Empire: World History - 269. Colonising Canada: The Truth Behind ‘The Last of The Mohicans’ (Ep 3)

Episode Date: July 2, 2025

Is there any truth in the film 'The Last of The Mohicans' and how did the French and Indian War that it's based on change the make-up of Canada? Why was the Seven Years War the first truly global war? What is the connection between the forced removal of the Acadians in Canada and cajun spices? Anita and William are joined by Maya Jasanoff to discuss how the French and Indian War affected Canada.  ----------------- Empire Club: Become a member of the Empire Club to receive early access to miniseries, ad-free listening, early access to live show tickets, bonus episodes, book discounts, our exclusive newsletter, and access to our members’ chatroom on Discord! Head to empirepoduk.com to sign up. For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com. ----------------- Email: [e-mail] Instagram: @empirepoduk Blue Sky: @empirepoduk X: @empirepoduk Assistant Producer: Becki Hills Producer: Anouska Lewis Senior Producer: Callum Hill Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com. Magua placed his hands to his mouth and raised the fatal and appalling whoop. The scattered Indian started at the well-known cry. directly there arose such a yell along the plain and through the arches of the wood as seldom burst from human lips before. More than 2,000 raving savages broke through the forest at the signal and threw themselves across the fatal plain with instinctive alacrity. Death was everywhere and in his most terrific and disgusting aspects.

Resistance only served to inflame the murderers. who inflicted their furious blows long after their victims were beyond their power of resentment. It might have been ten minutes before the sisters stood riveted. It might have been ten minutes that the sisters had stood riveted to one spot, horror-stricken and nearly helpless. When the first blow was struck, their screaming companions had pressed them in a body, rendering flight impossible. And now that fear or death had scattered most, if not all, from around them,

They saw no avenue open, but such as conducted to the tomahawks of their foes. On every side arose shrieks, groans, exhortations and curses. At this moment, Alice caught a glimpse of the vast form of her father. Father, father, we are here, shrieked Alice as he passed at no great distance without appearing to heed them. Come to us, father, or we die. Do not adjust your sets. This is not book at bedtime, hijack. or a particularly bloody version of Jackanori, Jackagory, if you like.

It's just a Williams found this. Very good. Thank you. Found this deep-seated desire to be a storyteller, and you do it very well. Thank you very much. That's all right. That was an exit from that very famous massacre scene from James Fenimore Cooper's novel, The Last of the Mexicans, which was made into that terrific film by Daniel Day Lewis.

And I just forced you to watch. Me to watch. I've literally spent the last hour and a bit of my life watching people bleeding slowly to death under the Tomahawk. So thanks for that. It's one of my all-time favorite movies. I love it. Yes. This massacre that you might remember from the movie, if you haven't already been forced to watch it by William, watch it. It's immortalized in that film The Last of the Mohicans. And it is actually based on a real thing that happened. It's what the Americans still call the French and Indian wars when Huron Warriors ambushed an army of English redcoats after the surrender. of Fort William Henry in 1757. And this became one of the most famous incidents in 18th century history. It was a key moment of the global conflict between France and England, known as the Seven Years' War. And in this war, the French, with their Huron allies, lay siege to this place, Fort William Henry. And after a six-day bombardment, the British finally surrender. And the terms of surrender include the British being allowed to withdraw under French protection. But, but, but, but, and you heard from William's reading, a very big part here, the Huron warriors, despite the French efforts to control them, attack the

withdrawing column. And it leads to this really quite horrific massacre. The Huron kill and scalp many of the British soldiers and civilians, they take captives, and then they slaughter the sick and the wounded. And we're here to talk about this period of history because you can't really talk about Canada without talking about that conflict that shaped so much, not just of Europe the Seven Year War, but also of North America. We are delighted. to welcome back. Maya Jassanoff of Harvard University. Hello, welcome, Maya.

Hi there, thanks for having me back. And thank you so much for not being frightened by the first time. I have a lot of things to say about it. First of all, we should say that Maya, like Elita, this morning, and woke up without ever seeing this greatest of all movies. And unlike me, Maya didn't give in to your hectoring. Well, well done, Maya. Well, above all, I didn't give in to the undoubted appeals of Daniel Day Lewis,

which is the primary reason that I might tune in. I mean, just between you and me, quite dishy. Look, the reason that you're here, you've written this fabulous, fabulous book. Can I just show it to the class? Maya Jasanoff's Liberty's Exx, the loss of America and the remaking of the British Empire. And it's very much, this is the bedrock of what we're going to be talking about in this episode and the next. A spectacular, spectacular award-winning book, which I'm ashamed to say I had never read before this week. And I have loved it, Maya.

