 Preface and Chapter 1 of A Chronicle of Lewisburg, 1720 to 1760. Lewisburg was no mere isolated stronghold which could be lost or won without affecting the wider issues of overseas dominion. On the contrary it was a necessary link in the chain of waterside posts which connected France with America by way of the Atlantic, the St. Lawrence, the Great Lakes, and the Mississippi. But since the chain itself and all its other links, and even the peculiar relation of Lewisburg to the Acadians and the Conquest have been fully described elsewhere in the Chronicles of Canada, the present volume only tries to tell the purely individual tale. Strange to say this tale seems never to have been told before, at least not as one continuous whole. Of course each siege has been described over and over again in many special monographs as well as in countless books about Canadian history. But nobody seems to have written any separate work on Lewisburg showing causes, crises, and results altogether in the light of the complete naval and military proof. So perhaps the following short account may really be the first attempt to tell the tale of Lewisburg from the foundation to the fall. W.W. 59 Grand Allet, Quebec 2 January 1915. Chapter 1. The Last Sea-Link with France, 1720 to 1744. The fortress of Lewisburg arose not from victory but from defeat, not from military strength but from naval weakness, not from a new adventurous spirit of attack, but from a half-despairing hope of keeping one last foothold by the sea. It was not begun until after the fortunes of Louis XIV had reached their lowest ebb at the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. It lived a precarious life of only forty years from 1720 to 1760, and nothing but bare ruins were left to mark its grave when it finally passed, unheeded and unnamed, into the vast dominions of the conquering British at the Peace of Paris in 1763. The Treaty of Utrecht narrowed the whole French sea coast of America down to the single island of Cape Breton. Here, after seven years of official hesitation and maritime exhaustion, Lewisburg was founded to guard the only harbour the French thought they had a chance of holding. A medal was struck to celebrate this last attempt to keep the one remaining sea-way open between old France and new. Its legend ran thus. Ludovico Burgum Fundatum et Munitum M. D. C. C. XX Lewisburg founded and fortified 1720. Its obvers bore the profile of the young Louis XV, whose statesmen hoped they had now established a French Gibraltar in America where French fleets and forts could command the straits leading into the St. Lawrence and threaten the coast of New England. In much the same way as British fleets and forts commanded the entrance to the Mediterranean and threatened the coasts of France and Spain. This hope seemed flattering enough in time of peace, but it vanished at each recurrent shock of war, because the Atlantic then became a hostile desert for the French, while it still remained a friendly highway for the British. The first French settlers in Lewisburg came over from Newfoundland, which had been given up to the British by the treaty. The fishermen of various nations had frequented different ports all round these shores for centuries, and by the irony of fate the new French capital of Cape Breton was founded at the entrance to the bay which had long been known as English harbour. Everything that re-christening could do, however, was done to make Cape Breton French. Not only was English harbour now called Lewisburg, but St. Peter's became Port Toulouse, St. Anne's became Port Dauphin, and the whole island itself was solemnly christened Isle Royale. The shores of the St. Lawrence up to Quebec and Montreal were as entirely French as the islands in the Gulf, but Acadia, which used to form the connection by land between Cape Breton and Canada, had now become a British possession, inhabited by the so-called neutral French. These Acadians, few in number and quite unorganized, were drawn in opposite directions, on the one hand by their French proclivities, on the other by their rooted affection for their own farms. Unlike the French Newfoundlanders, who came in a body from Plaisance, now Plaisentia, the Acadians preferred to stay at home. In 1717 an effort was made to bring some of them into Lewisburg, but it only succeeded in attracting the merest handful. On the whole the French authorities preferred leaving the Acadians as they were, in case a change in the fortunes of war might bring them once more under the Fleur de Lis, when the connection by land between Quebec and the sea would again be complete. A plan for promoting the emigration of the Irish Roman Catholics, living near Cape Breton, never got beyond the stage of official memoranda. Thus the population of the new capital consisted only of government employees, French fishermen from Newfoundland and other neighbouring places, waifs and strays from points further off, bounty-fed engages from France, and a swarm of camp-following traders. The regular garrison was always somewhat of a class apart. The French in Cape Breton needed all the artificial aid they could get from guns and forts. Even in Canada there was only a handful of French all told at the time of the Treaty of Utrecht, 25,000, while the British colonists in North America numbered fifteen times as many. The respective populations had trebled by the time of the cessation of Canada to the British fifty years later, but with a tendency for the vast British preponderance to increase still more. Canada naturally had neither men nor money to spare for Lewisburg, so the whole cost of building the fortress, thirty million livre, came directly from France. This sum was then the equivalent, in purchasing power, of at least as many dollars now. Though the old French livre was only rated at the contemporary value of twenty cents, but the original plans were never carried out, moreover not half the money that actually was spent ever reached the military chest at all. There were too many thievish fingers, by the way. The French were not to colonizing people. Their governing officials hated a tour of duty overseas, and Lewisburg was the most unpopular of all the stations in the service. Those Frenchmen who did care for the outlandish places went to East India or West to Canada. Nobody wanted to go to a small, dull, out-of-the-way garrison town like Lewisburg, where there was no social life whatever, nothing but fishermen, smugglers, petty traders, a discontented garrison, generally half-composed of foreigners, and a band of dishonest, second-rate officials, whose one idea was how to get rich and get home. The inspectors who were sent