John Montresor

Captain John Montresor (22 April 1736 – June 1799) was a British military engineer and cartographer in North America. Early life Born in Gibraltar on 22 April 1736 to the British military engineer James Gabriel Montresor and his first wife, Mary Haswell, John Montresor spent his early life there (and presumably on Menorca, where his father was briefly stationed). He was in England between 1746 and 1750 and attended Westminster School. He learned the principles of engineering from his father and in his later teens served as assistant engineer to his father at Gibraltar. French and Indian Wars In 1754, he accompanied his father to America and served as an ensign in the 48th Regiment of Foot on the expedition to Fort Duquesne, also performing as a supernumerary engineer. In the defeat that followed, he was wounded but survived to learn of his promotion to lieutenant days before the battle. He remained in America, serving along the Mohawk River and at Fort Edward abd then accompanying British forces to Halifax. In 1758, he was commissioned a practicing engineer in the Corps of Engineers, and as such was present at the siege of Louisbourg, and later, at that of Quebec, there drawing one of the last known portraits of General Wolfe, who died in the deciding battle. With the defeat of the French, Montresor was sent to neighbouring villages and as far afield as Cape Breton, using the language of his Huguenot ancestors to elicit oaths of allegiance. He was also twice sent overland from Quebec to Boston with dispatches, on one of these journeys, in a mid-winter blizzard, being reduced to eating belt and shoe leather in order to avoid starvation. He also, during this period, performed various surveys and prepared maps of Acadia, the Saint Lawrence River, and of his route along the Kennebec River. (The journal of this last expedition through the wilds of Maine would fall into enemy hands in the American Revolution, and was used as a guide by Benedict Arnold in his expedition against Quebec.)