Death or Victory Read online

  There was a large island, separated from the south shore by a gap of just over three miles. With a good natural harbour the Île du Bic had, for centuries, been an easily defensible haven for ships on the passage up or down the river and home to a small community of priests and pilots. Here the largest ship broke out a large plain white flag, or ensign, at its mizzen. It was the ‘Bourbon Banner’, symbol of the Bourbon kings of France. On the shore the inhabitants, who had been keenly examining the ships for clues as to their nationality, broke out into ‘the greatest rejoicing imaginable’.2

  This was the gateway to Canada, the jewel in the crown of New France, a vast French empire that stretched from the North Atlantic to the Rocky Mountains and down to New Orleans at the mouth of the Mississippi. But its great size was matched by its vulnerability and especially now that France was at war. Her ancient rivalry with England, inherited in 1707 by the newly created Britain, had been revived at the end of the seventeenth century and they had fought a series of wars, each greater than the last, separated by periods of unconvincing peace. No longer did Englishmen strive to carve out dynastic empires in France itself; instead, the fighting surged across the almost limitless horizons of newly discovered continents, dragging in the settlers of the adolescent colonial empires. For four years New France had been fighting the British whose colonies in North America clung to the Atlantic Ocean from Massachusetts down to Georgia. At the beginning of each campaigning season when the ice melted in the St Lawrence River, the artery of Canada, the settlers, or habitants, waited nervously to see what help France would send to her North American possessions. This year, it seemed, France had been generous in her aid. The people of Bic rushed into canoes and paddled out to greet the ships, which they assumed were carrying the food, gunpowder, soldiers, and gold which New France so desperately needed to hold back the British and their American colonial allies.

  The enthusiastic Canadians scrambled up the towering sides of the hulls on slippery, shallow steps that formed a vertical ladder. But as soon as they reached the deck, their euphoria was instantly extinguished. Rather than receiving a warm welcome from fellow subjects of the Most Christian King, Louis XV of France, they found themselves with British oak beneath their feet, and the muskets and cold steel of red-coated marines pointed at their bellies. The ships were British. It was 23 May 1759: the war had arrived in the heart of the French empire. This Royal Naval squadron under the command of Rear Admiral of the Red, Philip Durell, had been given the task of blockading Canada; to cut it off from any help that France might send, and hasten its capitulation.

  On shore the joy of the habitants turned to confusion as they waited for the canoes to return, then to ‘consternation, rage and grief’ as they saw ‘the White colours struck, and the British flags, hoisted in their place’. Apparently, a priest who had been avidly watching the proceedings with a telescope clamped to his eye, ‘dropped down and instantly expired’.3 With an age-old ruse de guerre Durell had lured experienced Canadian pilots on board, men he desperately needed to complete his mission.

  The squabbles of European monarchs had poisoned relations between their colonies in the Americas since those continents had been discovered 250 years before. The ambitions of Louis XIV in Germany, the Low Countries, and Spain had pushed England into armed opposition. Fighting had spread from Western Europe to the wildernesses of the Carolinas or northern New Hampshire as it had to West Africa and Asia. But the current conflict was different. Long the victims of Europe’s wars, the colonies now became their instigators. As their size, populations, and economies had all swelled they developed their own ambitions, interests, and points of friction with the colonies of other powers. While Europe would never lose its primacy in policymakers’ minds, by the mid-eighteenth century French and British politicians found themselves increasingly impelled by colonial considerations. In the late 1740s ambitious British colonials had crossed the Allegheny Mountains and started trading with the Native American inhabitants of the Ohio valley. The British colonies had always claimed the entire continent as far as the Pacific but the barrier of the Alleghenies and the hostility of the Native Americans beyond them had prevented them from ever making these claims a reality. Now these adventurers hoped to sell vast swathes of this fertile land to migrants from the colonies, who would then provide a market for manufactured goods that they would supply. Little attention was paid to French assertions of sovereignty in the area, and none at all to those of the Native Americans.

