aux Oeufs and adjacent reefs off the north
shore. About seven hundred soldiers, including twenty-nine officers, and
in addition perhaps two hundred sailors, were lost on that awful night.

The disaster was not overwhelming and Walker might have gone on and
captured Quebec. He had not lost a single war-ship and he had still some
eleven thousand men. General Hill might have stiffened the back of the
forlorn Admiral, but Hill himself was no better. Vetch spoke for going
on. He knew the St. Lawrence waters for he had been at Quebec and had
actually charted a part of the river and was more familiar with it, he
believed, than were the Canadians themselves. What pilots there were
declared, however, that to go on was impossible and the helpless
captains of the ships were of opinion that, with the warning of such a
disaster, they could not disregard this counsel. Though the character
of the English is such that usually a reverse serves to stiffen their
backs, in this case it was not so. A council of war yielded to the panic
of the hour and the great fleet turned homeward. Soon it was gathered
in what is now Sydney harbor in Cape Breton. From here the New England
ships went home and Walker sailed for England. At Spithead the Edgar,
the flag-ship, blew up and all on board perished. Walker was on shore
at the time. So far was he from being disgraced that he was given a
new command. Later, when the Whigs came in, he was dismissed from the
service, less, it seems, in blame for the disaster than for his Tory
opinions. It is not an unusual irony of life that Vetch, the one wholly
efficient leader in the expedition, ended his days in a debtor's prison.

Quebec had shivered before a menace, the greatest in its history.
Through the long months of the summer of 1711 there had been prayer and
fasting to avert the danger. Apparently trading ships had deserted the
lower St. Lawrence in alarm, for no word had arrived at Quebec of the
approach of Walker's fleet. Nor had the great disaster been witnessed by
any onlookers. The island where it occurred was then and still remains
desert. Up to the middle of October, nearly two months after the
disaster, the watchers at Quebec feared that they might see any day a
British fleet rounding the head of the Island of Orleans. On the 19th of
October the first news of the disaster arrived and then it was easy
for Quebec to believe that God had struck the English wretches with a
terrible vengeance. Three tho