You always said it was your best book, and it is. It's absolutely fantastic. It's epic amounts of archival research, more than I think any of your other books is extraordinary. And now that you've read it, I feel I must go and watch the last of the Mohiko. No, don't. Don't. Just watch the clips. Put in Daniel Day Lewis running. You'll be sorted. Okay, so can we start off? I mean, I think, William, the idea is to maybe paint a big picture of what's going on in the 18th century. And particularly, if you could take us through, well, two things really, the lead up to the global seven-year war, but specifically, you know, the cameras down to what will become Canada, the north part of British possessions in North America. So we call it the seven-year's war in global history, but really it's part of what some historians would call the second hundred-year's war, because the whole of the 18th century really is a series of conflicts between chiefly Britain and France. and a somewhat shifting set of allies, which in the second half of the 18th century, sees France and Spain often together, and Britain and Protestant German powers together,

including Prussia. Prussia being the guys that have really got the whole kind of military thing going in an extraordinary way at this point. Prussia getting that particularly under the reign of their incredibly powerful, charismatic and important modernizing ruler Frederick the second. Frederick the Great. Another thing that's striking about this period is there are these very pivotal rulers in a bunch of places you'll end up with, of course, the Empress Catherine in Russia later in the 18th century. You have Frederick the Great. You have Louis XIV.

You have various important monarchs who are sort of changing the playing field. And Maria Teresa and Joseph II in Austria as well. But Frederick, the Great, important because of his revolution in warfare, which goes global? Absolutely, yeah. So he's very significant, and we can add, by the way, that as far as Britain is concerned, remember that this is a period where the monarchs of Britain are also the electors of Hanover. So George I, who becomes king in the early 18th century, comes from Hanover, is succeeded by his son George II, who's the monarch over the period that we're discussing right now. And as elector of Hanover, he has responsibilities to his German state. And his German state is very near that of Prussia and Frederick the second. And in the run

up to the Seven Years' War, you see an alliance being created between Great Britain Hanover and Prussia. And the German states in general are big sources of military manpower. American listeners will be familiar with the Hessians, who are brought from the state of Hesse as mercenaries, essentially by the British to fight in the American Revolution some years later. Take as to why you've got Britain and France facing off against each other in North America. First of all, why is that part of the world so important to them? And how do they find themselves in such conflict? So you've got in North America, basically, you have a continent whose future is very much in the balance.

And the lay of the land going up into the French and Indian War slash Seven Years' War is that you have the 13 colonies of British America strung along the east. eastern seaboard, but then to the west of them, essentially blocking any further expansion westward by these growing, burgeoning, heavily mercantile, but also land-hungry colonies of the coast, you have the expanse of what's called New France, which has been in French hands, French claims since the 16th century, really, and ranges from Hudson's Bay and from Newfoundland, up in the north, all the way down, the river valleys of the Ohio, to some extent, that's in contest, the Mississippi, down to the Gulf of Mexico and New Orleans in the south.

Just before I came and had dinner with you at Harvard, my last month, I'd been in Fonteniac, which I hadn't realized was a French possession as far down in the Mississippi on the outsides of St. Louis. So, yeah, I mean, some of the cities that still have versions of their French names in the United States that are part of New France are Detroit in the Great Lakes, which is a big area of conflict and contestation between Britain and France in the second half of the 18th century and the United States, and St. Louis, which is a gateway to the West and was for San Luis under the French. So the French have claimed to this huge amount of land, but the French have very few people living

in it. The population of New France in this period is in the five digits. you know, 75,000, something like that. Compared to what in the British territories? Compared to about one and a half million and growing pretty fast. Oh, really? To look at the map, you see what looks like, this big French expanse, claiming the continent, potential access all the way to the West if they want to push for it. But in reality, it's the coast and the rapidly growing colonies in British hands

that have the real energy and the economic power. Is that the imbalance, Maya, that leads the French to cooperate more closely with their Indian allies? In all these movies, like Last the Me, because you're always seeing a couple of French generals in their sort of posh European kit. And then you have all these sort of guys with Tom Hawks around them. Or is it? I mean, we just did a couple of episodes with Cartier and others and those who sort of follow them, you know, really making allegiances, you know, trying to set up shop with the micmac and the Wendat and saying, you know, we can work together. You know, we start with furs and then we can actually have some kind of coalition. Are they just better at dealing with the native population? What's the truth of this?

Both sides are doing this. And one of the exceptions that I would take to your opening with the last of the Mohicans... Yes, I should apologize for that very, very sort of Victorian reading and the references to savages and so on, exactly. Anyway, but I would say that one of the misconceptions, perhaps that's perpetrated by that is the idea that, you know, the French have these uniquely horrific Indian allies while the British are more upstanding, et cetera. In truth, I mean, you know, a lot of this land is, of course, it's really native land and they ought to have possession of it. And they're more powerful in many of these places. When you have 75,000 people scattered across a territory ranging from New Orleans to Quebec and beyond, this is really

tiny numbers of people. And so, of course, along the way, the white traders are heavily dependent on relations with Indians. And there's also various objectives. I mean, you have Jesuit priests who are interested in converting people. Tell us about them, because they're interesting. You mentioned when we were setting up a French movie. What was it called Black Rob? Yes, there's a good movie or an instructive movie about the Jesuits in New France in the 17th century called Black Robe. It was made, I think, just about a year or so before last of the Mohicans. And it gets into some of the interactions on the ground, and it includes, I think, a number of actors from indigenous peoples, and certainly on indigenous languages. So it's just something