  The French regarded these encroachments as an unacceptable violation of the strategic corridor that linked Canada, along the St Lawrence, to Louisiana, a colony that was growing along the length of the Mississippi. New France moved troops into the Ohio valley and started building a chain of forts. This represented a threat not only to the individual British colonies, who believed it their destiny to expand west to the Pacific, but also to British North America as a whole which faced being surrounded by an unbroken ring of French forts from the Gulf of Mexico to the St Lawrence River. Even the British Prime Minister, Thomas Pelham Holles, Duke of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Newcastle-under-Lyme, probably the least belligerent man in George II’s government and no friend to rascally marauders on the fringes of empire, believed that this was intolerable. ‘No war,’ he wrote to the British ambassador at Versailles, ‘could be worse than the suffering of such insults.’ Britain would lose its entire position in America if her colonies were confined to the narrow coastal strip of the eastern seaboard. ‘That,’ he wrote emphatically, ‘is what we must not, we will not, suffer.’4

  With only a handful of British regular troops in North America it was left to the colonies to counter the French threat. Virginia took up the challenge and in true British style wrote a strongly worded letter to the French commander in the Ohio valley. It was delivered by eight men. Their leader was in his early twenties, a tall, hardy, rather conservative officer in the Virginia militia who owed his appointment to his connections to Lord Fairfax of Cameron, one of Virginia’s leading landowners. His name was George Washington. Given his later titanic reputation it is perhaps surprising that he stumbled rather than strode onto history’s stage. There was little sign of future greatness, indeed he was lucky to survive. He delivered his letter but the French commander was contemptuous. The following year Washington led a motley force over the mountains, planning to use gunpowder and steel where ink had failed. The first shots of the Seven Years War were fired in a glen near present-day Uniontown in Fayette County, Pennsylvania. In an action that did him no credit, on 28 May 1754, Washington ambushed a small force of French troops who were coming to warn him away from French land. Ensign Joseph Coulon de Villiers de Jumonville and nine of his men were killed. The French responded quickly, defeated Washington, sending him limping back across the Alleghenies. His actions had made war inevitable. He and his men were fortunate that they did not spend the whole of it as prisoners.

  The fighting triggered the sending of reinforcements to North America by both the British and the French. Britain moved first by lunging into the Ohio country, trying to capture Fort Duquesne at the Forks of the Ohio River. A force under General Braddock was cobbled together from different units and sent out from Britain. It was raw, unused to American conditions and its men were utterly terrified of the Native Americans. Braddock made some attempt to adapt to local conditions but was unwilling to listen to colonial advice and as far as Native Americans were concerned, he told Benjamin Franklin that ‘it is impossible that [they] should make any impression’ on his disciplined troops.5 Braddock’s men wilted as they hacked their way through thick forest, travelling between three and eight miles a day. The supply train collapsed as wagons broke up on the brutal road and horses dropped dead. Dysentery tore through the ranks. It was hugely impressive that the expedition got as far as it did. On 9 July 1755, the British force of approximately fifteen hundred men crossed the Monongahela River, nine miles short of the French Fort Duquesne. Their reward for such grit was blundering straight
into a terrible ambush by 108 Canadian colonial troops, 146 militiamen, and 600 Native Americans. Braddock’s force was utterly routed. The French poured fire into the thickly packed column, while sharpshooters picked off the officers. Without leadership, the men simply herded together like terrified animals desperately seeking a false sense of security in numbers. The column eventually broke and flooded back along the road they had made. Native Americans swooped down on the wounded, killing many, saving others to torture later, and claiming others as prisoners to induct into their tribes and replace fallen family members. Braddock was mortally wounded, Washington was hurt and had several horses shot from under him. Two-thirds of the British force were killed or captured. The French suffered less than fifty dead and injured. Of the 150 men in the colonial Virginia Regiment 120 became casualties. Monongahela ranks with the battle of Isandlwana of the Anglo-Zulu War and the massacre of the British army between Kabul and Jalalabad during the First Anglo-Afghan War as an epic tragedy in the military history of the British Empire. The French captured money, supplies, and artillery but the psychological consequences of the defeat were the most serious. It shook the confidence of the British army in North America for years to come and created a myth of the Native American as a superhuman savage.

