by Don Gillmor
On his way back to England, they encounter an Inuit in his kayak on the calm sea near Baffin Island. Frobisher dangles a bell over him and when the man reaches for it, they haul him and his boat on board as if they were fishing. The first thing the Inuit does in captivity is bite his tongue in half. Now he can’t tell them anything in any language. Frobisher takes him to Queen Elizabeth, the perennial virgin, who had put up a thousand pounds for the voyage. He wants to show her what her money has bought: an authentic Oriental, living proof. The Inuit goes to Hampton Court and on its exquisitely manicured grounds he demonstrates his skill with a bow by shooting the Queen’s swans. He dies a week later of heartbreak.
Frobisher goes back a second time and returns with ore and a family of three Inuit. The ore isn’t gold, as it turns out, and the Inuit all die within a month.
He goes back a third time. To raise money, one of his backers sells tickets to see the dead Orientals. There are maps in London that have China on them now, located northeast of Newfoundland. This time Frobisher brings back 1,200 tons of ore. Gold, he says, and he parades some of the dark rock through the streets. It turns out to be iron pyrites: fool’s gold. Frobisher returns to his old job of pirating, and London returns to hangings and floggings for entertainment. The maps are once more filled with monsters.
At the hospital the nurse stood in front of him, her grey face weary with the daily routine of cigarette breaks and human decay. “Third floor,” she said.
“What do the doctors think?” Michael asked.
“Impossible to tell with these things. He could wake up in ten minutes or ten years.”
Michael walked up the stairs. There were two other beds in the room and all three occupants were unconscious, their IVs dripping methodically. Michael sat on the metal chair and stared at Billy Whitecloud. His face was slightly swollen at the jaw, and a small patch of hair was missing on the side of his head where the stitches were. One arm was in a cast. He looked like a seven-year-old boy, untroubled in sleep. You could still see the child in them, even as they were almost grown, suddenly and regrettably gawky teenagers, resentful and insane, Michael thought, but a small gesture, the way their mouth sat in repose, the light catching their hair, and the perfect seven-year-old emerged. Billy was over six feet tall, stretched out on the bed, his feet pushing against the metal footboard.
His potential as a student was impossible to divine. He wasn’t indifferent to history—the most common response in Michael’s class—but was somehow unavailable to it, as if he hadn’t decided what it was. There were glimpses of ability. There were glimpses of something in most students.
Ancient maps, he told his class, were seductions, the compiled lies of merchants, the half-truths of fishermen, tales from sailors swimming in ale, a fevered dream drawn on parchment. Most of the mapmakers sat in London or Lisbon or Genoa and in their foreshortened lives they didn’t get any farther than the harbour. The empty spaces on those maps were filled with fear. What waited out there? Perhaps the Antipodeans, a race of devils who lived in flames near the equator. Or sea monsters, or men who had only one foot and hopped after their prey, their shark teeth gnashing. A race of giant women who shat gold, or winged monkeys.
The maps we have now, he told them, the ones you pick up at the gas station, are purely functional, for people travelling through those spaces. But early maps were made by people who had never gone there, for people who would never go. They were filled with larceny and rumour. Mapmakers stole from one another and distorted the truth to suit their interest.
Their mural had few supporters. The principal thought it was a fool’s errand and had said as much. Each of the five panels was five by ten feet, and they worked on them in sequence, spreading them on the floor, the shoeless students congregating around the canvases like an overgrown kindergarten. He thought the act of doing, of translating talk into art, might help. The teenage brain, an endless subject in the teacher’s lounge, was impervious to logic or reason, but a grateful host for whim and experience and, on occasion, narrative.
It was Purvue, a rancher’s son, dark haired, twitchy and raw boned, usually attentive only to the unchanging view through the window, who put up his callused adult hand.
“If we wanted to draw a war on the map, Mr. Mountain Horse?”
“How would you paint a war, Purvue?”
“Blood. Dead guys.”
For the exams, they had to memorize dates, and the dates usually corresponded to wars or treaties: Jay, Ghent, Boer, Civil, Holy.