out either failed in their duty and joined the official gang of thieves, or else resigned in disgust. Worse still, because this taint was at the very source the royal government in France was already beset with that entanglement of weakness and corruption which lasted throughout the whole century between the decline of Louis XIV and the meteoric rise of Napoleon. The founders of Lewisburg took their time to build it. It was so very profitable to spin the work out as long as possible. The plan of the Fortress was good. It was modeled after the plans of Vauban, who had been the greatest engineer in the greatest European army of the previous generation. But the actual execution was hampered at every turn, by want of firmness at headquarters, and want of honest labour on the spot. Seasand was plentiful, worthless, and cheap, so it was used for the mortar, with most disastrous results. The stone was hewn from a quarry of profritic trap nearby and used for walls in the rough. Cut stone and good bricks were brought out from France as ballast by the fishing fleet. Some of these finer materials were built into the governor's and the intendant's quarters. Others were sold to New England traders, and replaced by inferior substitutes. Of course direct trade between the opposing colonies was strictly forbidden by both the French and British navigation acts, but the Lewisburg officials winked at anything that would enrich them quickly, while the New Englanders pushed in eagerly wherever a profit could be made by any means at all. Lewisburg was intended to be the general rendezvous of the transatlantic French fishing vessels, a great port of call between France, Canada, and the French West Indies, and a harbour of refuge in peace and war. But the New England shipping was doing the best trade at Lewisburg, and doing it in double contraband, within five years of the foundation. Cod, caught by Frenchmen from Lewisburg itself, French wines and brandy brought out from France, tobacco and sugar brought north from the French West Indies, all offered excellent chances to enterprising Yankees who came in with foodstuffs and building materials of their own. One vessel sailed for New York, with a cargo of clare and brandy, that netted her owners a profit of a hundred percent, even after paying the usual charges demanded by the French Custom House officials for what really was a smuggler's license. Fishing, smuggling, and theft were the three great industries of Lewisburg. The traders shared the profits of the smuggling, but the intentant and his officials kept most of the choice thieving for themselves. The genuine settlers, and a starvelling crew they were, rested their debt-laden livelihood from the local fishing. This was by no means bad in itself, but, like other fishermen before and since, they were in perpetual bondage to the traders, who took good care not to let accounts get evened up. A happier class of fishermen made up the engages who were paid by government to play settler, for a term of years, during which they helped us swell the official consensus of uncongenial Lewisburg. The regular French fishing fleet, of course, returned to France at the end of every season, and thus enjoyed a full spell of French delights on shore. The Acadians supplied Lewisburg with meat and vegetables. Those were brought in by sea, for there were no roads worth mentioning, nor in the contemporary state of Cape Breton was there any need for roads. The farmers were few, widely scattered, and mostly very poor. The only prosperous settlement within a long day's march was situated on the beautiful Meera River. James Gibson, a Boston merchant and militiaman, who served against Lewisburg in 1745, was much taken by the appearance of an establishment at the mouth of a large salmon fishery by one very handsome house, with two large barns, two large gardens, and a fine field of corn, and by another with six rooms on a floor and well furnished. He adds that, in one of the barns were fifteen loads of hay, and room sufficient for sixty horses and cattle. In 1753 the intended St. Homer report about a proposed German settlement near the Grand Lake of Meera. A new experiment was then being tried. The importation of settlers from Alice Lorraine. But five years afterwards Cape Breton had been lost to France forever. The fact is that the French never really colonized Cape Breton at large, and Lewisburg least of all. They knew the magnificent possibility of Sydney Harbour, but its mere extent prevented their attempting to make use of it. They saw that the whole island was a maritime paradise, with seaports in its very heart as well as round its shores. But they were a race of gallant, industrious landsmen at home, with neither the wish nor the aptitude for a nautical life abroad. They could not have failed to see that there was plenty of timber in some parts of the island, and that the soil was fit to bear good crops of grain and others. A little prospecting would also have shown them iron, coal, and gypsum. But their official parasites did not want to see smuggling, and peculation replaced by industry and trade. Nothing indeed better proves how little they thought of making Isle Royale a genuine colony than their utter failure to exploit any one of its teeming natural resources in forest, field, or mine. What the French did with extraneous resources and artificial aids in the town of Lewisburg is more to the purpose in hand. The problem of the position, and of its strength and weaknesses in the coming clash of arms, depended on six naval, military, and governmental factors, each one of which must be considered before the whole can be appreciated. These six factors were the government, the garrison, the militia, the Indians, the navy, and the fortress. Get rich and go home! The English-speaking peoples, whose ancestors once went to England as overseas emigrants, and two-thirds of whom are now themselves the sirens of successive migrations across the Seven Seas, cannot understand how intensely the general run of French officials detested colonial service, especially in a place like Lewisburg, which was everything the average Frenchman hated most. This British failure to understand a national trait, which is still as strongly marked as ever, accounts for a good deal of the exaggerated belief in the strength of the French position in America. The British Americans, who tried to think out plans of conquest, were wont to underestimate their own unorganized resources, and to overestimate the organized resources of the French, especially when they set their minds on Lewisburg. The British also entertained the erroneous idea that the whole country was under one