alls of Quebec, than he resolved to prosecute the
fortifications of the place, which had been interrupted by the severity
of the winter; and the soldiers exerted themselves with incredible
alacrity, not only in labouring at the works, but also in the defence of
the town, before which the enemy had opened trenches on the very evening
of the battle. Three ships anchored at the Foulon below their camp; and
for several days they were employed in landing their cannon, mortars,
and ammunition. Meanwhile they worked incessantly at their trenches
before the town; and on the eleventh day of May, opened one
bomb-battery, and three batteries of cannon. Brigadier Murray made the
necessary dispositions to defend the place to the last extremity: he
raised two cavaliers, contrived some out-works, and planted the ramparts
with one hundred and thirty-two pieces of artillery, dragged thither
mostly by the soldiery. Though the enemy cannonaded the place with great
vivacity the first day, their fire soon slackened; and their batteries
were in a manner silenced by the superior fire of the garrison:
nevertheless, Quebec would in all probability have reverted to its
former owners, had a French fleet from Europe got the start of an
English squadron in sailing up the river.

THE ENEMIES SHIPPING DESTROYED.

Lord Colville had sailed from Halifax, with the fleet under his command,
on the twenty-second day of April; but was retarded in his passage by
thick fogs, contrary winds, and great shoals of ice floating down the
river. Commodore Swanton, who had sailed from England with a small
reinforcement, arrived about the beginning of May at the Isle of Bee, in
the river St. Laurence, where, with two ships, he purposed to wait for
the rest of his squadron, which had separated from him in the passage:
but one of these, the Lowestoffe, commanded by captain Deane, had
entered the harbour of Quebec on the ninth day of May, and communicated
to the governor the joyful news that the squadron was arrived in the
river. Commodore Swanton no sooner received intimation that Quebec was
besieged, than he sailed up the river with all possible expedition, and
on the fifteenth in the evening anchored above Point Levi. The brigadier
expressing an earnest desire that the French squadron above the town
might be removed, the commodore ordered captain Schomberg of the Diana,
and captain Deane of the Lowestoffe, to slip their cables early next
morning, and attack the