The British Are Coming. Rick Atkinson

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СКАЧАТЬ and ninety loyal companions slipped through the shadows to a St. Lawrence wharf, tumbled onto the brig Gaspé and ten smaller vessels, then shoved off for Quebec. A witness described the departure as “the saddest funeral.” They had reached Sorel—less than halfway to their destination, at the mouth of the Richelieu—when opposing easterly winds and the sudden appearance of American shore batteries forced them to drop anchor to await a dark night and a following breeze before running the gantlet. “I shall try to retard the evil hour,” Carleton had written Lord Dartmouth, “though all my hopes of succor now begin to vanish.”

      Even becalmed in the middle of nowhere, Guy Carleton was a formidable enemy. One acquaintance called him “a man of ten thousand eyes … not to be taken unawares.” He had showed his contempt for the Americans by refusing to read Montgomery’s surrender demand in Montreal, instead ordering the town executioner to ritually tread on the paper before tossing it with tongs into the fireplace. At fifty-one, he was tall and straight, with thinning hair, bushy brows, and cheeks beginning to jowl; a biographer described his “enormous nose mounted like a geological formation in the middle of his rather shapely face.” Like Montgomery, he was of Anglo-Irish gentry, and also a third son. Commissioned in 1742, he had been named quartermaster general by his friend James Wolfe for the 1759 expedition that captured Quebec but cost General Wolfe his life. In his will, Wolfe left his books and a thousand pounds to Carleton, who had survived a head wound in that battle and would survive three more wounds in other scraps.

      He was quick-tempered, autocratic, humane, and secretive—“everything with him is mystery,” a British major observed. Another subordinate called him “one of the most distant, reserved men in the world; he has a rigid strictness in his manner, very unpleasing.… In time of danger he possesses a coolness and steadiness.” The king himself had praised Carleton, calling him “gallant & sensible” and noting that his “uncorruptness is universally acknowledged.” Appointed governor of Canada in 1768, he soon returned to England—in one of his fourteen Atlantic crossings—to advocate the bold, progressive reform that became known as the Quebec Act. During the four years needed to persuade Parliament, Carleton also met and married Maria Howard, an earl’s daughter almost thirty years his junior; she had been educated in Versailles, a useful pedigree when they returned to Canada together in late 1774.

      He found North America in turmoil, of course, with the fetid spirit of liberty threatening British sovereignty north and south. No sooner had his Quebec Act taken effect than Carleton declared martial law and sent Maria home, the better to battle American interlopers. If the Canadian clergy and affluent French seigneurs supported him and his reforms, the habitants were wary and the English merchants mostly hostile because of his disdain for democratic niceties. Before fleeing Montreal just ahead of Montgomery, Carleton wrote Dartmouth that his scheme to defend Canada had failed: Lake Champlain lost, the outposts at Chambly and St. Johns overrun, Montreal doomed, and the militia hopelessly inert because of “the stupid baseness of the Canadian peasantry.” No longer did Britain have certain military advantages that had helped conquer New France fifteen years earlier, notably logistics bases in New England and New York and thousands of armed American provincials fighting for the Crown; in fact, hundreds of Canadians—the “lower sort”—had now rallied to the rebel cause. When this dispatch reached London, a courtier concluded that Carleton was “one of those men who see affairs in the most unfavorable light.”

      By Wednesday night, November 15, Carleton saw little reason for optimism on the dark, swirling St. Lawrence. Gunfire from American cannons on both shores, as well as from a floating battery, swept the British vessels “in such a quantity all the soldiers left the deck,” a mariner reported. Frightened sailors refused to go aloft to loosen the sails. Pilots turned mutinous, the wind remained contrary, and the master of a British munitions ship carrying several tons of gunpowder vowed to surrender rather than be blown to flinders. A truce flag from Sorel brought another American ultimatum, and this time Carleton had no executioner’s fire tongs at hand. Colonel James Easton wrote:

      General Montgomery is in possession of the fortress Montreal.… Your own situation is rendered very disagreeable.… If you will resign your fleet to me immediately without destroying the effects on board, you and your men shall be used with due civility.

