Francis McLean

Francis McLean was a British army officer who served in continental Europe, the Caribbean, Portugal and North America. During the American Revolution he commanded British forces in Nova Scotia and established Fort George at Majabigwaduce, in present-day Maine. In 1779 he held the unfinished position against the much larger Penobscot Expedition until a Royal Navy relief force arrived, producing one of the most severe American defeats of the war. He died at Halifax in 1781.

Bernard Cornwell’s The Fort dramatises the Penobscot Expedition and portrays McLean as the experienced, steady commander of a small and vulnerable garrison. The novel contrasts his professionalism with divisions among the American land and naval commanders. McLean’s defence is especially suited to fiction because the outcome depended not only on courage but on hesitation, faulty cooperation and the rapidly changing calculation of whether surrender was unavoidable.