command. This was the very thing it was not. The French system was the autocratic one, without the local autocrat, for the functions of the governor and the intendant overlapped each other, and all disputes had to be referred to Quebec, where the functions of another governor and another intendant also overlapped each other. If no decision could be reached at Quebec, then the question at issue was one of sufficient importance, the now double imbroglio would be referred to the Supreme Council in France, which would write back to Quebec, whence the decision would be forwarded to Lewisburg, where it would arrive months after many other troubles had grown out of the original dispute. The system was false from the start, because the overlapping was intentional. The idea was to prevent any one man from becoming too strong and too independent. The result was to keep governors and intendants at perpetual loggerheads and to divide every station into opposing parties. Did the governor want money and material for the fortifications? Then the intendant was sure the military chest, which was in his own charge, could not afford it. The governor might sometimes gain his ends by giving a definite emergency order under his hand and seal. But if the emergency could not be proved, this laid him open to greater risk from the intendant subsequent recriminations before the Superior Council in Quebec or the Supreme Council in France. The only way such a system could be worked at all was either by corrupt collusion or by superhuman cooperation between the two conflicting parties, or by appointing a man of genius who could make every other official discharge his proper duties and no more. Corrupt collusion was not very common, because the governors were mostly naval or military men, and the naval and military men were generally honest. Cooperation was impossible between two merely average men, and no genius was ever sent to such a place as Lewisburg. The ablest man in either of the principal posts was the notorious intendant Bijaud, who began here on a small scale the consummate schemes that proved so disastrously successful at Quebec, get rigged and go home. The minor governmental life of Lewisburg was a piece with the major. There were four or five lesser members of the Superior Council, which also had jurisdiction over Ile Saint-Jean, as Prince Edward Island was then called. The lucrative chances of the Custom House were at the mercy of four underpaid officials, grandiloquently called a court of admirality. An inferior court known as the Bailiwick tried ordinary civil suits and breaches of the peace. This Bailiwick also offered what might be euphemistically called business opportunities to enterprising members. True, there was no police to execute its decrees, and at one time a punctilious resident complained that there was not even a common hangman nor a jail nor even a tormentor to rack the criminals or inflict other appropriate tortures. But appeals took a long time and cost much money, so even the officials of the Bailiwick could pick up a living by threats of the law's delay on the one hand and promises of perverted local justice on the other. That there was money to be made, in spite of the meager salaries, is proved by the fact that the best journeyman-wigmaker in Lewisburg grew extremely rich in different branches of commerce, especially in the contraband, after filling the dual position of judge of the admiralty and judge of the Bailiwick, both to the apparent satisfaction of his friend, the Intendant. The next factor was the garrison of regulars. This was under the direct command of the king's lieutenant, who took his orders from the governor. The troops liked Lewisburg no better than the officials did. True, there were taverns and plenty. Even before Lewisburg was officially founded, they had become such a thriving nuisance that orders for their better control had been sent out from France. But there was no other place for the ordinary soldier to go to in his spare time. The officers felt the want of a larger outlook even more than the men did, and neither man nor officer ever went to Lewisburg if he could help it. When Montcom, the greatest Frenchman the New World ever saw, came out to Canada there was eager competition among the troops at home to join his army in the field. Officers paid large sums for the honour of exchanging into any one of the battalions ordered to the front, and when volunteers were called for from the ranks every single man stepped forward. But no Montcom came out to Lewisburg, and nothing but bounties could get a volunteer. There were only between five and six hundred regulars in the whole garrison during the first siege, twenty-five years after the foundation, and nearly half of these were foreigners, mostly pay-fighting Swiss. The third factor was the militia. Every able-bodied man, not specially exempt for other duties, was liable for service in time of war, and the whole island could be drawn upon for any great emergency at Lewisburg. Between thirteen and fourteen hundred men got under arms for the siege of seventeen forty-five. Those who lived in Lewisburg have the advantage of a little slack discipline and a little slack drill. Those in the country had some practice in the handling of firearms, but taken all around it would be an exaggeration to call them even quarter-trained soldiers. The fourth factor was the Indians. They belonged to the Micmac tribe of the great Algonquin family, and probably numbered no more than about four thousand throughout the whole French sphere of influence in what are now the maritime provinces. A few hundred braves might have been ready to take the war-path in the wilds of Cape Breton, but sieges were not at all in their line except when they could hang round the besiegers inland flanks on the chance of lifting scalps from careless stragglers or ambushing an occasional small party gone astray. As in Canada, so in Cape Breton, the Indians naturally sided with the French, who disturbed them less and treated them better than the British did. The British, who enjoyed the inestimable advantage of superior sea-power, had more goods to exchange, but in every other respect the French were very much preferred. The handful of French sent out an astonishingly great number of heroic and sympathetic missionaries to the natives. The many British sent out astonishingly few. The Puritan clergy did shamefully little compared with the wonderful Jesuits. Moreover, while the French in general made the Indians feel he was at all events a fellow human being, the average British colonist simply looked on him as so much vermin to be destroyed together with the obstructive