It was at this very place that General Ambert's brigade of 300 men, coming to attack Canada, was lost; the French at Montreal received the first intelligence of the invasion, by the dead bodies floating past the town. The pilot who conducted the first batteaux, committing the same error that we did, ran for the wrong channel, and the other batteaux following close, all were involved in the same destruction. The whole party with which I was escaped; four left the barge at the Cedar village, above the rapids, and went to Montreal by land; two more were saved by the canoe; the barge's crew, all accustomed to labour, were lost. Of the eight men who passed down the Cascades, none but myself escaped, or were seen again; nor indeed was it possible for any one, without my extraordinary luck, and the aid of the barge, to which they must have been very close, to have escaped; the other men must have been drowned immediately on entering the Cascades. The trunks, &c., to which they adhered, and the heavy great-coats which they had on, very probably helped to overwhelm them; but they must have gone at all events; swimming in such a current of broken stormy waves was impossible. Still I think my knowing how to swim kept me more collected, and rendered me more willing to part with one article of support to gain a better. Those who could not swim would naturally cling to whatever hold they first got, and, of course, many had very bad ones. The Captain passed me above the Cascades, on a sack of woollen clothes, which were doubtless soon saturated and sunk.
The trunk which I picked up belonged to a young man from Upper Canada, who was one of those drowned; it contained clothes, and about £70 in gold, which was restored to his friends. My own trunk contained, besides clothes, about £200 in gold and bank notes. On my arrival at La Chine, I offered a reward of 100 dollars, which induced a Canadian to go in search of it. He found it, some days after, on the shore of an island on which it had been driven, and brought it to La Chine, where I happened to be at the time. I paid him his reward, and understood that above one-third of it was to be immediately applied to the purchase of a certain number of masses which he had vowed, in the event of success, previous to his setting out on the search.