  The war in North America continued to go badly. In Europe the news was scarcely better. The British were forced to shoot one of their admirals, John Byng, on his own quarterdeck to, in Voltaire’s memorable words, ‘encourage the others’. A court martial determined that Byng had been insufficiently aggressive when he withdrew his fleet after an indecisive battle off Minorca, allowing a French force to capture the vital island. On the Continent Britain’s woes were added to not by an absence of aggression but by a surfeit. Britain’s ally, Frederick II of Prussia, ignited a general war by invading Saxony, thus triggering a series of alliances that united Russia, Austria, and France against him, all three determined to punish Prus-sia’s temerity with annihilation. King George II’s hereditary possession in Germany, his beloved Electorate of Hanover, was rapidly overrun by French troops.

  Britain’s fortunes did slowly improve from this nadir. French colonies were picked off in West Africa and the Caribbean. The French army was driven out of Hanover and then held at bay by an allied army paid for by London but commanded by a Prussian, Frederick’s brother-in-law, Ferdinand of Brunswick. Frederick won a series of stunning victories that would earn him the epithet ‘the Great’ but even so Prussia was never far from dismemberment. There was unequivocally good news from India where Robert Clive routed the Nawab of Bengal and his French allies at the battle of Plassey in 1757. This battle turned the British East India Company’s zone of influence into an empire. Fighting moved to the Carnatic where British forces sought to wipe out French power as they had in Bengal. But in North America there were years of defeat. Regular troops were trounced as they struggled with unfamiliar terrain and enemies while the civilians of the frontier were murdered, tortured, or captured by war parties of Native Americans and Canadians. 1758 had finally seen some success when a British amphibious force had seized the French stronghold of Louisbourg perched on the rocky Atlantic coast of Cape Breton Island.

  Everything suggested that 1759 would be the decisive year. Britain was to make a massive push for victory in North America. Austria and Russia seemed to have Frederick on the brink of defeat and France, frustrated by her lack of progress in Germany, was assembling an invasion force to cross the Channel and knock Britain out of the war. She would then regain those colonies lost on the battlefield at the negotiating table.

  For Britain the year began in crisis. London’s financial community were terrified by the spectre of invasion. Everyone knew that Le Havre was awash with shipwrights, its harbour filling inexorably with shallow-draught invasion barges. Forty thousand soldiers had been moved to France’s north-west coast. Lord Lyttelton, an opposition politician, wrote from London that ‘we talk of nothing here but the French invasion; they are certainly making such preparations as have never before been made to invade this island since the Spanish Armada’.6 Government bonds sold at the steepest discounts of the war. The national debt was larger than anyone could have imagined possible and any new taxes had little chance of getting through a House of Commons packed with country gentlemen who, while patriots, had no wish to fund a perpetual war for the benefit of London financiers, merchants, and American prospectors. The cost of the navy alone jumped from £3.3 million in 1758 to £5 million in 1759. In all the Duke of Newcastle would have to find £12 million in 1759, over half of which he would need to borrow and as the markets lost confidence in the progress of the war the cost of that borrowing crept up.

  The campaigning season opened with defeats for Ferdinand in Germany. He was driven back to the borders of Hanover itself. Frederick suffered sharp setbacks and later in the year he was so badly beaten by the Russians and Austrians at Kunersdorf that he thought the war lost. In Britain, by the start of summer the Chancellor of the Exchequer had asked to resign, government stock had plunged, and Newcastle was thinking about suspending seamen’s wages. The Prime Minister wrote a memorandum in which he admitted that ‘we are engaged in expenses infinitely above our strength…expedition after expedition, campaign after campaign’. He suggested that Prussia should be warned that Britain might not be able to continue the war for another year.7

  Attempts were made to fortify strategic points in southern England. Chatham, Portsmouth, Dover, and Plymouth were given earthworks and batteries were erected along the coast. They were futile gestures. The country was stripped of regular troops. The commander in chief of the British army told his colleagues that only 10,000 men would be available to meet an invasion on the south coast. So many of Britain’s Royal Engineers had been sent to America there were only five qualified engineers left in the country.8 The only other troops available were a half-assembled militia of amateur soldiers. In a clash with veteran French infantrymen there would be no doubt as to the result. In desperation the population clung to reassuring jingoism. A great favourite was ‘Rule, Britannia’, with words by James Thomson and music by Thomas Arne, a song which had become wildly popular during Charles Edward Stuart’s Jacobite uprising of 1745-6. Another hit at the time was ‘Great Britain For Ever’.