wilds that harboured him. The fifth factor, the navy, brings us into contact with world wide problems of sea-power which are too far reaching for discussion here. Footnote, see in this series the winning of Canada and the passing of New France, where they are discussed. Suffice it to say that, while Lewisburg was an occasional convenience, it had also peculiar dangers for a squadron from the weaker of the two hostile navies. As squadrons from France were likely to be, the British could make for a dozen different harbours on the coast, the French could make only for this one. Therefore the British had only to guard against this one stronghold if the French were in superior force. They could, the more easily, blockade it if the French were in equal force, and they could the more easily annihilate it if it was defended by an inferior force. The last factor was the fortress itself, this so-called Gibraltar of the west, this Quebec by the sea, this Dunkirk of New France, was certainly first of its kind. But it was first only in a class of one, while the class itself was far from being a first among classes. The natural position was vastly inferior to that of Quebec or Gibraltar, while the fortifications were not to be compared with those of Dunkirk, which in one sense they were meant to replace. Dunkirk had been sold by Charles II to Louis XIV, who made it a formidable naval base commanding the Straits of Dover. When the Treaty of Utrecht compelled its demolition, the French tried to redress the balance a little by building similar works in America on a much smaller scale with a much more purely defensive purpose, and as an altogether subsidiary undertaking. Dunkirk was a pistol held at England's head because it was an integral part of France, which was the greatest military country in the world and second to England alone on the sea. Louisburg was no American Dunkirk because it was much weaker in itself, because it was more purely defensive, because the odds of population and general resources as between the two colonies were fifteen to one in favour of the British, and because the preponderance of British sea power was even greater in America than it was in Europe. The harbour of Louisburg ran about two miles northeast and southwest, with a clear average width of half a mile. The two little peninsulas on either side of the entrance were nearly a mile apart, but the actual fairway of the entrance was narrowed to a little more than a clear quarter of a mile by the reefs and islands running out from the southwestern peninsula, on which the fortress stood. This low, nubbly tongue of land was roughly triangular. It measured about three quarters of a mile on its longest side facing the harbour, over half a mile on the land side facing the enemy's army, and a good deal under half a mile on the side facing the sea. It had little to fear from naval bombardment, so long as the enemy's fleets remained outside, because fogs and storms made it very dangerous lee shore, and because, then as now, ships would not pit themselves against forts unless there is no rival fleet to fight, and unless circumstances were unusually propitious. The entrance was defended by the island battery, which flanked the approach with thirty-nine guns and the royal battery, which directly faced it with thirty guns. Some temporary lines with a few more guns were prepared in time of danger to prevent the enemy from landing in Gaborus Bay, which ran for miles southwest of Louisburg. But the garrison, even with the militia, was never strong enough to keep the enemy at arm's length from any one of these positions. Moreover, the northeast peninsula, where the lighthouse stood, commanded the island battery, and the land side of Louisburg itself was commanded by a range of low hillocks less than half a mile away. It was this land side containing the citadel and other works which so impressed outsiders with the idea of impregnable strength. The glasses was perfect, not an inch of cover wherever you looked, and the approach was mostly across a slimy bog. The ditch was eighty feet wide. The walls rose over thirty feet above the ditch. There were embouchures for one hundred and forty-eight guns all around, though not more than ninety were ever actually mounted. On the seaward face Louisburg was not so strongly fortified, but in the centre of this face there were a deep ditch and high wall, with bastions on each immediate flank, and lighter defences connecting these with the landward face. A dozen streets were laid out so as to divide the whole town into conveniently square little blocks. The area of the town itself was not much more than a hundred acres altogether, rather close quarters for several thousand men, women and children, during a siege. If reports and memoranda could defend a fortress, then Louisburg ought indeed to have been impregnable. Of course every official trust entails endless correspondence, but quite apart from the stated returns that go through the usual channels of communication, reams and reams of paper were filled with special reports, inspections, complaints, and good advice. The Governor wrote home, most elaborately, in 1724, about the progress of the works. Ten years later he announced the official inauguration of the lighthouse on the first of April. In 1736 the chief item was the engineer's report on the walls. Next year the great anxiety was about a dangerous famine, with all its attendant distress, for the many and its shameless profits for the few. On November 23, 1744, reinforcements and provisions were asked for, because intelligence had been received that the New Englanders were going to blockade Louisburg the following summer. At the same time the discontent of the garrison had come to a head, and a mutiny had broken out because the extra working-pay had not been forthcoming. After this the discipline became, not sterner, but slacker than ever, especially among the hireling Swiss. On February 8, 1745, within three months of the first siege, a memorandum was sent in to explain what was still required to finish the works begun twenty-five years before. But, after all, it was not so much the defective works that really mattered as the defective garrison behind them. The English-speaking civilians, who have written about Louisburg, have sometimes taken partial account of the ordinary Frenchman's repugnance to oversee duty in time of peace, and of the little worth of hireling foreigners in time of war. But they have always ignored that steady drip-drip-drip of deterioration which reduces the efficiency of every garrison commanded to service in remote and thoroughly uncongenial countries. Louisburg was remote, weeks