Memoirs of the Siege of Quebec and Total Reduction of Canada, by John Johnson, Clerk and Quarter-master Sergeant to the Fifty-eighth Regiment. A manuscript of 176 pages, written when Johnson was a pensioner at Chelsea (England). The handwriting is exceedingly neat and clear; and the style, though often grandiloquent, is creditable to a writer in his station. This curious production was found among the papers of Thomas McDonough, Esq., formerly British Consul at Boston, and is in possession of his grandson, my relative, George Francis Parkman, Esq., who, by inquiries at the Chelsea Hospital, learned that Johnson was still living in 1802.
I have read and collated with extreme care all the above authorities, with others which need not be mentioned.
Among several manuscript maps and plans showing the operations of the siege may be mentioned one entitled, Plan of the Town and Basin of Quebec and Part of the Adjacent Country, shewing the principal Encampments and Works of the British Army commanded by Major Genl. Wolfe, and those of the French Army by Lieut. Genl. the Marquis of Montcalm. It is the work of three engineers of Wolfe's army, and is on a scale of eight hundred feet to an inch. A fac-simile from the original in possession of the Royal Engineers is before me.
Among the "King's Maps," British Museum (CXIX. 27), is a very large colored plan of operations at Quebec in 1759, 1760, superbly executed in minute detail.
[Appendix J.]
Chapter XXVIII. Fall of Quebec.
Death and Burial of Montcalm.—Johnstone, who had every means of knowing the facts, says that Montcalm was carried after his wound to the house of the surgeon Arnoux. Yet it is not quite certain that he died there. According to Knox, his death took place at the General Hospital; according to the modern author of the Ursulines de Québec, at the Château St.-Louis. But the General Hospital was a mile out of the town, and in momentary danger of capture by the English; while the Château had been made untenable by the batteries of Point Levi, being immediately exposed to their fire. Neither of these places was one to which the dying general was likely to be removed, and it is probable that he was suffered to die in peace at the house of the surgeon.
It has been said that the story of the burial of Montcalm in a grave partially formed by the explosion of a bomb, rests only on the assertion in his epitaph, composed in 1761 by the Academy of Inscriptions at the instance of Bougainville. There is, however, other evidence of the fact. The naval captain Foligny, writing on the spot at the time of the burial, says in his Diary, under the date of September 14: "A huit heures du soir, dans l'église des Ursulines, fut enterré dans une fosse faite sous la chaire par le travail de la Bombe, M. le Marquis de Montcalm, décédé du matin à 4 heures après avoir reçu tous les Sacrements. Jamais Général n'avoit été plus aimé de sa troupe et plus universellement regretté. Il étoit d'un esprit supérieur, doux, gracieux, affable, familier à tout le monde, ce qui lui avoit fait gagner la confiance de toute la Colonie: requiescat in pace."
The author of Les Ursulines de Québec says: "Un des projectiles ayant fait une large ouverture dans le plancher de bas, on en profita pour creuser la fosse du général."