I would recommend to any listeners who want to get. Something more serious than that. Yeah, maybe we could put it that way. But suffice to say, I mean, what I want to get across here is that if you're looking at, say, the Great Lakes in the 17th and early 18th centuries, You see Europeans trading, particularly the fur trade, in areas with indigenous peoples, Indians, or Native Americans. Either phrase is used widely. And both of these groups, British, French, you know, there are small numbers of people and they're very embedded in these communities. And in fact, the historian Richard White has influential written about this time and place is what he calls a middle ground, a place where, in fact, there are ways in which white and Indian, and communities managed to create a sort of modus Vivendi together that will later be shattered

by much more aggressive claims to land that are being pursued particularly by colonists, but are also thrown into a dispute by increasingly high-level war between the respective governments of Britain and France. Maya, one other thing I think we should stress, which I learned from you, I remember, when we were talking, what you last had you on the show, is how much rich. the Caribbean is at this point than the North American continent, because we today obviously think that America is the big economy and the Caribbean is a small fry. But the opposite is true at this period, isn't it? All of the action is further south. I mean, the truth of the matter is that the biggest power in the Americas at that time is Spain, which has new Spain, it has

new Granada, it has Peru. I mean, it has huge claims. And of course, Portugal, with Brazil, and the Caribbean Islands, which are rapidly growing into huge industrial centers, really, of sugar production on the backs of millions of imported enslaved Africans to do the work. And the economy of Northern New England, part of New France, is very much bound up with that sugar economy because it's part of what we call the Triangle Trade, where you have trade in enslaved captives coming across the Atlantic from Africa, going to work on the sugar plantations. Then you have the byproducts of sugar production, rum, molasses, sugar itself being brought into the colonies and into, of course, Europe itself. And then you have the big product coming from the Northern Atlantic, namely cod,

salted, dried, packed fish, which is set down to the Caribbean as a very protein-rich food source for the enslaved laborers. That sort of supply belt thing is just so haunting because you need to feed the slaves, so you need to take some land, so you need to take it from people and you need to do more enslaving. I just wanted to turn back to the idea

that I had in my head and just, you know, by all means, shoot it down. We did an episode where we talked a lot about Samuel de Chamblerc, who is the man who founded Quebec, or, you know, New France, the very seed of it. And he did write about this vision that he had of this utopia, of the two peoples of France and the Indians, you know, becoming one

working together as one having this sort of shared identity and community. How long after Champlain's death does that actually survive? Or does it, you know, does it die with him? Or does it, you know, do the French have a better attitude to indigenous people than the Brits do, say, when they turn up? I'm very reluctant to get into these games of, you know, who's better and who's worse in certain ways. Oh, Maya. No fun. Spoil sport. I think that what we have to think about here are power dynamics and end goals and numerical balances and all of that. Not for nothing.

Are you a double professor at Harvard? What we can see, I think, very much are, as it were, periods of greater and lesser interaction and tolerance, if you will, with Native things, right? I totally bow to your professored him. I do, I really, I haven't read sort of, you know, English sources saying we have met a, you know, great noble people that I think we can, you know, sort of become a melded new country. Well, I think the big, I think the big example to put forward. And I don't want to discount the exceptional qualities of Champlain. I mean, similarly, you can look in the Spanish Empire and you see someone like Bartola Mades Casas, who has an unbelievably seeming to us sort of fresh tolerant attitude toward indigenous peoples. I'm very much laments the brutality. of the conquistadors. I mean, there are these figures definitely. But what I would say, for example, in the middle of the 18th century in British, North America, is that the relationships

formed between the colonists and say the what was then called the Iroquois, and we would now refer to as the Hauden Ashani Confederacy, is incredibly important and real. And this is a group of confederated tribes or nations in what is now sort of central New York State, ranging west. Six Nations, as they're called, and they form together a Confederacy, which is quite powerful, which then creates a kind of alliance with the British, which they think of as the covenant chain. And this is a real alliance, I would say. And there is an example. One of your colleagues was writing, I remember, a book on the Mohawk Barronet. Will you tell us quickly about him?

Well, I think that the figure who's important here and will be important in, I mean, in fact he's important in the events, around Fort William Henry is a man called William Johnson. William Johnson is of Irish origin, moves to North America, as many ambitious men from the fringes of the British Isles, I'm sure some of Willie's ancestors among them. Always on the wrong side, my lot. They come and they're eager to get colonial offices, and whether it's in the military or civil administration. So William Johnson ends up settling in central New York State and becomes the commissioner or superintendent of Indian Affairs, so-called. And his job is basically to create and nurture the alliance between the Haudanishani and the British. And he even, you know, is one of many, again of these men in sort of imperial frontier situations very much like his counterparts of the East India Company.

this time, in that he forms intimate relations with a number of indigenous women, but in particular one called Molly Brandt, who is a very significant figure in her Mohawk community. And the two of them lived together for many years, have a lot of children. And Molly and her brother Joseph will be very significant players in the American Revolution, actually, and in maintaining the alliance between the Mohawks and the British in that conflict. Now, Maya, the outbreak of the French and Indian Wars, which we call 70-year-war, actually involves no lesser character than George Washington with a whole troop of...