away from exchanges with Quebec, months from exchanges with any part of France or Switzerland, and what other foreign station could have been more thoroughly uncongenial, except perhaps a convict station in the tropics. Bad quarters were injurable in Paris or even in the provinces, where five minutes walk would take one into something pleasanter. Bad fortifications would inspire less apprehension anywhere in France, where there was at least an army always ready to take the field. But cold, cramped quarters in foggy little Louisburg between the estranging sea and an uncouth land of rock, bog, sand, and scrubby vegetation made all the world of difference in the soldier's eyes. And to this his want of faith and works, which he saw being scamped by rascally contractors, and we can begin to understand why the general attitude of town and garrison alike was one of, here to-day and gone to-morrow. Please visit LibriVox.org. Recorded by Jody Crangle. A Chronicle of Louisburg, 1720-1760 by William Wood. Chapter 2 The Sea Link Lost, 1745 Rome would not rest till she had ruined Carthage. Britain would not rest till she had seen Dunn-Kirk demolished. New England would not rest till she had taken Louisburg. Louisburg was unique in all America, and that was its undoing. It was the one sentinel beside the gateway to New France. Therefore it ought to be taken before Quebec and Canada were attacked. It was the one corsair lying in perpetual wait beside the British lines of seaborn trade. Therefore it must be taken before British shipping could be safe. It was the one French sea-link between the Old World and the New. Therefore its breaking was of supreme importance. It was the one real fortress ever heard of in America, and it was in absolute alien hands. Therefore, so ran New England logic, it was most offensive to all true Britons, New Englanders and Puritans, to all rivals in smuggling, trade and privateering, and to all right-thinking people generally. The weakness of Louisburg was very welcome news to the energetic Massachusetts. In 1744, when Frederick the Great had begun the war of the Austrians' succession, and France had taken arms against Great Britain, de Cuisineau, the governor of Louisburg, who had received the intelligence of these events some weeks before the alert Bostonians, at once decided to win credit by striking the first blow. He was much disliked in Louisburg. He drank hard, cursed his subordinates when in his cups, and set the whole place by the ears. Moreover, many of those under him wished to avoid giving the British Americans any provocation in the hope that the war might be confined to Europe. But none dared to refuse a legal and positive order, so in May his expedition left for Canso, where there was a little homemade British fort on the strait between Cape Breton and the mainland of Nova Scotia. The 80 fishermen in Canso surrendered to de Vivier, the French commander, who sent them on to Boston after burning their fort to the ground. Elated by this somewhat absurd success, and strengthened by nearly a hundred regulars and four hundred Indians, who raised his total force to at least a thousand men, de Vivier next proceeded against Annapolis on the west side of Nova Scotia. But Masquerine, the British commander there, stood fast on his defence, though his men were few and his means small. The Acadian French in the vicinity were afraid to join de Vivier openly. The siege dragged on. The British received a slight reinforcement, the French did not, and in September de Vivier suddenly retired without attempting an assault. The burning of Canso and the attack on Annapolis stirred up the wrath of New England. A wild enthusiast, William Vaughn, urged Governor Shirley of Massachusetts to make an immediate counterattack. Shirley was an English lawyer, good at his own work, but very anxious to become famous as a conqueror. He lent a willing ear to Vaughn, and astounded the General Court of Massachusetts on January 21st, 1745, by first inducing the members to swear secrecy, and then asking them to consider a plan for a colonial expedition against Louisburg. He and they were on very good terms, but they were provincial, cautious, and naturally slow when it came to planning campaigns and pledging their credit for what was then an enormous sum of money. Nor could they be blamed. None of them knew much about armies and navies. Most thought Louisburg was a real transatlantic Dunkirk, and all knew that they were quite insolvent already. Their Joint Committee of the Houses reported against the scheme, whereupon each house carried a secret adverse vote by a large majority. But just before these votes were taken, a Puritan member from a country district wrestled in what he thought confidential prayer with such loud ejaculations that an eavesdropper overheard him and passed the secret on. Of course the momentous news at once began to run like wildfire through the province. Still, the noose had it, both in the country and the house. Surely was dejected, and in doubt what to do next. But James Gibson, the merchant militiamen, suddenly hit on the idea of getting up a petition among the business community. The results surpassed every expectation. All the merchants were eager for attack. Louisburg embodied everything they feared and hated—interference with seaborn commerce, rank, popery, French domination, trouble with Acadia, and the chance of being themselves attacked. When the petition was presented to both houses, the whole subject was again debated. Provincial insolvency and the absence of either a fleet or an army were urged by the opposition. But the fighting party put forth all their strength and pleaded that delay meant reinforcements for Louisburg and a good chance lost forever. The vote would have been a tie if a member of the opposition had not slipped and broken his leg as he was hurrying down to the house. Once the decision had been reached, however, all did their best to ensure success. Surely wrote to his brother-governors, Vaughn galloped off post-haste to New Hampshire with the first official letter. Gibson led the merchants in local military zeal. The result was that Massachusetts, which then included Maine, raised over three thousand men, while New Hampshire and Connecticut raised about five hundred each. Rhode Island concurred, but ungraciously and ineffectually late. She nursed two grudges against Massachusetts—one about the undeniably harsh treatment meted out to her great founder, Roger Williams, the other about the most fruitful source of inter-provincial mischief-making—a disputed boundary. New York lent some guns, which proved very useful. The remaining colonies did nothing. Shirley's