  Defiance alone never repelled an invasion. Britain’s real defence was her fleet. But her politicians had left little margin for error. The First Lord of the Admiralty reported to a small de facto war cabinet in February that the majority of British battleships had been dispatched around the globe to poach French possessions. Forty-one were left in home waters. The French were thought to have forty-three, although some of these were in her southern ports in the Mediterranean. The number of French ships that were in a condition to get to sea, let alone last long in the Channel, would be far smaller but the Royal Navy was also weaker than its paper strength, lacking nearly ten thousand men; many of its capital ships were hardly able to weigh their anchors.9

  The government had taken a terrible gamble. Britain itself was at risk and yet men, ships, and treasure had been sent abroad. Vast resources were committed to the invasion of Canada, the most important operation yet undertaken in the war. Failure would place the North American colonies in danger, threaten the creditworthiness of the British government, and almost certainly destroy Newcastle’s administration. The fate of the expedition would be felt from the log cabins of the American frontier to the palaces of Whitehall and Versailles.

  If Durell’s Royal Naval squadron in the St Lawrence could block French supplies to Canada the prospects for the British attack would be rosy indeed. But he also had another task, almost as important. The river was unknown to British seamen. With its reefs, currents, rocks, and other hazards it was Canada’s first and, many thought, strongest line of defence. Durell was charged with finding a route up the river. The French authorities had made desultory attempts to chart the river but the results were unimpressive and, it seems, at best only partially available to the Briti
sh. For generations the French had relied on pilots, each expert in a small stretch of river. So important was their knowledge that one British officer discovered that ‘it is a rule with the inhabitants of Quebec not to let any pilots have the whole navigation of this river’.10 Durell had tricked these men aboard by showing them the Bourbon Banner. It was a perfectly legitimate ruse according to the rules that governed eighteenth-century warfare, and it had brought these vital pilots straight to him.

  Durell was typical of the fighting admirals of the mid-century navy. He was 52 years old and had been at sea since he was 14. Like so many naval officers he had joined a ship thanks to the patronage of a family member, his uncle Captain Thomas Durell of the Sea Horse, although rather more unusually he had joined as an ordinary seaman. Serving his time on the lowest rung of the Georgian navy had given him an unbeatable training in what it took for men to sail and fight a ship. He had spent the rest of his teenage years in North American waters and was made an officer at 24 and a captain by his early thirties. War had made him rich. In the maelstrom of battle naval officers could fight for something more tangible than honour: prizes. Naval officers were incentivized by the guarantee that they would receive a proportion of the value of any enemy ship captured. In the 1740s he had helped take two French merchantmen, returning from the East Indies packed with valuable goods. But wealth had not dampened his ambition; he had continued at sea and had fought in large fleet actions against the French in European waters until returning to North America for good in 1758.11

  Durell had had an awful winter. He had written to the Admiralty in London in March 1759 from the British naval base of Halifax in Nova Scotia telling them that ‘the winter has been the severest that has been known since the settling of the place’, vessels attempting to get up the coast ‘have met with ice eighteen or twenty leagues from the land, so were obliged to return, after having had some of their people froze to death, and other frost bitten to that degree, as to lose legs and arms’.12 Durell had stationed one of his quickest, most manoeuvrable ships, the frigate Sutherland under Captain John Rous off Canso, to bring him news of the ice melting. Rous was also in his fifties and knew the waters off the coast of Newfoundland and the Gulf of St Lawrence as well as any Briton or American. He had been a New England privateer, preying on French merchantmen, before a commodore in the Royal Navy recruited this ‘brisk, gallant man’ for the King’s Service.13 When planning his campaign Durell had decided not to risk taking his full squadron into the gulf to lie in wait for the enemy. He had spent years in these waters, time which included a vain search for the French in similar conditions in 1755, and reckoned that his chances of finding them at sea were small and the cost to his crews and ships from the cold too high. Far better, he decided, to wait for the ice to melt in Halifax, and then sail up the St Lawrence and intercept the French in the confined waters of the river.