Are they Huron? Who's he with? Or Mingo Nation. And they ambush a French detachment under Joseph Coulon de Jumonville. And that is one of the things that kicks off the whole global conflict, isn't it? Washington, at that time, he's in his early 20s, and he's been trained as a surveyor in colonial Virginia, And he joins the Virginia kind of militia. His elder brother, Lawrence, as well as the governor of Colonial Virginia at that time,

are both speculators in a company called the Ohio Company, which is one of these kind of land speculation companies eager to get in on what they perceive of as the very rich lands beyond the northwest frontier. It's now the Ohio Valley. And I think that in most American listeners' minds, the idea that this is the kind of wild northwest frontier will sound quite funny, but that's what it is in that period. And a lot of what happens in colonial conflicts in North America in those 1750, 6070s on up until really the War of 1812 concerns eager colonial subjects who want to push west

when a metropolitan government maybe feels a little bit differently about it. So we have to see this as very much a colony's first operation where the governor of Virginia, and others who are into getting land in the Ohio Valley are eager to send their men out there and lay claim to land which the French are also busily claiming. The French have a whole series of forts that they're building. And it's in one of these expeditions that George Washington, who's sent off to threaten a French fortification

in the Ohio River Valley, ends up ambushing, as you say, a group of French soldiers. The numbers in these encounters are tiny, we have to say. I mean, they're in the dozens or something. And this skirmish and its follow-up acts, which include a much larger and more kind of put-together expedition under the command of the British General Braddock the following year. We'll move on to Braddock next, so save Braddock up. Yeah, so this skirmish ends up being what many people recognize as the first skirmish in the so-called French and Indian War taking place in 1754. I do just want to make one little point as well that the French and Indian War, as it's called in North America, is very much sort of, what would I say, synonymous with the Seven Years War as it erupts in Europe. But we do need to change the dates on it a little bit in the same way that if you look at, say, World War II from the perspective of Asia, you might tell the story really starting in, say, 1937 with the Japanese invasions of Manchuria.

Similarly, this is a conflict which in its seven years war guise, if you want to put that label, looks very much like a conflict, you know, between all of these European princes on battlefields and Germany and whatever. But really, we have to see it as a global conflict that's starting earlier and starting in North America with this ongoing competition for power between Britain and France. I mean, should we be calling it actually the first World War I? You know, World War I because it is a global, as you say, a global conflict. You know, we missed a bit. Churchill himself called it the first global war, the first world war.

And it absolutely was. It would go on to encompass really every continent that the British and French and Spanish empires had an interest and would be a huge global conflagration. We left Washington with his ambush without really explaining why he was there. So as I understand it, it's access to the land beyond Pennsylvania that the English and the French are really competing over. Do you want to just take us that for a second, Maya? Yeah, so you have this series of river valleys that are a whole sort of river system that defines the kind of what we would call now of the Midwest up to the Mississippi being the big one in the U.S. And the Ohio River is the most important of those.

It runs through western Pennsylvania, forms the southern edge of the state of Ohio now, and ultimately joins up with the bigger river systems of the Mississippi. And so it's really that area on the western frontiers of Virginia, of Pennsylvania that are in play in this period. And why not, as far as the columnists are concerned, right? I mean, it's the extension of what they already are trying to have in parts further east. It's mountainous. I mean, we're getting into the Appalachian mountains here, and it's heavily wooded. But you get into a river valley, and of course it's very lush, potential agricultural land. The other thing I want to hide, highlight is that in the British imagination at this time, British ideas of wealth, I mean, land is the essence of it, right? Land is what undergirds the great, we call them landed estates of the British Isles, the big aristocratic titles. So for the British colonists, these sort of ambitious high-placed socially people like the governor of Virginia or like the Washington family, which are slaveholding, plantation-owning people, having big land of estates is. is very much part of their vision of what a wealthy future for themselves is going to look like. Well, I mean, if anyone's interested in digging deep into this, I'll just remind you that we did do an American series, America's Empire, and we did the Founding Fathers, and there is a huge, whopping great, big fat episode on Washington,

and so the minutiae of all of this time and his interest and his, you know, sort of extracurricular activities that made him rather rich. It is episode 151 of our podcast. We are going to take a break, but we ought to sort of circle back to where we began, which was that reading from William. And we should talk about Braddock, and we should talk about Fort William Henry and the subsequent massacre that we started with. So tell us, first of all, you mentioned Braddock. Who is Braddock, and why is he important?

Braddock is the British general of the official British army. We're talking here of the formal army, the regulars, again, supplemented. by these colonial militias, you know, Virginia, Rangers, and Light Horse, and these sorts of things, in addition. So Braddock, I highlight this because, you know, this is another thing that comes up a lot in these conflicts, is there's a combination of the British regulars and then various colonial militias.