“What war did you have in mind?”
“The Plains of Abraham. It was short. I think maybe an hour.”
“Battles are short and wars are long.”
“You were in a war.”
“Yes.”
“Did you paint it?”
“No, but others did.” Picasso’s Guernica, with its angled drama and calculated chaos. Paintings were once the only visual images of war. Da Vinci’s idealized males with their perfect musculature, wielding swords, holding severed heads, dying nobly of their wounds in languid poses attended by angels. The audience craved nobility, the state demanded it. Artists were complicit for centuries. Frederick Varley’s World War I paintings showed the same anguished faces as da Vinci’s work, the gods or women or cherubs replaced by waste, decay, and futility in brown acres of mud. Of course, Varley was there. The Plains of Abraham produced several paintings, but one elbowed all others out of contention and became the visual reference for the next two hundred years. Inaccurate, perhaps, but catchy, like a pop song, it was called The Death of General Wolfe.
The first thing you have to understand about James Wolfe, Michael told the class, is that he was a tortured man. There isn’t much disagreement about that.
In 1759, England and France are at war in Europe and the British are losing. The drearily named Seven Years’ War.
Prime Minister William Pitt decides to send a large force to North America. Perhaps they’ll have better luck there.
The man who will lead this force is Brigadier General James Wolfe, thirty-one years old, a frail and humourless man. He suffers from seasickness, a bladder infection, and rheumatism. He’s a fatalist who believes he’ll die young, a gift for a soldier. During a party at the prime minister’s residence, Wolfe retrieves his sword and begins slashing at imaginary enemies. He isn’t drunk. The dinner guests stare in reserved horror. “To think that I have committed the fate of my country and of my ministry into such hands,” Pitt says after the demonstration. Wolfe is betrayed by his predatory name. He has a weak chin and the spindly build of a London clerk. There is nothing lupine about Jimmy Wolfe.
In the spring, Wolfe sails to Quebec with one-quarter of the British navy, 186 ships, a floating city. On board are fifteen thousand soldiers, as well as cooks, surgeons, butchers, sailors, children, prostitutes, pipers, cobblers, teachers, tailors, clerks, cattle, sheep, hens, dogs, rats, syphilis, and lice. They sail up the St. Lawrence River, a parade that is thirty miles long. The Canadiens who farm the banks of the St. Lawrence see the enemy arrive like a stately dream, one that goes on for days. Look at the power of Europe! There are more people on these ships than in the city they’re invading. Canadien farm boys and old men lie down in the grass under the pleasant June sun and level their muskets at the ships, spend a leisurely day trying to kill something.
Wolfe arrives at Quebec, but it’s a fortress, heavily walled and sitting on top of a steep hill. He can’t figure out a way to attack it, and in September he’s still sitting in his ship. Almost three months have gone by. He bombards the city with mortar fire, but the French won’t come out. Wolfe has a fever and he’s indecisive, forming plans then changing them. He has just received news that his father has died, which further depresses him. He reads obsessively from Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard; “The paths of glory lead but to the grave.” His men draw pictures of him, chinless caricatures, and pass them around like school kids. They openly doubt his leadership. He writes to his mot
her, telling her he’ll quit the military when he returns to England, that life is a misery.
If he doesn’t do something soon the river will ice up and trap them and they will slowly starve before spring. If he returns now, taking this mighty fleet back to England without having engaged the enemy, he’ll be ridiculed, a symbol of national impotence. His fiancée will deny him, his colleagues will avoid him, his family will bear his failure with quiet condemnation. But to charge the hill would be suicide.
Luckily, he is suicidal. This is his strongest quality as a leader. At least that’s what the men who had been with him at Louisbourg thought. Louisbourg was the French fortress that guarded the entrance to the St. Lawrence River, and a detested symbol for the British. In 1758, they sent twelve thousand men to destroy it, a battle that started with European politesse: The British sent a gift of two pineapples to the French governor’s wife, and in return the governor sent over several bottles of champagne. Then they bombarded each other with cannon shot.
