Episode Details

In 1759, the year the British Empire could not stop winning, the largest prize of all sat on a cliff in the middle of North America: Quebec, the heart of New France, the fortress every earlier English attempt had broken against. This is the story of how it fell — and of the two generals who decided its fate by refusing, each for his own reasons, to do the cautious thing. James Wolfe, 32 and dying, stakes everything on a midnight climb up a cliff nobody thought an army could scale. The Marquis de Montcalm, who has seen that Canada is doomed and stayed to “retard its fall,” comes down off his ground to fight in the open when waiting might have saved him. On the Plains of Abraham they meet in a stand-up European battle the whole continent had spent five years avoiding — settled in fifteen minutes by the most perfect musket volley their enemies had ever seen — and within an hour both men are dying of the same kind of wound. A battle that reads like a duel, and the morning the fate of a continent was decided.