First Salute - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [82]
The most significant feat of the “wonderful year” of 1759 was General Wolfe’s defeat of the French at Quebec, an indirect victory of the British sea power that Pitt had believed in and prepared as the instrument that would enable England finally to prevail over France in their centuries-old struggle for supremacy. Wolfe’s 9,000 troops were transported to Canada through the British control of the sea, and before they scaled the cliffs to the plains of Abraham the way had been opened by preliminary victories at Ticonderoga and Crown Point. Even at the cost of the loss of a hero, in General Wolfe’s death in the battle on the hilltop, the victory brought a decisive result, for it was followed by the occupation of Montreal, which in turn assured the British conquest of Canada. The French were thereby eliminated from a territory that had allowed them to dispute possession of America. Facing attack on Montreal from below and from behind by General Amherst’s forces coming from Lake Ontario, the Marquis de Vaudreuil, French Governor of Canada, in September, 1759, surrendered the Province of Quebec, or New France, to the English. French presence as a Catholic power and French collusion with the Iroquois, who were hostile to the settlers of the New England colonies, were always seen by both British and Americans as factors that would hold the Colonies loyal for the sake of British protection against the threat from the north. By one of the tricks that Fate likes to use to show the vanity of human expectation, the British by their own victory at Quebec and its removal of the Catholic threat gave the Americans the freedom for rebellion.
Although Rodney sailed in 1758 with the fleet under Admiral Boscawen that was sent against Louisburg, his vessel, the Dublin, was an unhealthy ship, with a crew laid low by an epidemic of fever. It was left behind at Halifax, with the men installed in sheds hastily erected on shore by the ship’s carpenters. Owing to the Dublin’s debility, Rodney missed the assault on the great French fortress whose capture opened the way to Quebec. He joined the victors just before the surrender and sailed home with them to England. He missed, too, in November, 1759, Admiral Hawke’s crushing of the French main fleet, intended for the invasion of England, in the Battle of Quiberon Bay, on the coast of Brittany. Called “the greatest victory since the Armada” by an unidentified enthusiast, it added more laurels to the “wonderful year.” Rodney was engaged at the time on a mission against another aspect of the invasion plan, commanding a squadron ordered to destroy by means of bomb ships a flotilla of flat-bottomed boats gathered at Le Havre as landing craft. These boats were 100 feet long, capable of carrying 400 men each. Promoted in May, 1759, to Rear Admiral of the Blue (blue, white and red were colors originally indicating squadron position in the line, and carrying minor progression in grade from blue through white to red), he took his 60-gun flagship, the Achilles, with four other gunships, five frigates and six bomb ketches to bombard the harbor of Le Havre and burn its boats. While Rodney received from the shore batteries a “very brisk fire indeed,” he inflicted damage on the French boats that left all masts gone and the “boats to all appearance broken-backed” and the port itself believed ruined as a naval arsenal for any further annoyance of Great Britain during the continuance