choice of a commander-in-chief wisely fell on William Peperel. There was no military leader in the whole of New England, so the next most suitable man was the civilian who best combined the necessary qualities of good sense, sound knowledge of men in affairs, firmness, diplomacy, and popularity. Popularity was essential because all the men were volunteers. Peperel, who answered every reasonable test, went through the campaign with flying colors and came out of it as the first and only baronet of Massachusetts. He was commissioned as Major General by all three contributing provinces, since none of them recognized any common authority except that of the Crown. He was ably seconded by many leading men, who if not trained soldiers were at least accustomed to the organization of public life, for in those days the word politician had not become a term of reproach in America, and the people were often represented by men of the highest character. The financial difficulty was overcome by issuing letters of credit, which were afterwards redeemed by the imperial government at a total cost of nearly a quarter of a million sterling. There was no time and there were no means to change the militia into an army, but many compensating advantages helped to make up for its deficiencies. The men volunteered eagerly. They were all very keen to fight the French. Most of them understood the individual use of firearms. Many of them had been to sea and had learned to work together as a crew. Nearly all of them had the handiness then required for life in a new country. And what with conviction and what with prejudice, they were also quite disposed to look upon the expedition as a sort of crusade against idolatrous papists, and therefore as a very proper climax to the Great Awakening, which had recently roused New England to the heights of religious zealotry under the leadership of the famous George Whitefield himself. Strangely enough, neither Whitefield nor his friend Peperel were at all sure that the expedition was a wise or even a godly venture. Whitefield warned Peperel that he would be envied if he succeeded and abused if he failed. The Reverend Thomas Prince openly regretted the change of enemy. The heavenly shower is over from fighting the devil they needs must turn to fighting the French. But Parson Moody, most truculent of Puritans, had no doubts whatsoever. The French, the Pope, and the devil were all one to him, and when he embarked as senior chaplain, he took a hatchet with which to break down the graven images of Lewisburg. In the end, Whitefield warmed up enough to give the expedition its official motto, Nil Desperandum Christoduce. The Never Despair heartened the worldlings, the Christ as our commander appealed to the Great Awakened, and the whole saying committed him to nothing particular concerning the issue at stake. The three militia contingents numbered 4,270 men. The three naval contingents had 13 vessels, mounting 216 guns. In addition to both these forces, there were the transports, which had considerable crews, but all these together, if caught on the open sea, would be no match for a few regular men of war. New England had no navy, though the New Englanders had enjoyed a good deal of experience in minor privateering against the Spaniards during the last few years, as well as a certain amount of downright piracy in time of peace, whenever a Frenchman or a Spaniard could be safely taken at a disadvantage. So Shirley asked Commodore Warren, commanding the North American station to lend his aid. Warren had married an American and was very well disposed towards the colonists, but having no orders from England he had first felt obliged to refuse. Within a short time, however, he was given a free hand by the Imperial Government, which authorized him to concert measures with Shirley for the annoyance of the enemy and for his Majesty's service to North America. Warren immediately sailed for Canso with three men of war, and sent for another to join him. His wait for orders made him nearly three weeks later than the New Englanders in arriving at the rendezvous. But this delay, due to no fault of his own, was really an advantage to the New England militia, who thus had a chance of learning a little more drill and discipline. His four vessels carried 180 guns and 1,150 men at full strength. The thirteen provincial armed vessels carried more than a thousand men. No exact returns were ever made out for the transports, but as sixty-eight lay at anchor in Canso Harbor while others came dropping in from day to day, as there were 4,270 militiamen on board, in addition to all the stores, and as the French counted ninety-six transports, making for Gaboris Bay, there could not have been less than a hundred, while the crews could hardly have mustered less than an average of twenty men each. The grand total at the beginning of the expedition could not therefore have been less than eight thousand men, of all sorts put together. Over four thousand American provincial militia, over one thousand men of the Royal Navy, quite one thousand men aboard the provincial fighting vessels, and at least two thousand more as crews to work the transports. May 1st, the first Sunday the provincial spent at Canso, was a day of great and multifarious activity, both sacred and profane. Parson Moody, the same who had taken the war-path, with his iconoclastic hatchet, delivered a tremendous philipic from the text, Thy people shall be willing in the day of thy power. Luckily for his congregation he had the voice of a stenter, as there were several mundane competitors in an adjoining field, each bawling the word of command at the full pitch of his lungs. A conscientious diarist, though full of sabbiterian zeal, was feigned to admit that several sorts of businesses was a going on, some a exercising, some a hearing o' the preaching. On May 5th Warren sailed into Canso. The provincials thought the date of his arrival a very happy omen, as it fell on what was then, according to the old-style calendar, St. George's Day, April 23rd. After a conference with Peperel, he hurried off to begin the blockade of Lewisburg. A week later, May 21st, the transports joined him there and landed their militiamen for one of the most eccentric sieges ever known. While the British had been spending the first four months of 1745 in preparing eight thousand men, the French authorities in Lewisburg, whose force was less than two thousand, had been wasting the same precious time in ridiculous councils of war. It is a well-known saying that councils of war never fight, but these Lewisburg councils did not even prepare to fight. The news from Boston was not heeded. Worse yet, no