And if you want to come up with an analogy in India, say you have the East India Company Army versus the British, or alongside the British regulars, one of the parts of the story of India in the first part of the 19th century is the presence of British regulars actually increases a great deal and the relative importance of the East India Company army goes down. Anyway, Braddock is a British regular military officer and he is dispatched after these whatever you want to call them, skirmishes, ambushes, encounters. He is dispatched on a proper expedition into the Ohio country against a, of, you know, and countries, um, he is dispatched on a proper expedition,

British Ford called Fort Duquesne. Washington is also with Braddock at this point, isn't he? He's on both trips. He is. Washington is promoted at this point to Lieutenant Colonel. He's serving under Braddock. He's like an aide-to-camp, something like that. And they go marching up toward Fort Duquesne, which is at a river confluence, which is today, the city of Pittsburgh. At this time, 1755, this is a French fort. And it's again one of a string of forts that run down from sort of Lake Erie down further in the Ohio River Valley and part of that big French chain going from Quebec down to St. Louis and South down the Mississippi. And the British are very eager to take over these forts and take over that land. So Braddock leads an expedition and goes marching up this again heavily forested, rather massive. mountainous terrain against the French, and in it, thinking he's going to win easily and then go on and keep on marching up and go up into the Great Lakes and all of that, he is in fact badly defeated.

Well, I mean, there's a misplaced sort of arrogance that the French don't know how to fight and that they're lazy and that they won't put up much resistance. I mean, you know, since my in-depth research into Last of the Mexicans, I just wanted to quote one phrase, which actually you do see a lot in the source material at the time, which is a huge underestimation of the French by the British. They're not fighters. And particularly the French militias who turn out to be rather good at all this. Yeah, and they're

ill-equipped. Their supply lines don't work. But in last of the Mexicans, just before the massacre takes place, you've got this commanding officer saying you don't need to worry about the French, there's no problem, because they've got this Latinus voluptuousness which gets in that way.

I just wrote it down. I thought that's fantastic. Judging by that reading we did, that's probably the source material. Well, I mean, the thing is, they are wrong because the French do beat them back. And why do they beat them back? Because this is the underestimation of their capability? Or is it that the British are just, you know, sort of in equipped to fight in those terrains? What happens? Why do the French do so well? I mean, I think one thing I want to emphasize, I'm not a military historian, but I would just say that, you know, all of these encounters, they're again between really quite small numbers of people. I mean, you know, a couple of thousands for Browell.

And that constitutes the big army. And there's always this thing, isn't there, with the British at this period. They always start slow. The British military is quite a small force. We always assume that the British in the 18th century are. It's a few thousand under Braddock. But, you know, all of these are happening. And again, these heavily wooded areas far from anything you could consider to be a supply post.

You know, the British are good and they get even better at moving things. around by ship and by sea and then, you know, provisioning and moving troops and doing all these things. You're very far from any kind of coast. And the French, again, remember, their strength is inland. The French have the, you know, river valleys, and they are well established in these places. And the British are sort of marching further and further away from their centers of power toward the French centers of power. And again, I'm sure you could get a military historian on who would have much more expert things to say about the tactics of the fighting methods. But what you're saying, I mean, it's, you know, one broken supply line will make all the

difference. The other thing I would say is that the British are very accustomed to this kind of open field fighting, right? I mean, they want to go, they want to set up, they want to line up their troops and have them face the other troops and then go at it, right? Almost square. Yeah, exactly. And they're good at that, and that's what they're used to, and that's how the European battles are fought. But in North America, that is not how you generally do that. For example, I remember a children's book I had. I think it was called something like, Meet George Washington. And it was telling us all about George Washington's adventures as a young man. And I remember there was an illustration in it of a soldier with his back against a tree,

kind of dressed up in camouflage, holding a gun. And, you know, the idea of this is that the way that you fight in these terrains successfully is to adopt more of these kinds of what we might consider, I don't know, guerrilla tactics or something like that. And not to wear a bright red coat. Well, the word camouflage is a French word, right? So, you know, you just couldn't think about it maybe as a little bit of a difference and familiarity with the terrain and use of more scouts and better ways and, you know, this kind of thing.

Just before we take a break, tell us your version, because I know that you disapprove of the but not only the language used by last of the Mexicans, but also. its depiction of that ambush. It was a far smaller and less exceptional massacre than British propaganda made it into. I would just say that that description is intended to conjure up ideas of exceptional native savagery, which have all kinds of things to tell us about American attitudes about indigenous peoples, and much less to tell us about the nature of conflict in the Etudes Sanctuary. Well, on that admonishment, I'll take a break. And join us after the break.

Well, there will not be a reading in sight, but we'll get into some of the people. I don't think mine's going to be watching the last week as any time soon, even with Daniel Day Lewis's bare chest. Literally never going to get that hour of my life back. Anyway, join us in a moment. Welcome back. So after two dismal years, British luck is turning by the year 1758. You've got a stronger government at home headed as Maya was turning us by William Pitt, for whom Pittsburgh is named. we're learning things every day, along with better generals, stronger finances, and all of these

things together are beginning to count. So Pitt lavishly subsidises the colonies. He induces them to provide crucial assistance in troops and supplies for the army and fleet. He sends across the ocean. The Royal Navy had kept the French Navy tied up at the docks in port in France, and so, you know, there is some space for damage to be done. And this is kind of the point. backdrop for the extraordinary story of James Wolfe. Now, first of all, give us a little pen portrait of the man, James Wolfe, and why we should know about him. So James Wolfe is a career professional military officer. He has already served in the previous war, the War of the Austrian succession in the 1740s, and he'd been a garrison commander in the Scottish Highlands, which of course is also a place

of some military conflict. As you will know, William, in the 1740s. He is, again, so many of these people are one of these Anglo-Irish commanders. He's a young, ambitious commander who is very much on the make. And his appointment to a command in North America is going to be the making of him, and he absolutely intends to make the most of it. So the British sent across this, amphibious force. They participate in the siege of Lewisburg, which is of a huge French fort. I mean, the size of this fleet is significant. You know, you've got sort of James Wolfe commanding, what is it, 8,500 men on this fleet, which is, which is a lot. And I just, one thing to add about him, you know, if you met him in the street, you may not be that impressed by

