This was made on the night of December 31st, 1775.

Whatever possibility of success there may have been vanished with the death of Montgomery, who fell at the head of his men.
The American army retired three miles up the river, went into winter-quarters, and established a land blockade of Quebec, which was cut off from the sea by the ice.

"For five months," wrote Carleton to the Secretary for War, on the 14th of May, 1776, "this town has been closely invested by the rebels." From this unpleasant position it was relieved on the 6th of May, when signals were exchanged between it and the _Surprise_, the advance ship of a squadron under Captain Charles Douglas,[2] which had sailed from England on the 11th of March.
Arriving off the mouth of the St.Lawrence, on the morning of April 12th, Douglas found ice extending nearly twenty miles to sea, and packed too closely to admit of working through it by dexterous steering.

The urgency of the case not admitting delay, he ran his ship, the _Isis_, 50, with a speed of five knots, against a large piece of ice about ten or twelve feet thick, to test the effect.

The ice, probably softened by salt water and salt air, went to pieces.
"Encouraged by this experiment," continues Douglas, somewhat magnificently, "we thought it an enterprise worthy an English ship of the line in our King and country's sacred cause, and an effort due to the gallant defenders of Quebec, to make the attempt of pressing her by force of sail, through the thick, broad, and closely connected fields of ice, to which we saw no bounds towards the western part of our horizon.