A few minutes later a man whose identity was never established came running from the Lower Town to say that Arnold’s men had taken the Sault-au-Matelot barricade.  If this was true it meant that the Pres-de-Ville fifty would be caught between two fires.  Some of them made as if to run back and reach Mountain Hill before the Americans could cut them off.  But Coffin at once threatened to kill the first man to move; and by the time an artillery officer had arrived with reinforcements perfect order had been restored.  This officer, finding he was not wanted there, sent back to know where else he was to go, and received an answer telling him to hurry to the Sault-au-Matelot.  When he arrived there, less than half a mile off, he found that desperate street fighting had been going on for over an hour.

Arnold’s advance had begun at the same time as Livingston’s demonstration and Montgomery’s attack.  But his task was very different and the time required much longer.  There were three obstacles to be overcome.  First, his men had to run the gauntlet of the fire from the bluejackets ranged along the Grand Battery, which faced the St Charles at its mouth and overlooked the narrow little street of Sous-le-Cap at a height of fifty or sixty feet.  Then they had to take the small advanced barricade, which stood a hundred yards on the St Charles side of the actual Sault-au-Matelot or Sailor’s Leap, which is the north-easterly point of the Quebec promontory and nearly a hundred feet high.  Finally, they had to round this point and attack the regular Sault-au-Matelot barricade.  This second barricade was about a hundred yards long, from the rock to the river.  It crossed Sault-au-Matelot Street and St Peter Street, which were the same then as now.  But it ended on a wharf half-way down the modern St James Street, as the outer half of this street was then a natural strand completely covered at high tide.  It was much closer than the Pres-de-Ville barricade was to Mountain Hill, at the top of which Carleton held his general reserve ready in the Place d’Armes; and it was fairly strong in material and armament.  But it was at first defended by only a hundred men.

The American forlorn hope, under Captain Oswald, got past most of the Grand Battery unscathed.  But by the time the main body was following under Morgan the British blue-jackets were firing down from the walls at less than point-blank range.  The driving snow, the clumps of bushes on the cliff, and the little houses in the street below all gave the Americans some welcome cover.  But many of them were hit; while the gun they were towing through the drifts on a sleigh stuck fast and had to be abandoned.  Captain Dearborn, the future commander-in-chief of the American army in the War of 1812, noted in his diary that he ‘met the wounded men very thick’ as he was bringing up the rear.  When the forlorn hope reached the advanced barricade Arnold halted it till the supports had come up.  The loss of