Wolf, because the descriptions of him seem to portray a quite a sickly sort of, you know, weakling of a man who, you know, the kind of man you imagine would have rather the limp handshake. That was the general impression of him even at the time, wasn't it, Meyer? Absolutely. He was understood as this kind of, you know, ambitious, neurotic, like, slightly frail kind of character. Basically describing Woody Allen. He's Woody Allen in battle. Yes. As I tell my students, he had the kind of mentality, you know, the kind of mentality that would make him very much a kind of person who would want to get into Harvard.

and then Excel once he got there. I mean, I think he was very sort of ambitious for success. And so this big British fleet goes across. They successfully lay siege to a large French fort, which essentially guards the mouth of the St. Lawrence River. And from there, the plan is that they will go sailing down the St. Lawrence and take control of the capital of New France, namely of the city of Quebec.

So this is a big operation, and it shows the British doing something which they're very good at and is responsible for a lot of their military success in the decades to come. And that is these joint operations, amphibious operations where they're able to move troops well, they can position them and they can land them and then the troops can go and wreak damage on land. And by the way, what is one of the great sources of naval timber for the British, particularly for the masks? It is the white pines that grow with lush profusion in the territories of formerly New France, soon to be increasingly British North America. In any event, they successfully make their way down the St. Lawrence River. I should add, there's a whole sort of side story, which I think we should talk. about which deals with the French-speaking inhabitants of part of Nova Scotia in this period, which end up getting expelled and in a real sort of ethnic cleansing operation.

Which you write about very movingly in your liberties exiles. Yeah, there's a real sort of ethnic cleansing operation of French-speaking colonists from Nova Scotia in this period. I'd never read about that before. It's a horrific story. Yeah, so how do they make the move, Maya? just give us an insight into how they chase them out. I'm going to give you one little twist going back,

which is that we talked about New France versus the 13 colonies of North America. Well, in the end of one of the earlier wars in this region, the British get possession of a large chunk of present-day Nova Scotia. And this has been part of New France, up until 1713, when the British get it, and a lot of the people living there are French-speaking Catholic. and they're known as Acadians, because this province of New France is called Akkadia.

The Acadians go about doing their business. The people, particularly from the New England's colony of Massachusetts, end up moving up into this region. There's a very, very profitable fishing industry, as we've already touched on. But at the time of the renewed conflict in the 1750s, the presence of these French-speaking colonists in really British Nova Scotia becomes increasingly troublesome to the British, and they end up getting cleared out, very much like the Highlanders from Scotland in very much the same period. Loaded into prisons and then shipped off on both. They are systematically rounded up by British military officers, Wolf is part of this, and they are carried away. Men, women and children, and entire people.

And often separated women and children from their men. It's a straight up ethnic cleansing operation. And a number of them end up moving further south into present-day Maine. Many Americans will be familiar perhaps with Acadia National Park. It's the same name, of course, Acadia there. And to this day, there's French-speaking communities even, you know, tucked away in parts of Maine. but above all, their best known emigration takes some of them to New Orleans,

where Acadian gets shortened into the term Cajun, and the descendants of these Acadians become the Cajuns of Cajuns. I didn't know that. Lime. Gosh. So that's a sort of side plot happening here. Just you have to wait for one second while our minds are blown. But another fact, you casually throw on the table.

Okay, this is extraordinary. Thank you. Do carry on. Okay. So back to that's 1758. They've got Lewisburg, Louisburg, and they move on down the St. Lawrence River. Then Wolf is charged with attacking the city of Quebec. Now, oh, one other little side thing.

You know, I've been stressing the smallness of numbers about a lot of this. One of the consequences of that is that you see all of the same people kind of recurring. in these things. So, for example, on Braddock's campaign, we have George Washington, right? We also have Thomas Gage, who ends up being the commander-in-chief of the British forces in Boston at the beginning of the American Revolution. And they're both, you know, in Braddock's expedition in 1755. What do we have in the surveying of the St. Lawrence River and its entry point? It's James Cook turns up, doesn't he? Exactly. James Cook, who will go on here. James Cook, who had been a merchant Mariner, joins the British Navy, will end up being the guy who is sent off on this huge

