|
||
|
|
|
|
Published in London in 1772 as a folding plate for Thomas Mante’s History of the Late War in North-America, this large two-sheet engraving is the most detailed contemporary plan of the 1759 siege and assault that decided the fate of New France. It distils the observations of Royal Engineer survey parties who accompanied Major-General James Wolfe and Admiral Charles Saunders up the St Lawrence, translating their field sketches into a map that allowed readers in Britain to follow the campaign step by step.
The moment it records lies near the climax of the global Seven Years’ War. After four seasons of fighting on the North American frontier, British ministers judged that capturing Quebec—the fortified capital perched atop Cap Diamant—would collapse French resistance from the Great Lakes to Louisiana. Wolfe’s army, convoyed by Saunders’s fleet, therefore ascended the treacherous river in June 1759, intent on forcing a decisive engagement before ice returned. When the city fell on 18 September, France lost its principal bastion on the continent, and the treaty that followed in 1763 ceded Canada to Britain, reshaping the imperial geography of North America.
Across nearly three feet of copperplate, the engraver renders that strategic chessboard with unusual clarity. The north half traces the Beauport shore, where French commander Montcalm anchored redoubts and entrenchments from the Montmorency Falls westward to the city walls. Opposite lies the long spine of the Île d’Orléans, shown bristling with British fieldworks and hospitals; beyond it the meandering Montmorency River empties into the North Channel. In mid-stream, two neat clusters of ship silhouettes mark the divisions of Saunders and his subordinate Admiral Charles Holmes, whose vessels supplied the army and screened its twisting approach to the final landing at Anse-au-Foulon.
Every battery, regiment and landing place is keyed to extensive reference tables engraved in the corners, while delicate hachures capture the sheer escarpments that made a direct assault on Quebec appear impossible. The plate doubles as a lesson in military cartography: pictorial symbols differentiate woodland from cultivated seigneuries; compass north is subtly offset to align the river’s reach with the sheet; and a fine scale bar converts the viewer’s thumb span into yards and miles. Mante’s inset text walks the reader through each numbered feature, so the map functions as both illustration and analytic tool.
Thomas Mante (bapt. 1733, d. c. 1802), army officer, historian, and sometime intelligence agent, was baptized Thomas Mant on 3 December 1733 at St Faith’s, Havant, Hampshire. He was the eldest of eight children born to Thomas Mant, an estate manager, and Mary Bingham, daughter of the church historian Joseph Bingham and his wife Dorothea Pococke. Nothing is known of his early education or training, but he began his military career on 25 June 1756 as a senior second lieutenant in the Royal Marines.
During the Seven Years’ War, Mante transferred to the 56th company of Marines in 1759 and participated in the major West Indies campaigns of 1759 and 1762. He served as one of seventeen assistant engineers under the Earl of Albemarle during the siege of Havana in 1762, and by June of that year had obtained a commission as a lieutenant in the 77th Regiment of Foot. That regiment departed Havana for New York in August 1762, but was disbanded the following year as part of postwar reductions. Mante, however, remained in North America: in 1763 he joined Colonel Henry Bouquet’s campaign against the forces of Pontiac, and in 1764 served as brigade major in Colonel John Bradstreet’s expedition to the western Great Lakes.
Placed on half-pay in 1765, Mante spent the next eight years in London. He sought appointments—most ambitiously, as lieutenant-governor of a proposed colony in Detroit—but failed to secure political support. He relied increasingly on borrowed funds and fell out with both John Bradstreet and Sir Charles Gould. During this period, he was employed by John Robinson at the Treasury to provide intelligence in anticipation of a renewed Anglo-French conflict. On 29 June 1769 he married Mary Silver at North Hayling, near his family’s home in Havant.
Mante’s literary career began in this first London period. Between 1770 and 1772 he completed four military works: three translations of treatises on tactics from the French school of Joly de Maizeroy—A Treatise on the Use of Defensive Arms (1770), Elementary Principles of Tactics (1771), and the two-volume System of Tactics (1781)—and his major historical achievement, The History of the Late War in North America (1772). This last work, issued with a suite of folding maps, drew on his own military experience and is still regarded as a valuable contemporary account of the Seven Years’ War. He changed the spelling of his name from “Mant” to “Mante” between 1770 and 1772, and used it consistently thereafter.
In 1773, Mante moved permanently to Dieppe, Normandy, where he had lived intermittently since 1769. He had been recruited by the Jacobite exile Jean-Charles-Adolphe Grant de Blairfindy to provide military intelligence to the French ministry of war. Though on the French payroll for a time, his payments ceased in 1774 amid suspicions that he was a double agent. Nonetheless, he remained in France, serving briefly as an excise officer and then attempting to operate an estate for raising British sheep. This project failed, and in 1778 he was imprisoned for debt. That same year, he published Traité des prairies artificielles, des enclos, et de l’éducation des moutons de race angloise, a treatise on English methods of sheep husbandry, which received formal approval from Louis XVI and was dedicated to Benjamin Franklin, then serving as American ambassador in Paris.
Released from prison in early 1781, Mante returned to London in poor health and near destitution. Rejected by his former associates, he found support from the publisher Thomas Hookham, who issued two of his novels, Lucinda and The Siege of Aubigny, in 1781–82. These were paraphrases of French originals. His final project was an ambitious Naval and Military History of the Wars of England, published in multiple volumes between c.1795 and 1807. He personally authored the early volumes and most of volumes five and six, which covered the wars of 1714–1771. Volume seven was only partially completed by him and finished by another hand; volume eight was written posthumously by an anonymous editor. Between 1800 and 1801 he also contributed nineteen essays, titled “Retrospect of the eighteenth century,” to The Gentleman’s Magazine. He died around 1802, still at work on his history.
Substantially based on the ODNB entry.
![[ Siege of Quebec ] Quebek, De Hoofdstad van Kanada; aan de Rivier van St. Laurens . . . 1759](https://storage.googleapis.com/raremaps/img/small/93087.jpg)
![[ Ottawa to Montreal ] Carte regionale de la province de Quebec, comprenant les comtes de St Maurice, Maskinonge, Berthier, Joiliette, Montcalm. . .](https://storage.googleapis.com/raremaps/img/small/77568.jpg)
