That morning1 Captain Charles Douglas stood on the upper deck of his 50-gun ship, Isis, and stared across the wastes of sea ice that lay between his squadron and Canada. It was 10 to 12 feet thick, as an initial survey had already revealed, but the question occupying the captain was: How strong was it? Could they break through it? Courageously, for it was the type of operation that could be costly to a career officer in the navy should he be wrong, he planned to test it.
He ordered canvas, and as the sails filled, the Isis moved forward at 5 knots. The helmsman steered straight for the thick edge of the ice field. The bows of the ship struck the frozen wall; for a few moments the ship checked, shuddering; then the ice split, cracking loudly, and the Isis began to plow a channel.
“Encouraged by this experiment,” crowed Douglas, “we thought it . . . an effort due to the gallant defenders of Quebec to make the attempt of pressing her by force of sail through the thick, broad and closely connected fields of ice, to which we saw no bounds towards the western part of our horizon.”
Signaling the other two ships to follow, he plowed on through the ice, and by night, when a snow blizzard was howling over the ice, they had progressed some 20 miles through the field, “describing our path all the way with bits of sheathing of the ship’s bottom. . . .”
The little squadron moved slowly on through the ice for nine days until at last it cleared near Anticosti Island in the wide Gulf of St. Lawrence. Then they were checked by fog and later by the wind veering to the west. It was not until May 6 that the Surprise frigate, sailing ahead of the others, came in sight of the gaunt towers of the besieged city. Fluttering at the head of the flagpole was a blue pennant over a Union Jack—the agreed signal that the town was still in British hands—and five guns roared a welcome from the walls. The captain of the Surprise ordered his gunners to acknowledge, and, as planned at that crisis council of war in the Chateau St. Louis in November, seven of the frigate’s cannon fired in reply.
The rebel army was still camped outside the town. It had been reinforced substantially, but the morale of the troops, ravaged by smallpox, was low. They had tried to fire the town with red-hot ball, shot from batteries set up on the far banks of both the St. Lawrence and the St. Charles. Later there had been an attempt to sail into the port a flaming fire ship, but it had burned out before it could damage any of the shipping.
By May Arnold, now a brigadier general, was in charge of Montreal. General David Wooster had taken personal command of the besiegers, but as the three British warships sailed into Quebec Harbor, he was about to be replaced by General John Thomas.
Until then Carleton had stubbornly resisted any temptation to attack from Quebec, but now that he had 200 more regulars and knew that thousands of reinforcements were on their way, he switched to the offensive. British troops marched out of the western gates onto the Plains of Abraham to “see what those mighty boasters were about,” as he reported scathingly to London. “They were found very busy in their preparations for retreat . . . the plains were soon cleared of those plunderers; all their artillery, military stores, etc., were abandoned. . . .”
Carleton led the pursuit, advancing down the bank of the St. Lawrence to Three Rivers, where he set up his temporary headquarters, sending on a small detachment to probe the rebels at Montreal. On both sides of the St. Lawrence the Americans were retreating.
On May 27 the first of the troop convoys arrived off Quebec, from Ireland. Six days later another, which had set off from Portsmouth, sailed up the river; on board one of the ships was Major General “Gentleman Johnny” Burgoyne, who had arrived to serve as second-in-command of the army under Carleton.
Captain Charles Douglas on the Isis was well prepared for the convoys. Pilots were sent aboard the ships at Quebec, and they passed on up the river to the assembly point off Three Rivers. A frigate was already standing by just below the narrows at the Berthier Islands, through which Carleton had made his night escape in November, to guide the transports through the dangerous rocky channel when the commander ordered them forward.
By then Carleton, who had returned to Quebec, had learned from a New York newspaper that Brigadier General John Sullivan was marching with six regiments to rally the rebels and mount an opposition to the British advance in Canada.
At three o’clock in the morning of June 8, Captain Henry Harvey on the Martin sloop, anchored at the entrance to Lake St. Peter, was awakened with news brought by a Canadian canoe that a large force of rebels had crossed the river in bateaux, had landed at Pointe-du-lac on the north shore and was now advancing through the woods to attack Three Rivers.
Most of the newly arrived British troops were still on board the transports anchored in the river near the town, so hurriedly, they were rushed ashore. The soldiers in the town had already been alarmed. Men were forming in their units; guns were being manhandled into position.
The clash in the woods was brief. At five o’clock in the morning the rebels advanced in three columns along the woodland paths—into the fire of the waiting British cannon. They broke and made for their boats. While 1,200 soldiers under Brigadier Simon Fraser tried to cut them off by marching up the riverbank, the Martin sailed ahead, firing on the retreating men. But the wind dropped; the frigate was checked, and the rebels escaped. Twenty-four hours later the British captured General William Thompson hiding in a swamp.
It was the last halt to the British advance. The transports sailed through the narrows between the Berthier Islands, and while one small force moved on up the St. Lawrence to recover Montreal, the main army under General Burgoyne advanced up the Richelieu River to Chambly, where the rebel schooners at the foot of the rapids were burning, and on to a flaming St. Johns, set alight by the retreating Americans just before the British entered.
The rebels fell back to the Isle aux Noix at the entrance to the Richelieu, and then sailed south along Lake Champlain, from which, just over a year before, Benedict Arnold and Ethan Allen had led the first raids into Canada.
For the time being, Burgoyne could not follow, for while the rebels had armed vessels on the lake, all the British ships were below the rapids at Chambly.
Carleton had anticipated this and saw it only as a temporary check. The wealth of Britain and the sheer logistics of war that, given time, it could deploy were now available to him. There were more than eighty British ships on the St. Lawrence above Three Rivers, an enormous source of manpower and equipment.
Even so, assembling enough vessels at the water level of Lake Champlain to transport the army and fight the rebels was a mammoth operation. No fewer than 560 bateaux and 25 longboats were hauled up as far as possible through the rapids, then heaved through the forest on rollers by teams of horses. Elaborate plans were formed to drag two 12-gun schooners from the water at Chambly up the rugged 12-mile forest hill track, broken at many points by slender bridge crossings over waterfalls, to St. Johns. It was an ambitious project, and it failed. The road began to crumble under the great weight of the Maria, the first schooner they tried to move.
Captain Douglas, who was in charge of the operation, accepted his engineers’ advice and ordered the schooners to be broken down into sections and reassembled on the stocks at St. Johns, where two other vessels were already under construction. At Quebec, the captain had discovered a 180-ton ship was being built. He commandeered this, had it broken down in sections like the others and sent it down in a convoy of longboats taken from the transports.
Throughout the summer, in addition to the drivers of hundreds of horses, more than 700 sailors, as well as chain gangs of Canadian prisoners working in shackles, took part in this gigantic transport operation. At the end, the British had a fleet of five major vessels—one an 18-gun sloop—and twenty-four gunboats, backed up by a supply flotilla.
By then the rebels had also been busy preparing for the inevitable confrontation on the lake. They did not have the resources of the British, but they had plenty of timber. And they had Arnold driving them on. They, too, were constructing a fleet to challenge the passage of the British on the lake.
It was October before the British were ready to sail from the Richelieu. By then Howe had launched a major offensive with an army of 35,000 men against Washington in New York.