expedition to the South Pacific. He charts the entry points to the St. Lawrence River, and will then go on to do this huge charting expedition of the South Pacific, which will be the sort of warm up for the British colonization of Australia in the 1780s. Anyway, they're moving on down the river. They end up outside Quebec, but then they have... a real challenge. Wolf has a real challenge, which is that Quebec is situated on a river, on the St. Lawrence River, but it's high up cliffs, and it's hard to figure out kind of how to attack this city. So they arrived there at the beginning of the summer of 1759, and Wolf's job is to figure out how to attack the city, and he tries various things. They have conflicts of different

points kind of around the city. They do quite a lot of slash and burn around about about, did they? A lot of the French applicants can attack. And the effort here is, of course, again, to try to cut off supply and so on. And the French commander adopts a maddeningly

successful strategy, which is that he refuses to come out and engage. And it's maddeningly successful because it means that Wolf can't take the city, right? I mean, if the army is still staying in there, he can't do anything about it. The best he can do is kind of get the little things around the edges and try to

whittle away from the outside. But he lacks any obvious way to get the city itself. He tries to persuade the civilians to come out and turn on the commanders and, you know, all of this kind of thing. But none of it really works. And so as he's sitting there, you know, the months go on. It's hot. It's sticky. They're wearing the red little coats, you know, sitting in the in the St. Lawrence River, in, you know, mosquito filled and all of that in 1759. And Wolf knows, look, I mean, time is running. out. If he doesn't get this thing done by the autumn, this is going to fizzle. And so he decides to do something quite daring, really, and indicative of his rather brilliant neurotic temperament of sort of thinking it through and working it out and then coming up with a real stroke of genius

if it works and terrible risk if it doesn't. And that is to try to scale up the cliffs in the dead of night. And rather than attacking the city, which has these big fortified walls kind of facing the river, to come up around the back, as it were, onto the open plains that are behind the city, and then engage in one of these much more sort of open field type of confrontations that the British are used to and like. But it does involve a complicated river crossing, climbing up, fainting so that the French don't know that they're coming. But they're climbing up. Let's not just throw that. away, it is a sheer cliff face. I mean, they're climbing up. You have to kind of repel up the cliffs.

And you meanwhile have to, of course, pretend. I mean, you have to pretend to the French that you're not doing it. Because, you know, obviously when you're coming up, you know, anyone who's above can just like shoot down on you and you're really done for, right? So, pebbles at you, you're going to come down. Yeah. So they have to, again, they have to do all of these kind of, you know, duplicitous things to make it seem that they're doing something other than what they are. And so in the dead of night, you know, they end up scrabbling up the cliffs in, you know, in the middle of the night. Is there a path that's shown to them or is it their own initiative? It is climbing up the cliffs. It's 200 meters. It's not a joke. You know, imagine trying to

carry up your artillery. You know, they have only a couple of small cannon that they can bring with them up there. But, you know, no one imagines that this can happen. And so the French commander, he hears some gunfire in the night or whatever, because they're through the summer there's been these little confrontations around the edges of the city. But then when he gets up in the morning, he sort of goes out and there's the British Army,

you know, right outside the city. And they've managed to make it. And at this point, he does the thing he hadn't done before, which is that he comes out to fight. And there is an actual battle. It takes place on this open field, which is rather poetically called the Plains of Abraham. And on the Plains of Abraham, there is a day-long battle at the end of which

Montcalm is fatally wounded. He takes a ball shot to the gut, doesn't he? Like, you know, quite a large hit of metal to his stomach. They run, see how they run, and never was a route more complete than that of our army, reported a Frenchman. And much to his own glory, and some would say, in his hopes, Wolf also takes bullets to the wrist and the torso, and he ends up also dying at the end of this battle. And it is a hugely significant battle because the British take control of the capital of New France and with it the keys to that part of North America. And the significance

before you do the significance, let's do the spooky bit. Because there is a report that Wolf, you know, did the night before when he's sort of a, with him. his troops. And there are officers saying that while they were crossing the river, the previous night, Wolf, is reciting Thomas Gray's elegy written in a country churchyard. And there is a line in that, Maya, don't give up on the spooky here, lady. This is really good. There is a line in that which says, the paths of glory lead but to the grave. And all of his men, when they seem cut down, even though he's one, like, oh, that's what that poem means. Now we understand and can do an essay on it. So, you know, that was, they were pretty pretentious. Anyway, as you were,

The significance of it. We've done the spooky. Now do the significance. And the Benjamin Wiss painting we've got to talk about too. That's where I'm headed. Interestingly enough. Well, is it spooky or is it self-aggrandizing? Because Wolf very much wants this kind of fate, one could argue.

You know, for example, he had this fiancé for a long time in Britain. And, you know, the poor fiancé is sitting there and, you know, he's never coming back, basically. I mean, he's just visibly looking for. glory. And, you know, and so it's, it's very clear in the way that he comports himself and, you know, writes to his mother and says, you know, I'm sure I'm never going to get married and and so on, you know, even though he has this fiance, that he's eager for a certain kind of a future for himself, which he gets because he has the big victory, he dies on the battlefield,

and then a painter from Colonial Pennsylvania, which of course is one of the great friend Tier states in this period, who is making his name for himself as a court painter to George the second and then George III by the name of Benjamin West paints a hugely significant canvas depicting this event. It is called the death of General Wolfe, and it is in the manner of the so-called history painting, a genre of big, famous scenes typically from ancient history. or if modern history, with everybody kind of puzzlingly dressed in togas. And one of the things about Wolf's, excuse me, West's rendition of the death of General Wolf, is that he paints everybody in modern garb.

