Levis rallied his army for one more effort and pressed the siege to the uttermost of his power. Murray had lost a thousand men and could now muster less than three thousand. Each side prepared to fight the other to the death. But both knew that the result would depend on the fleets. There had been no news from Europe since navigation closed; and hopes ran high among the besiegers that perhaps some friendly men-of-war might still be first; when of course Quebec would have to surrender at discretion, and Canada would certainly be saved for France if the half-expected peace would only follow soon.
Day after day all eyes, both French and British, looked seaward from the heights and walls; though fleets had never yet been known to come up the St Lawrence so early in the season. At last, on May 9, the tops of a man-of-war were sighted just beyond the Point of Levy. Either she or Quebec, or both, might have false colours flying. So neither besiegers nor besieged knew to which side she belonged. Nor did she know herself whether Quebec was French or British. Slowly she rounded into the harbour, her crew at quarters, her decks all cleared for action. She saluted with twenty-one guns and swung out her captain's barge. Then, for the first time, every one watching knew what she was; for the barge was heading straight in towards the town, and redcoats and bluejackets could see each other plainly. In a moment every British soldier who could stand had climbed the nearest wall and was cheering her to the echo; while the gunners showed their delight by loading and firing as fast as possible and making all the noise they could.
But one ship was not enough to turn the scale; and Levis redoubled his efforts. On the night of the 15th French hopes suddenly flared up all through the camp when the word flew round that three strange men-of-war just reported down off Beauport were the vanguard of a great French fleet. But daylight showed them to be British, and British bent on immediate and vigorous attack. Two of these frigates made straight for the French flotilla, which fled in wild confusion, covered by the undaunted Vauquelin in the Atalante, which fought a gallant rearguard action all the twenty miles to Pointe-aux-Trembles, where she was driven ashore and forced to strike her colours, after another, and still more desperate, resistance of over two hours. That night Levis raised the siege in despair and retired on Montreal. Next morning Lord Colville arrived with the main body of the fleet, having made the earliest ascent of the St Lawrence ever known to naval history, before that time or since.
Then came the final scene of all this moving drama. Step by step overpowering British forces closed in on the doomed and dwindling army of New France. They closed in from east and west and south, each one of their converging columns more than a match for all that was left of the French. Whichever way he looked, Levis could see no loophole of escape. There was nothing but certain defeat in front and on both flanks, and starvation in the rear. So when the advancing British met, all together, at the island of Montreal, he and his faithful regulars laid down their arms without dishonour, in the fully justifiable belief that no further use of them could possibly retrieve the great lost cause of France in Canada.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Wolfe is one of the great heroes in countless books of modern British history, by far the greatest hero in the many books about the fight for Canada, and the single hero of four biographies. It was more than a century after his triumphant death before the first of these appeared: The Life of Major-General James Wolfe by Robert Wright. A second Life of Wolfe appeared a generation later, this time in the form of a small volume by A. G. Bradley in the 'English Men of Action' series. The third and fourth biographies were both published in 1909, the year which marked the third jubilee of the Battle of the Plains. One of them, Edward Salmon's General Wolfe, devotes more than the usual perfunctory attention to the important influence of sea-power; but it is a sketch rather than a complete biography, and it is by no means free from error. The other is The Life and Letters of James Wolfe by Beckles Willson.
The histories written with the best knowledge of Wolfe's career in Canada are: the contemporary Journal of the Campaigns In North America by Captain John Knox, Parkman's Montcalm and Wolfe, and The Siege of Quebec and the Battle of the Plains of Abraham by A. G. Doughty and G. W. Parmelee. Knox's two very scarce quarto volumes have been edited by A. G. Doughty for the Champlain Society for republication in 1914. Parkman's work is always excellent. But he wrote before seeing some of the evidence so admirably revealed in Dr Doughty's six volumes, and, like the rest, he failed to understand the real value of the fleet.
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