Work carried out near the former Augustines General Hospital in Quebec led to the discovery of what appears to be a mass grave of British soldiers who died during the Conquest.
The grave was spotted on Saint-Anselme Street in front of the Monastery of the Quebec General Hospital, in the heart of the Saint-Roch district. The city was carrying out road work there.
During the Conquest, the Augustine sisters treated thousands of soldiers from both camps at this location. Many had fought on the Plains of Abraham (1759) but they also received wounded from the Battle of Sainte-Foy (1760).
Hundreds of British soldiers died in these clashes.
“It was a tumult”
Twenty-three bodies have been discovered so far, all of them male. The remains of a child of about one year old were also found in the grave.
The City of Quebec insists that the identification of a grave of British soldiers is a “hypothesis” but the clues are eloquent. “Obviously, archaeologists cannot prove it beyond a reasonable doubt, but it corresponds to everything that we currently find in terms of information from the archives,” explained Denis Robitaille, project manager for the Augustines during a visit organized by the city of Quebec.
In their archives, the nuns write that they placed the soldiers’ bodies in a pit to the northeast of the Catholic cemetery and that is precisely where the bones were found.
“The sisters say: ‘We have at least 1,000 wounded to treat at the same time here at the hospital,'” said Mr. Robitaille. “It was period care like amputations and all that, so they even talk about piles of limbs. So there was tumult after the battle.”
The work carried out by archaeologists suggests that the bodies have been there since the 18th century.e century and a lead bullet was found at the site that was used, explained archaeologist Caroline Parent, project manager for the city. “We see that there are fractures that indicate a violent event that would have caused significant injuries that did not necessarily cause death. Other bones show traces of amputations, which suggests that emergency care was provided.”
An unparalleled discovery
This is an unprecedented discovery, according to Luc Nicole-Labrie, coordinator of historical mediation at the National Battlefields Commission. “To our knowledge, nothing equivalent has been found for this period for this type of soldier.”
“It’s very moving,” he added. “When you have 260 years of hindsight on a historical event, it’s sometimes hard to remember that an army on a battlefield is made up of thousands of people. It reminds us that there was a real human cost to this, that there were people who died, who fought for this.”