Walker's fleet entered the St Lawrence on the 22nd of August. The Admiral, totally ignorant of the navigation of the gulf, steered his vessels in misty weather straight for the northern shore. His own ship was saved just in time, but not so those which followed, and eight of the transports were dashed to pieces on the rocks, with a loss of almost a thousand lives. Walker, as proved by his own writings, never possessed any true ability; and he was only too ready, like Jack Hill, to look for some pretext for retreat. This horrible disaster was sufficient for the Admiral's purpose, and three days later the mighty armament turned away from Quebec, and New France was for the time saved. Walker looked upon the wreck as providential, and that the army had been saved from worse disasters. It was indeed a strange action for a British sailor to pen words of sincere gratitude for the loss of half his fleet. "Had we arrived safe at Quebec," he writes, "our provisions would have been reduced to a very small proportion, not exceeding eight or nine weeks at short allowance, so that between ten and twelve thousand men must have been left to perish with the extremity of cold and hunger. I must confess the melancholy contemplation of this (had it happened) strikes me with horror; for how dismal must it have been to have beheld the seas and earth locked up by adamantine frosts, and swoln with high mountains of snow in a barren and uncultivated region."[264] Walker sailed back to Boston and then with his fleet returned to England, where as a final completion to the horrible fiasco, the Admiral's ship was blown up. Swift records this event as taking place in the Thames, but it more probably occurred at Spithead, owing "to an accident and carelessness of some rogue, who was going as they think to steal some gunpowder: five hundred men are lost."[265]