eant cannon.
Already Britain had almost driven France from the sea and these French
ships, which ascended the St. Lawrence, were few. Then, in 1759,
happened what had been long-expected and talked about. Signal fires
blazed at night on both sides of the St. Lawrence to give the alarm,
when not French, but British ships, sailed up the river, a huge fleet.
They stopped at Tadousac and then slowly and cautiously filed past
Malbaie. On a summer day the crowd of white sails scattered on the
surface of the river made an animated scene. In wonder our farmer and
his helpers watched the ships silently advance to their goal. There were
39 men-of-war, 10 auxiliaries, 70 transports and a multitude of smaller
craft carrying some 27,000 men; it was the mightiest array Britain had
ever sent across the ocean. New France was doomed.

The French fought bravely a campaign really hopeless. Montcalm massed
his chief force at Quebec and there awaited attack. In vain had he
appealed to France for further help; he was left unaided to struggle
with a foe who had command of the sea, whose fleet could pass up and
down before Quebec with the tide and keep the French guards for twenty
miles in constant nervous tension as to where a landing might be made.
Wolfe carried on his work relentlessly. He warned the Canadians that he
would ravage their villages if they did not remain neutral. Neutral it
was almost impossible for them to be for the French urged them in the
other direction. With stern rigour, Wolfe meted out to them his
punishment. He sent parties to burn houses and destroy crops and Malbaie
was not spared. On August 15th, 1759, Captain Gorham reported to Wolfe
that with 300 men, one half of them Rangers from the English colonies,
the other half Highlanders, he had devastated the north shore of the St.
Lawrence. The soldiers did their work thoroughly. From Baie St. Paul,
the last considerable village east of Quebec, they went on thirty miles
to Malbaie where they destroyed almost all of the houses. We do not know
whether the competent Dufour was still the farmer at Malbaie. But all
the fine pictures of better cattle, better pigs and sheep, better
farming, better fishing, ended with the applying of the British
soldiers' torch to the wooden buildings: much of the settlement went up
in smoke. Some of the cattle, pigs and sheep found their way perhaps to
Wolfe's commissariat. But a good many were left and no doubt they are
the ancestors of many o