attention was paid to the American scouting vessels, which had been hovering off the coast for more than a month. The Bibulist de Cuesnel had died in October, but his successor, Duchampon, was no better as a commandant. Perhaps the kindest thing to say of Duchampon is that he was the foolish father of a neighbor's son, of that Duchampon de Virger, who, in the next war, surrendered Fort Bozeger without a siege and left one sleepy sentry to watch wolves cove the night before the Battle of the Plains. It is true that Duchampon had succeeded to a thoroughly bad command. He had no naval force whatsoever, and the military force had become worse instead of better. The mutiny in December had left the five hundred and sixty regulars in a very sullen frame of mind. They knew that acquisitive government officials were cheating them out of their proper rations of bacon and beans. The officials knew that the soldiers knew, and so suspicion and resentment grew strong between them. The only other force was the militia, which, with certain exceptions, comprised every male inhabitant of Cape Breton, who could stand on two legs and hold a musket with both hands. There were boys in their early teens and old men in their sixties. Nearly one thousand eight hundred ought to have been available, but four or five hundred that might have been brought in never received their marching orders. So the total combatants only amounted to some one thousand nine hundred, of whom one thousand three hundred and fifty were militia. The non-combatants numbered nearly as many. The cramped hundred acres of imprisoned Lewisburg thus contained almost four thousand people, mutineers and militia, women and children, drones and other officials, all huddled up together. No reinforcements arrived after the first appearance of the British fleet. Maren, a well-known guerrilla leader, had been sent down from Quebec, through the bush, with six or seven hundred whites and Indians, to join the two thousand men whom the French government had promised to vivier for a second, and this time a general attack on Acadia. But these other two thousand were never sent, and Maren, having failed to take Annapolis by the first week in June, was too late and too weak to help Lewisburg afterwards. The same ill luck pursued the French by sea. On April thirtieth, the Renommé, a very smart frigate bringing out dispatches, was chased off by the provincial cruisers, while all subsequent arrivals from the outside world were intercepted by Warren. The landing affected on May twelfth, was not managed according to Shirley's written instructions, nor was the siege. Shirley had been playing a little war-game in his study, with all the inconvenient obstacles left out, the wind, the weather, the crashing surf at Gaviris Bay, the rocks and bogs of the surrounding country, the difficulties of entering a narrow-necked harbour under a combination of end-on and broadside fire, the terrible lease-shore off the islands, reefs and lighthouse-point, the commonest vigilance of the most lovin'ly garrison, and even the offensive power of the guns on the walls of Lewisburg itself. Shirley's plan was that Peperole should arrive in the offing, too late to be seen, land unobserved, and march on Lewisburg in four detachments while the garrison was wrapped in slumber. Two of these detachments were to march within striking distance and then halt and keep a profound silence. The third was to march under cover of said hills, until it was opposite the royal battery, which it was to assault on a given signal, while the profound silence-men rushed the western gate. The fourth detachment was to race along the shore, scale a certain spot in the wall, and secure the windows of the governor's apartments. All this was to be done by raw militia on ground they had never reconnoitred, and in the dead of night. Needless to say Peperole tried something quite different. At daybreak of the twelfth the whole fleet stood in Gaboris Bay, a large open roadstead running west from the Little Lewisburg Peninsula. The provincials eyed the fortress eagerly. It looked mean, squat, and shrunken in the dim grey light of early dawn. But it looked hard enough for all that. Its alarm bells began to ring, its signal cannon fired, and all the people who had been living outside hurried in behind the walls. The New Englanders were so keen to land that they ran some danger of falling into complete disorder. But Peperole managed very cleverly. Seeing that some Frenchmen were ready to resist a landing on Flat Point, two miles south-west of Lewisburg, he made a faint against it, drew their fire, and then raced his boats for Freshwater Cove, another two miles beyond. Having completely out-distance the handful of panting Frenchmen, he landed in perfect safety and presently scattered them with a wild charge, which cost them about twenty and killed, wounded, and prisoners. Before dark, two thousand provincials were ashore. The other two thousand landed at their leisure the following day. The next event in this extraordinary siege is one of the curiosities of war. On May fourteenth, the enthusiastic fawn took several hundreds of these navy-landed men to the top of the nearest hillock, and saluted the walls with three cheers. He then circled the whole harbour, keeping well inland, till he reached the undefended storehouses on the inner side of the northeast harbour, a little beyond the royal battery. These he had once set on fire. The pitch, tar, wood, and other combustibles made a blinding smoke, which drifted over the royal battery and spread a stampeding panic among its garrison of four hundred men. Vaan then retired for the night. On his return to the royal battery in the morning, with only thirteen men, he was astounded to see no sign of life there. Suspecting a ruse, he bribed an Indian with a flask of brandy to feign being drunk and reel up to the walls. The Indian reached the fort unchallenged, climbed into an embrasure, and found the whole place deserted. Vaan followed it once, and a young volunteer, shinning up the flagpole, made his own red coat fast to the top. This defiance was immediately answered by a random salvo from Lewisburg less than a mile across the harbour. Vaan's next move was to write a dispatch to Peperole. May it please your honour to be informed that by the grace of God and the courage of thirteen men, I entered the royal battery about nine o'clock, and am waiting for a reinforcement and a flag. He had hardly sent this off before he was attacked by four boats from Lewisburg. Quite undaunted, however, he stood out on the open bench with his thirteen men, and kept them all at bay till the reinforcements and the flag