Death or Victory: The Battle for Quebec and the Birth of Empire. Dan Snow
were not more than 10 days before us.14
This was a disaster; the bold attempt to sever the umbilical cord to France had failed and with it any prospect of an easy campaign of conquest. These French supplies would enable Canada to fight on and nothing short of a full military campaign would bring the colony to its knees. Another British officer wrote, ‘this, you may imagine was mortifying news to us’.15
It was mortifying enough for the sailors on the ships, but Durell would have known that for one man in particular it would be the most unwelcome news imaginable. The man whose job it was to command the soldiers that would do the fighting once the fleet delivered them up the St Lawrence into the heart of Canada, whose army would attempt to bring about the ruin of New France, to kill, capture, or scatter its defenders and batter its strongholds into submission. For this man, it would be by far the greatest test of his short career but he had been confident of success, as long as the British ships could stop French supplies from reaching the Canadians. Now his plan had misfired before he had even entered the St Lawrence. This commander was Major General James Wolfe.
While Durell secured pilots and intelligence, James Wolfe had spent the spring chafing to follow him up the river. Wolfe was charged with threatening, and ideally capturing, the principal towns of Canada, particularly its capital, Quebec, perched on a plateau, protected by cliffs which plunged down to the St Lawrence. Quebec was a great prize that had eluded British soldiers for generations. On paper he had a considerable force but his chances were lessening by the day as the expedition suffered delay after delay. The campaign season in North America was short; the onset of winter put a stop to any military activity as the river froze and the temperatures plunged far below zero. Every minute counted.
Even as Wolfe and many of his senior officers had met in Portsmouth, in southern England in February 1759 there was already a sense of great urgency. Previous attacks on Canada had petered out as the gales and frosts of September and October had heralded the onset of the terrible winter. Surviving letters to these officers from the bureaucrats and politicians in London are laced with exhortations of speed. On 1 January the Admiralty Secretary had written to the port admiral at Portsmouth telling him ‘in the most pressing manner’ to get the ships ready for service in North America, ‘with all the expedition that is possible’.16 Wolfe was in overall command of the army; Rear Admiral Charles Saunders would command the fleet, including Durell’s ships as soon as he arrived in North American waters. Saunders assured the government that ‘the least delay’ was unacceptable.17
The red-coated soldiers who would do the bulk of the fighting were already in America, but Wolfe and Saunders were bringing civilian ships hired by the navy to act as transports to get the men and supplies up the St Lawrence. There were 20,000 tons of shipping in all, each ton costing 12s. 9d. and was ‘victualled’ or supplied with food for four months. Many of these ships came straight from the collier trade that brought the coal from north-east England down to London, a city which even by 1759 was insatiable in its appetite. Over Christmas officers were sent up the Thames to chase dawdling ships carrying powder and shot. The Admiralty demanded an account of the readiness of the transports ‘every other day’.18
Accompanying these transports and protecting them from French interference, Saunders commanded an overwhelmingly powerful naval task force. The Royal Navy was the strongest on the planet. It outnumbered the French navy, enjoying an advantage in battleships or ‘ships of the line’ of approximately 120 to 55. But whereas Britain had naval commitments across all of the world’s oceans, France was concentrating her ships to launch an invasion of Britain. Despite this threat Saunders was given fourteen battleships to protect the convoy of troop ships across the Atlantic, supported by six smaller frigates, three bomb vessels, and three fireships. These would join Durell’s American squadron of ten ships of the line and four frigates which had wintered in North America. This vast concentration of naval firepower would then be the strongest single fleet in the world.19
Portsmouth was booming. It was the crucible of Britain’s naval effort and was packed with sailors, many with spare cash from enlistment bounties and their share of the prize money awarded for capturing enemy ships. The navy was larger than it had ever been before, with unprecedented investment being poured into ships and shore facilities like the Haslar Hospital in Gosport, opened in 1753, with a capacity for 2,000 patients, four times greater than Guy’s and St Thomas’s in London, the next biggest in the country. For years to come Haslar would be the largest brick building in Europe. A visitor to Portsmouth in 1759 commented that, ‘The streets are not the cleanest, nor the smells most savoury; but the continuous resort of seamen &c makes it always full of people, who seem in a hurry.’20 It was here that Wolfe was joined by his subordinate, Brigadier George Townshend, who recorded the event in his journal, ‘I embarked on the Neptune,the Admiral’s ship, on the 13th of February on board of which was also the General.’21
On 15 February Saunders sent an advance party of fifteen warships, a mix of ships of the line and frigates, plus sixty-six transports to New York to round up the troops who had wintered in the American colonies and collect fresh supplies.22 The same day he received a promotion. He was made Vice Admiral of the Blue, and the Neptune immediately raised a blue ensign.23 The next day Saunders was able to ‘acquaint the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty that I am now working out between the Buoys, with the wind at East’.24 Townshend confirmed the journey’s auspicious start, writing that ‘we had a fine wind down the channel’.25 Given that the prevailing winds in the Channel are south-west it must have seemed like a happy omen for the Atlantic crossing that lay ahead.
It did not last. After hitting calms off Cornwall the weather turned rough. Although ships could make the eastern seaboard of America in around a month,26 the large convoy was held up by the pace of the slowest vessels. Thanks to ‘strong gales and thick hazy weather’ they lost contact with the Dublin with ‘three of the victuallers, two transports and a bomb tender’. Even though Saunders had ‘no doubt of their getting safe to America’, these incidents were pushing the operation into ever greater delays.27 Other ships lost masts and spars in the heavy weather.
Navigation was an imperfect art. Fixing a ship’s longitude with any accuracy in 1759 was impossible. Seven years before, the University of Göttingen in Hanover had published a longitudinal table which allowed a careful navigator to work out his longitude to within sixty nautical miles but it is not known how many of the British ships carried the means to use even this rudimentary method. Cracking longitude was the great civilian and military challenge of the time, what the race to jet engines and harnessing the power of the atom was to the twentieth century. The Royal Navy was edging closer to a solution; two years later in 1761 the Deptford would sail for Jamaica with John Harrison’s chronometer on board and would stun his detractors by arriving just over one nautical mile out from her calculated position.28
Such a revolution was a distant dream for the officers of Saunders’ fleet as they lined the quarterdeck every day at noon, praying for a gap in the clouds to get their reading from the position of the sun. Meanwhile ships lost topmasts, sails were shredded, and many of the transports parted company. In these northern latitudes they came across ‘floating islands of ice’.29 They were aiming for Louisbourg, until the year before a French possession on Cape Breton Island that had guarded the mouth of