There were no such sea fights on the coasts of Canada, where the British were in overwhelming naval strength. But never was there a joint expedition which owed more to its fleet than the one that took Quebec this same year (1759). The fact that the battles were fought on the land, and that Wolfe and Montcalm both fell in the one which decided the fate of Quebec, has made us forget that sea-power had more to do with this and the other American campaigns than all the other forces put together. The army did magnificently; and without Wolfe's and the other armies the conquest could never have been made. But the point is this, that, while each little army was only a finger of the hand that drew the British sword in Canada, the fleet which brought the armies there and kept them going was part and parcel of the whole vast body of British sea-power united round the world.
Pitt planned to give French Canada the knockout blow in Empire Year. So, holding the extreme east and west at Louisbourg and Fort Duquesne, he sent a small force to cut the line of the Lakes at Niagara, a much larger one to cut into the line of the St. Lawrence from Lake Champlain, and the largest and strongest of all up the St. Lawrence to take Quebec, which, then as now, was the key of Canada. Niagara was taken; and the line of Lake Champlain was secured by Amherst, who, however, never got through to the St. Lawrence that year. But the great question was, who is to have the key? So we shall follow Saunders and Wolfe to Quebec.
Wolfe's little army of nine thousand men was really a landing party from Saunders' big fleet, which included nearly fifty men-of-war (almost a quarter of the whole Royal Navy) and well over two hundred transports and supply ships. The bluejackets on board the men-of-war and the merchant seamen on board the other ships each greatly outnumbered the men in Wolfe's army. In fact, the whole expedition was made up of three-quarters sea-power and only one-quarter land.
Admiral Durell, who had been left at Halifax over the winter, was too slow in getting the advance guard under way in time to cut off the twenty-three little vessels sent out from France to Montcalm in the spring. But this reinforcement was too small to make any real difference in the doom of Quebec when once British sea-power had sealed the St. Lawrence. Saunders took Wolfe's army and the main body of his own fleet up the great river in June: a hundred and forty-one vessels, all told, from the flagship _Neptune_ of ninety guns down to the smallest craft that carried supplies. It was a brave sight off the mouth of the Saguenay, where the deep-water estuary ends, to see the whole fleet, together at sunset, with its thousand white sails, in a crescent twenty miles long, a-gleam on the blue St. Lawrence.