Wolfe was at Louisbourg and he decided to land a force on the rocky shores of Île Royale, where Louisbourg was perched. The piece of the coast where he chose to land was so rough and rocky that it was undefended. Who could possibly land there? But Wolfe did. He lost men as the boats smashed on the rocks, but they landed. By then the walls of Louisbourg were so riddled with cannon shot they could just walk in. Wolfe made his mark, and that’s what got him the job of invading Quebec.
Who is he facing in Quebec a year later? Wolfe’s French counterpart is the Marquis de Montcalm, a forty-seven-year-old career officer who began his training at the age of nine and who comes from a distinguished French military family. He is short, impatient, vain, and as tortured as Wolfe. He misses his wife and France and is heavily in debt. He had tried, repeatedly and unsuccessfully, to be posted elsewhere, somewhere warm, and has just received word that one of his daughters has died, but he doesn’t know which one, an agony that has all of them dead in his frail heart.
And Montcalm has another fear: that he’ll lose his European soul. The French are allied with the Indians, whose style of warfare is to spread terror, to burn villages, kidnap women and children, and submit the male captives to inventive torture. These aren’t the European rules of engagement. The Indian soul, Montcalm thinks, is as black as pitch, and some of the French soldiers have slid into this morass, have abandoned themselves, their country, and their God, and have become savage in this savage land. The French weren’t spreading civilization, they were becoming barbaric, that seductive state.
Michael observed the class, his barbarians, a few faces following the story, eager for blood. So he continued. These two lost men face one another to decide the fate of a continent, Michael said. Wolfe with his impressive fleet and well-trained soldiers, Montcalm with his fortress. They sit, day after day, with their respective demons, wishing they were elsewhere, convinced they will lose the upcoming battle.
Wolfe keeps making plans to assault Quebec, but rejects them all. His officers lose faith. This feverish scarecrow will get them killed. Or humiliated. Or both.
Finally, on September 12, Wolfe announces his historic decision: to climb the steep face of Anse au Foulon at night, to move hundreds of men and guns up a sheer rock face in the dark a few hundred yards from the city.
It is suicidal. It’s perfect.
At eleven that night the soldiers begin the climb, sliding in the mud in their leather-soled shoes, their hands torn from grasping the gnarled brush that grows on the hill, their rifles and shot weighing them down. They curse softly and pray the French sentries don’t hear them, that the Iroquois—those lords of the forest—don’t descend upon them with their godless tortures. It takes six hours to make the climb.
By five in the morning, five hundred British troops are standing on the Plains of Abraham in a light rain. Montcalm had been expecting an assault from the east, at Beauport, the more logical spot, and his troops have been awake for thirty-six hours, waiting for a night attack there. When Montcalm gets word that Wolfe is outside the gates, he marches the men back to Quebec. It takes an hour marching at double time. He has three thousand reinforcements coming from a position upriver, three hours away. If he simply waits, he’ll have the British trapped in a crossfire.
But he doesn’t wait. He takes his exhausted, underfed army out to the plain to engage the British. Why? Perhaps he needs the reassurance of those two lines facing one another, the nostalgic geometry of European death. Or maybe he’s just as fatalistic as Wolfe.
The battle begins at eight with a volley of British shot. An hour later, the two armies move closer to one another. At ten the battle begins in earnest. Both sides fire. Bodies slump, musket balls smashing bone. Wolfe is shot in the wrist by a sniper and his wound is bandaged with a handkerchief. At 10:15, Wolfe gives the order to fire once more. The French give way under the volley, and the Highlanders attack with their broadswords, hacking at the retreating French. A piper plays. Indian snipers shoot at the British from the woods. The stately format of European battle mixed with the guerrilla tactics of the New World.
Wolfe’s injury gives him an appetite for the heroic death he craves. There is just enough pain for this moment to be glorious, a taste of mortality that whets his need for oblivion. He is hit again, this time in the groin. The pain is excruciating, and erases his thoughts of noble death. Suddenly he wants to live. As death circles, he craves life. He has no wife, no children, little experience of the world. He left a fiancée in London. If he had doubts about his love for her (and he did), he loves her now with a force that empties all impure thoughts of glory. Then he’s hit again, this time in the chest, and is knocked backward and dies without another thought.
