried on’ at Louisbourg. The French fortress ‘could not have held out ten days if it had been attacked with common sense’. He bemoaned that his engineers were ‘very indifferent, and of little experience; but we have none better’.15 It was not the first time Wolfe was unkind in his judgement, nor would it be the last time he would be forced to revise it.
Mackellar’s diary for June 1959 reports that ‘while the troops were disembarking, the General went to the point of Orleans with an escort’. Wolfe, Mackellar, and a company of rangers walked along the road that circles the island and after six miles arrived at the western tip. There Wolfe finally saw Quebec for the first time. From that vantage point Quebec looked spectacular, as it still does. The cliffs are clearly visible, about four miles away across the basin. To the south of the town the narrows can be distinctly seen, with steep wooded hills on either side, looking almost like a gorge. Mackellar would have pointed out the landmarks, identified the massed batteries, and also explained the difficulty of assaulting the Upper Town from the Lower. Quebec looked impregnable enough but Wolfe must have prepared himself for that. What he had not gambled on was the scale of the French defences that stretched along the north shore of the St Lawrence. Mackellar wrote that he and Wolfe ‘saw the enemy encamped along the North shore of the basin in eight different encampments, extending from the River St Charles to within a mile of the Falls of Montmorency, and the coast fortified all along’.16 The author of Wolfe’s ‘Family Journal’ writes that ‘from the falls of Montmorency to Beauport (which is four miles) the banks are very high and steep’. While ‘from Beauport to the river St Charles the banks are low and level the shore winds here in the form of an amphitheatre’. But this ideal landing place was ‘deeply entrenched, and batteries of cannon at small distances for the whole way’.17 Wolfe reported to London that ‘we found them encamped along the shore of Beauport…and entrenched in every accessible part’.18 His heart sank. He would later describe it as ‘the strongest country perhaps in the world to rest the defence of the town and colony upon’.19 Both he and Mackellar also noticed the small gunboats and floating batteries, providing more mobile firepower.
While crossing the Atlantic and sailing up the St Lawrence Wolfe had come up with a plan of operations. He had lightly assumed that ‘to invest the place and cut off all communication with the colony it will be necessary to encamp with our right to the river St Lawrence, and our left to the river St Charles’. This meant landing on the Beauport shore fighting ‘a smart action at the passage of the river St Charles’ and then surrounding the town on the landward side. This plan, like so many others, was predicated on the total inactivity of the enemy. Disobligingly the French commander had fortified the Beauport shore to such an extent that any landing would have to take place in the teeth of a terrible crossfire. Wolfe had written to his uncle that if he found the enemy was ‘timid, weak, and ignorant, we shall push them with more vivacity’. If, however, ‘I find that the enemy is strong, audacious, and well commanded, I shall proceed with the utmost caution and circumspection’.20 In that case the best he could hope for was to pin down as many defenders of Canada as possible and thereby limit the number of men that General Amherst would face on his push north towards Montreal. From his first view of the dispositions of the enemy it looked decidedly like the latter scenario was more likely.
Later in the summer Wolfe would write in his report to the Secretary of State, William Pitt, that ‘the natural strength of the country, which the Marquis de Montcalm seems wisely to depend upon’, had presented him with ‘obstacles’ which were ‘much greater than we had reason to expect, or could forsee’. It was abundantly obvious as he and Mackellar peered through their telescopes and beheld the sheer scale of the trenches, bastions, and batteries and also the numbers of defenders that the French were in a ‘very advantageous situation’. Stunningly, Wolfe, hitherto so eager to get to grips with the defenders of Quebec, even admitted in the report that ‘I could not flatter myself that I should be able to reduce the place.’21 His sudden pessimism demonstrated his inexperience as a commander. Word seems to have spread quickly throughout the army. Knox wrote in his journal that he had heard about the strength of the enemy position and that the French are employed ‘in adding every kind of work, that art can invent, to render it impenetrable’.22 It is interesting that even the French journals seem to have got wind of the rumours in the British camp. One goes so far as reporting that ‘we have since learned that as soon as he [Wolfe] had taken an exact reconnaissance…he did not conceal from his principal officers of the army who accompanies him, that he did not flatter himself with success’.23 The only man on the French side who was not cheered by these rumours was Montcalm; ironically, he was equally disconsolate. ‘It seems like everything points to failure,’ he wrote in his journal as he wrestled with the lack of munitions and the slow pace of constructing his fortifications.24
‘After taking a full view of all that could be seen from this place,’ Mackellar reported that he and Wolfe ‘returned to St Laurent’25 where the army was disembarking and making camp. The hill above the village was seething with activity. Men cleared trees and stumps, others dug trenches for latrines and quartermasters marked out spaces on which their regiments would camp. Parties of men scoured the countryside for fresh hay; Knox reports that they returned with ‘excellent hay to lie upon’.26 That was not all, days later he comments on the ‘great quantities of plunder, that they found concealed in pits in the woods’.27 The arrival of thousands of men, with a sizeable hardened criminal minority, was like a plague of locusts. Not a cupboard, shed, or even suspiciously fresh piece of earth was left unsearched. Meanwhile, the hillside was alive with the noise of hundreds of mallets tapping away at pegs. Neat rows of tents were appearing on the southfacing slope. The British army always pitched them according to the same pattern. The comforting and familiar shape of the camp attempted to create some normality for soldiers who found themselves in utterly alien surroundings. The army would camp ‘in one line’, Knox tells us, ‘with our front to the north-ward’.28 On the northern edge of the camp were around five tents per regiment to house the quarter guard, a security force which men would rotate through to provide a twenty-four-hour watch. A wide avenue separated them