And it shows Wolf, you know, passing away in this very kind of romantic way with a shaft of light, you know, artfully poised right over his face and he's in the arms of various officers and around him are congregated not only British Redcoats, but also very operatively a member of one of these colonial regiments dressed in green as a ranger, showing the participation of the colonists in their own defense, and a very statuesque Native American looking very much like a sort of Greek statue, but depicted carefully. And lots of Scotsmen in plaid. lots of Scotsmen and the whole thing is a big image of the sort of British Empire as it sees itself after the victories of the seven years. So I've seen this. I went, we did a wreath lecture with a woman, I'm sure you know, eminent Canadian historian called Margaret McMillan.

And this painting there, which is a fairly large thing, it's almost like a religious pilgrimage. It's the one where you find the biggest knot of people sort of standing reverentially in front of it. So, yes. Now, we're running out of time for this episode, as we always do when we're chatting to Maya, because we get carried away with such good tangents. And good stories, exactly. Yeah. So, I mean, the French are the principal losers out of all of this. And they end up giving up Canada pretty much, formerly New France and Louisiana. I mean, it's not just France. It's Louisiana as well. they do, though, keep a toehold in two islands off Newfoundland. I mean, just tell us a little bit about, you know, the presence that they managed to cling on to. Well, yes, they do cling on to these two little islands, which are called Saint-Pierre and Michelin,

and they are important for them as their footholds in this incredibly lucrative cod fisheries business in the North Atlantic. However, the thing I want to highlight is actually something that goes to the point that we were discussing earlier, which is when they're doing the negotiations at the end. of the war, and obviously the British have the upper hand having won a victory, they are faced with various choices about where they choose to concede and where they don't. And the operative thing they do is they choose to surrender the vast expanse of New France from everything except basically New Orleans, but the whole Mississippi Valley all the way up to Hudson's Bay, to the British. But what do they keep?

Guadalupe. Islands, thank you. You have to come in with that. You know, Guadeloupe and Williams, William, would you like to tell us what the other one is? Yeah, get it. Get it. Get it, Maya. Get it, Maya. Get it, Maya. Guadalupe and Martinique. So they retain Guadeloupe and Martinique, and this is significant, of course, because those are unbelievably valuable commercially to them because they're sugar-producing islands. And so, I mean, I think it neatly encapsulates the differential in wealth and promise that you would swap basically, you know, this vast expanse of the North American. continent for Guadalupe and Marique in effect. And that was the right thing to do at that time. It was definitely the right thing to do. And by the way, these places are all still part of

greater France to this day. Now, we're heading on in the next episode, the next massive earthquake in North American history, of course, is the American Revolution. And in that, we see this newly conquered New France remain with Britain, while all the stuff that British had goes to America. Is there anything at this stage, Meyer, which hints that that's the way it's heading? Are we, is there anything that, you know, Wolf could have seen if he'd been very clever at this point that would have shown him the way the wind was blowing? Because very short, what's it, only 20 years now that the American Revolution will break out. After this enormous British victory, the British completely triumphant in Canada. They've just taken also Havana. They've also

They've taken quite a lot of West Africa. They've taken Dakar, the port of the slave port. They've taken Placie, the whole beginning of the East India Company and Clive, and all that story is beginning during this time. Is there any hint of the way the wind is blowing yet of the American Revolution? Twelve years later, we'll have the beginning of the American Revolution. And the answer is yes and no. It is no emphatically in terms of the kind of collaboration.

colonial outlook, the imperial outlook that you see embodied in a painting like The Death of General Wolf from 1770, the idea that we're now all part of this great imperial. Settlement, emigration to the colonies increases significantly. The economic growth is high, etc. But yes, because the causes of the American Revolution come really straight out of the victories of the seven years war. Because of the costs, because of the massive amount of money that the British have to now find in order to pay the debts of this war? Absolutely, that's part of it. The other part of it I like to highlight is that the British now find themselves managing this big global empire with subjects who are not just English-speaking Protestants or German-speaking Protestants in the Atlantic Seaboard, but are also French-speaking Catholics of Quebec, are also the hundreds of millions of Bengalis and now subject to tax collection by the East India Company. and, of course, the ongoing interests of the sugar planters in the West Indies. And so you see the British trying to manage all of these different interests of these different groups

in ways that look sensible from a metropolitan perspective if you're sitting in London and you're trying to manage this whole thing. But if you're sitting in, say, Boston or Williamsburg or Philadelphia, look very provocative. Why the hell should you be paying more? Well, exactly. Yeah. Look, we've got a lot to talk about. That's where we're going to pick up on the next episode.

If you're a member of our Empire Club, do you know what? You can just listen to it straight away because what you need in your life is an endless loop of us. That's what you need. So go to Emma Podukuk.com. I mean, she makes it bearable, to be honest. Empirepoduk. com. Empirepod UK.com.

Till the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnan. And goodbye from me, William, Deroomple.