      Failure to comply would result in the squadron’s annihilation by 32-pounders, the Americans warned, though in truth they had no guns that large.

      The moment had arrived for desperate measures. On Thursday night, with help from Jean Baptiste Bouchette—a sloop captain known as the “Wild Pigeon” for his stealth and speed—Carleton disguised himself as a habitant in a tasseled wool cap, moccasins, and a blanket coat belted with a ceinture fléchée, the traditional peasant sash. Over the Gaspé’s rail he climbed, and into a waiting skiff with an orderly, an aide, and several crewmen. At Bouchette’s direction, they steered for the river’s narrow northern channel, shipping the muffled oars and paddling with cupped hands past American campfires and barking dogs for more than thirty miles to the trading town of Trois-Rivières. There an armed two-masted snow, the Fell, would carry him farther downstream.

      Behind them, their erstwhile comrades dumped most of the gunpowder and shot into the St. Lawrence, then struck their flags in surrender. Even without the powder, more spoils fell into American hands: 11 rivercraft, 760 barrels of flour, 675 barrels of beef, 8 chests of arms, entrenching tools, additional red coats, 200 pairs of shoes, and more than 100 prisoners, among them Brigadier General Richard Prescott. Carleton had again made good his escape, slipping into Fortress Quebec on November 19. “To the unspeakable joy of the friends of the government, & to the utter dismay of the abettors of sedition and rebellion, Gen. Carleton arrived,” a customs officer recorded. “We saw our salvation in his presence.”

      But as he stripped off his peasant disguise to reemerge as the king’s satrap in Canada, Carleton hardly felt like a savior. “We have so many enemies within,” he privately wrote Dartmouth from Château St. Louis, the governor’s palace. “I think our fate extremely doubtful, to say nothing worse.” Of even greater concern were enemies without. As a Quebec merchant had just written, “Intelligence has been received that one Arnold, with 1,500 woodsmen, marched from … New England the first of October on an expedition against this place. Their intention must be to enter the city by assault.”

      That was precisely Colonel Benedict Arnold’s intention. The former Connecticut apothecary, who had captured Ticonderoga in cahoots with the star-crossed Ethan Allen, was gathering strength twenty miles west of Quebec City, amid aspen and birch groves in Pointe-aux-Trembles, a riverine hamlet with a church, a nunnery, and a few farmhouses built of flint cobbles. His 675 emaciated men—less than two-thirds the number that had started north with him from Cambridge almost two months earlier—were recuperating from a grueling trek through the Maine wilderness, already lauded by one Canadian admirer as “an undertaking above the race of men in this debauched age.” The last miles along the St. Lawrence had been particularly painful. “Most of the soldiers were in constant misery,” a Connecticut private wrote, “as they were bare-footed, and the ground frozen and very uneven. We might have been tracked all the way by the blood from our shattered hoofs.” At Arnold’s request, all shoemakers around Pointe-aux-Trembles were now sewing moccasins for the men from badly tanned hides. Habitants brought hampers of roast beef, pork, potatoes, and turnips, despite a recent church edict that barred those disloyal to the Crown from receiving Holy Communion, baptism, or burial in sacred ground. Once his men regained their vigor and were reinforced by Montgomery’s troops from Montreal, Arnold planned to “knock up a dust with the garrison at Quebec, who are already panic-struck.” His only regret was not capturing the city already. “Had I been ten days sooner,” he wrote Washington on November 20, “Quebec must inevitably have fallen into our hands.”

      Even now, gaunt after his Maine anabasis, Arnold at thirty-four was muscular and graceful, with black hair, a swarthy complexion, and that long, beaky nose. He was adept at fencing, boxing, sailing, shooting, riding, and ice-skating. “There wasn’t any waste timber in СКАЧАТЬ