Montcalm is shot below the ribs and collapses. He’s taken to the hospital, and as they scurry through the rubble of Quebec, he breathes out his love for his wife and his daughters. He is consumed by sadness at having lost that feminine world. It sits in him like a dark cloud as he dies. His reinforcements arrive at eleven but it’s too late. The battle is over. Quebec has fallen.
The Canadiens attempt to bury their dead, but there are no more coffins in Quebec. Poor Montcalm is put into a box and lowered into a bomb crater in the chapel of the Ursuline nuns. The sisters cover him with earth and pray for his soul and hold one another and weep for an hour.
Wolfe is taken back to London for a hero’s burial. But how to get him there? His small corpse will rot. They open a barrel of rum, drain half of it, and stuff the general inside like a rag doll. A waste of good rum, some of the men complain. He sails back to England and is uncorked at a funeral parlour near Westminster Abbey, his skin the colour of tobacco. His coffin is paraded slowly through the streets of London, the conquering hero.
The continent has been won. All that’s left is to paint it.
The artists weren’t there of course. They didn’t see the Highlanders cleaving a man’s arm at the shoulder with their broadswords, or Indians wrestling with a man’s scalp as he screamed. They didn’t see the mutilation, the doubt. They certainly didn’t see the winter of starvation that followed, or the invalids begging for bread. They saw bravery and purpose and a nobility that could be hung in the galleries and palaces back home. Where did they see all this? In their artist’s imagination. And what fed that imagination? Other paintings of war.
Montcalm is the losing general. So he gets the lesser artist and the inferior painting. The Death of Montcalm shows him dying beside a palm tree, flanked by what look like South American natives. In the background, if you squint, you can see Wolfe dying less nobly.
There are several mundane versions of Wolfe’s death, of the battle, but none of them catch on.
What do we want from a death? That it mean something.
But then comes The Death of General Wolfe, painted by Benjamin West, an American. He has Wolfe propped by three aides. His face is uplifted, slightly anguished, beatific; he looks like a schoolgirl who has just fainted. An Indian warrior is in the foreground, staring
at Wolfe in a classical pose of contemplation. The Indians, of course, fought for the other side. What is he doing in the painting? He is the noble savage, a popular European idea of aboriginal peoples uncorrupted by civilization. An idea held by Europeans who never left Europe.
West’s painting is a hit. It is unveiled at the Royal Academy, and William Pitt, who had thought that Wolfe was mad, commissions a copy of it. King George III, who would soon go mad himself, also asks for a copy. West becomes rich from this one painting. His career is made. What was it about the painting that made it so popular? It certainly didn’t tell the story of the battle, or even the story of Wolfe’s death. What did it do?
It reaffirmed that there is nobility in war and purpose in life.
West’s painting was finished in 1770, eleven years after Wolfe’s death. It is a big year for history. In Boston, British soldiers open fire on a crowd of demonstrators, killing five of them. They are tried for murder and acquitted, and so begin the rumblings of the American Revolution. What else? James Cook circumnavigates the globe. The world is getting smaller. The British have won the top half of North America. The Americans will soon claim the lower half. The Spanish are retreating, the French dwindling. Ownership is being established, but the continent has yet to be discovered. Millions of square miles are still unseen, unmapped. They don’t exist in the European mind.
And 1770 was the year that my great-great-grandfather was born, Michael tells the class. David Thompson, the greatest land geographer who ever lived, and in the tradition of greatness, a man who died in poverty and obscurity. He was a genius, both intuitive and scientific, largely self-taught, the Mozart of the plains. Driven by some inner force that is difficult to define, he mapped western Canada. It was a solitary passion. And the reward? Nothing really. Or almost nothing. What was his contribution? He helped create your world, the one you are now living in, with its Levi’s, Ford pickups, longing, hormones, fear, and the exquisite boredom of this particular moment.