Death or Victory: The Battle for Quebec and the Birth of Empire. Dan Snow
than defending it. Two miserable months after leaving Portsmouth the fleet neared Louisbourg but as it did so it ran into a thick shelf of ice miles wide that stretched out from the shore. The harbour at Louisbourg was completely enclosed. Saunders dispatched smaller boats to try to find passages through the ice but to no avail.
Saunders had no choice. Working the ships in these conditions was unimaginably tough. The sails were ‘stiff like sheets of tin’, making them impossible to furl, while the ‘running ropes freeze in the blocks’. The ‘topmen’ were suffering the most. These young, agile seamen were responsible for the setting and furling of these highest sails and faced frequent climbs up into the frozen rigging. The weather made this impossible. Durell reported to London that, in conditions such as these, ‘the men cannot expose their hands long enough to the cold to do their duty’.30 Having been buffeted with ‘contrary winds and hard gales’ and now ‘stopped with a body of ice’ from getting into Louisbourg, Saunders had to head south-west, away from the Gulf of St Lawrence and towards the British base at Halifax.31 The risks to his fleet from a further period at sea in the blizzard conditions waiting for the ice to melt were too great. He was already undermanned and the grim realities of eighteenth-century seafaring were further depleting his crews.
Lack of access to fresh provisions, the freezing weather, and physical exertion left the men, who slept in hammocks fourteen inches apart slung across a gun deck, prone to debilitating sickness. The year before HMS Pembroke had sailed from Portsmouth to Halifax and due to a rather circuitous route the voyage had lasted seventy-five days. Twenty-six men had died on the passage and a large number were put in hospital as soon as she arrived; five desperate men deserted in one of her small boats just after they dropped anchor.32 Things were not as bad for Wolfe on the flagship, Neptune, but even so he chafed at the delays. He was a very poor sailor. The year before he had written to his father, ‘You may believe that I have passed my time disagreeably enough in this rough weather; at best, the life, you know, is not pleasant.’33 On this crossing he wrote to a senior officer that ‘your servant as usual has been very sensible of the ship’s motions’.34
As the battered fleet entered the bay at Halifax on 30 April Wolfe’s frustration turned into rage. There sitting at anchor was Durell’s North American squadron which should by now have been blockading the St Lawrence. The seamen of the fleet would have noticed immediately that Durell’s ships were riding at just one anchor and were therefore clearly ready to sail on the first fair breeze but the landsman Wolfe was livid. To his political superiors in London he was measured but to Major General Jeffrey Amherst, the senior British commander in North America, he wrote that, having arrived in ‘tolerable good order, the length of our passage considered’, he was ‘astounded to find Mr Durell at anchor’.35 This was positively diplomatic compared to comments recorded in a remarkable and recently discovered private journal written by one of Wolfe’s close ring of aides. This straight-talking account, the so-called ‘Family Journal’, is more outspoken in its condemnation of Durell and his late departure from Halifax: ‘Nothing could astonish Wolfe more than on our arrival at Halifax’ to discover Durell riding at anchor, and ‘nothing could be more scandalous than their proceedings’ when ‘all the bellowing of the troops at Halifax could not persuade them to leave that harbour for fear of the ice’. The diarist writes that Wolfe, who ‘knew the navy well’, had feared since leaving Britain that they would be late to leave thanks to ‘an aversion to run the hazards of the river’. He went on to say that ‘much time, according to custom was spent in deliberation, and at length they determined that it would be more agreeable to sail up the river when the spring was well advanced than during so cold a season’. The ‘Family Journal’ makes it clear that Wolfe believed this was a setback of the most serious kind: had they got into the river when they were supposed to have done ‘supplies [would have] been intercepted’ and ‘the enemy would not have been able to fire a gun’. In short, concludes the journal, ‘Canada would certainly have been an easy conquest, had that squadron gone early enough into the river.’36
Saunders, for whom sadly little personal correspondence exists, was kinder to his subordinate, writing to London on 2 May that he found Durell ‘unmoored, and ready to sail…He waits only for a wind, and, I hope, will sail tomorrow.’37 He did sail on 3 May but ‘the wind proved contrary’ and ‘they were obliged to anchor’ just outside the harbour until 5 May.38 As a result Durell entered the St Lawrence just days after the precious convoy from France. Wolfe would never forgive his naval colleagues for this failure. It was the first crack in a relationship upon which combined operations depended and the resultant schism was almost as detrimental to the British cause as the arrival of succour to his enemies.
The hysteria of Wolfe’s circle is perhaps attributable to the slow realization of the scale of the challenge and the paucity of their resources. Troop ships from New York trickled in slowly. The first to arrive was the Ruby, on 1 May, carrying ordnance, gunpowder, and shot. She told of storms, dismastings, and delays afflicting the rest of the fleet.39 As the other ships did start to arrive it soon became clear that they were carrying numbers of men who were consistently below what Wolfe had been expecting. In Britain, he had been promised battle-hardened regiments of the British army in North America; however, nobody had considered that winter would leave these units decimated. Three thousand reinforcements were supposed to have been sent out from Britain, a mix of new recruits and soldiers drafted in from other regiments.40 However, these men had been diverted to bolster a bogged-down campaign in the French-owned Caribbean islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe. Vague promises were made to transfer these men back up to Wolfe’s army after they had conquered the islands, but these assurances must have rung hollow to Wolfe. It was a fact that service in the Caribbean ruined any unit sent there. Microbes broke armies in the Indies more surely than enemy steel. From 1740 to 1742 a British and colonial American army outside the walls of Cartagena had lost 10,000 of its 14,000 men, about one in ten of them as a result of enemy action, the rest from disease. Wolfe, as a boy soldier, had been earmarked for the expedition but had been saved from an almost certain death by a delicate constitution that was so overwhelmed by the germs of Portsmouth that he was sent home to recuperate with his mother. The Spanish boasted that disease provided a surer defence than ships, forts, and men. They morbidly celebrated yellow fever, as fiebre patriótica, ‘patriotic fever’, because it attacked outsiders with such jingoistic fervour.41 Criminals were granted a reprieve from the death penalty in Britain if they agreed to serve in the tropics. Soldiers were often given the choice when being punished for a grave offence: 1,000 lashes or service in the Caribbean; they usually chose the former.42
Wolfe would have known it would be a miracle if the troops arrived back in the North Atlantic in time to be of any use even if they were not eviscerated by disease. He would have to make do with the regiments already in theatre. At least every regiment had seen action. British regular soldiers had been fighting in North America since 1755. Each summer’s fighting had been on a larger scale than the year before. Early in the war the men had been so raw that many of them had been taught how to use muskets on decks of transports by officers who had learnt their trade through reading manuals. Now every unit had served through at least one operation and had survived one tough winter. On the downside the campaigns and climate had exerted a powerful attritional effect. Men had used the dispersal to billets over the winter as an opportunity to desert and disappear along the vast and unregulated frontier. Disease could be just as bad among the snow as it was in the tropics. The absence of fresh fruit and vegetables over the winter meant that men lacked vitamin C and scurvy was a constant