Live-blogging the siege of Quebec+250 #49

Monday, August 20, 1759: The diarist Foligné reports details still buzzing in the French camp about Brigadier Murray’s Deschambault raid of August 18.

M. de Bougainville arrived there as the enemy was re-embarking with the captured livestock. Our cavalry fired on the rear guard and took three prisoners, who told them that one of our people from the parish of Lotbinière had shown the enemy where our stores were and served them as guide, for a payment of twenty guineas. The same man guided them in the south part of the community where he pointed out the cached goods of the people and the women’s hiding places in the woods. The burnings cost Father Gabriel a chest containing all his books. Compared to how Recollets usually behave, he was most upset.

Knox: “On the 20th the Louisbourg Grenadiers [not really a Louisbourg force, but an elite corps that had been drawn from the best troops in the army assembled there the previous year] began their March down the main Land of Quebec, in order to burn and destroy all the houses on that Side.” Wolfe had written earlier, “It is to very little purpose to withhold the rod, seeing they are incorrigible. They have had Indians on the Isle of Orleans and have scalped four sailors very lately.”