arrived, with Bradstreet, who was afterwards to win distinction as the captor of Fort Frontenac during the great campaign of 1759. This disgraceful abandonment and this dramatic capture of the royal battery marked the first and most decisive turning point in the fortunes of the siege. The French were dismayed, the British were elated, and both the dismay and the elation grew as time wore on, because everything seemed to conspire against the French and in favour of the British. Even the elements, as the anonymous habitant de Lewisburg complained in his wonderfully candid diary, seemed to have taken sides. There had never been so fine a spring for naval operations, but this was the one thing which was entirely independent of French fault or British merit. All the other strokes of luck owed something to human causes. Wiseacres had shaken their heads over the crazy idea of taking British cannonballs solely to fit French cannon that were to be taken at the beginning of the siege. It was too much like selling the pelt before the trap was sprung, yet these balls actually were used to load the forty-eight pounders taken with the royal battery. Moreover, as if to cap the climax, ten other cannons were found buried in the northeast harbour, and again spare British balls were found to fit exactly. The fact is that what we should now call the intelligence department had been doing good work the year before by spying out the land at Lewisburg and reporting to the proper men in Boston. The Bostonians had always intended to take the royal battery at the earliest possible moment, but nobody had thought that the French would abandon it without a blow and leave it intact for their enemy with all its armament complete. The French Council of War apparently shrank from hurting the feelings of the engineer in charge, who had pleaded for its preservation. They then ran away without spiking the guns properly and without making the slightest attempt either to burn the cartridges or knock the trunnions off. The invaluable stores were left in their places. The only real destruction was caused by a barrel of powder, which some bunglers blew up by mistake. The inevitable consequences of all this French ineptitude was that the royal battery roared against Lewisburg the very next morning with tremendous effect, smashing the works most exposed to its fire, bringing down houses about the inhabitants' ears, and sending the terrified non-combatants scurrying off to underground cover. Meanwhile the bulk of the New Englanders were establishing their camp along the brook which fell into Gaboris Bay beside Flat Point and within two miles of Lewisburg. Equipment of all kinds was very scarce. Tents were so few and bad that old sails stretched over ridge poles had to be used instead. When sails ran short, brushwood shelters roofed in with overlapping spruce boughs weren't used as substitutes. Landing the four thousand men had been comparatively easy work, but landing the stores was very hard indeed, while landing the guns was not only much harder still but full of danger as well. Many a flatboat was pounded into pulpwood while unloading the stores, though the men waited in waist deep and carried all the heavy bundles on their heads and shoulders. When it came to the artillery it meant a boat lost for every single piece of ordinance landed. Nor was even this the worst. For as strange as it may seem there was at first more risk of foundering a shore than a float. There were neither roads nor yet the means to make them. There were no horses, oxen, mules or any other means of transport except the brawny men themselves who literally buckled two with anchor cable drag ropes, a hundred pair of straining men for each great lumbering gun. Over the sand they went at a romp. Over the rocks they had to take care, and in the dense, obstructing scrub they had to haul through by main force. But this was child's play to what awaited them in the slimy, shifting and bolder strewn bog they had to pass before reaching the hillocks which commanded Lewisburg. The first attempts here were disastrous. The guns sank out of sight in the engulfing bog, while the toiling men became regular human targets for shot and shell from Lewisburg. It was quite plain that the British batteries could never be built on the hillocks if the guns had nothing to keep them from a boggy grave, and if the men had no protection from the French artillery. But a ship-builder colonel, Miserve of New Hampshire, came to the rescue by designing a gunslay, sixteen feet in length and five in the beam. Then the crews were told off again, two hundred men for each slay, and orders were given that the work should not be done except at night or under cover of the frequent fogs. After this things went much better than before, but the labour was tremendous still, while the danger from random shells bursting among the boulders was not to be despised. Four hundred struggling feet, four hundred straining arms, each team hove on its long-taught cable through fog, rain, and the blackness of the night, till every gun had been towed into one of the batteries before the walls. The triumph was all the greater because the work grew not easier, but harder as it progressed. The same route used twice became an impassable quagmire, so when the last two hundred men had wallowed through, the whole ensnaring bog was seemed with a perfect maze of decoying death trails, snaking in and out of the forbidding scrub and boulders. Pepperyl's dispatches could not exaggerate these almost incredible hardships. A float and a shore, a wake and a sleep, the men were soaking wet for days together. At the end of the longest haul they had nothing but a choice of evils, they could either lie down where they were on hard rock or oozing bog, exposed to the enemy's fire the moment it was light enough to see the British batteries, or they could plow their way back to camp. Here they were safe enough from shot and shell, but in other respects no better off than in the batteries. Most men's kits were of the very scantiest, very few, had even a single change of clothing, a good many went barefoot, nearly all were in rags before the siege was over. When twenty-five pieces had been dragged up to Green Hill and its adjoining hillocks, the bombardment at last began. The opening salvo seemed to give the besiegers new life, no sooner was their first rough line of investment formed than they commenced gaining ground with a disregard for cover, which would have cost them dear if the French practice had not been quite as bad as their own. A really wonderful amount of ammunition was fired off on both sides without hitting anything in particular. Louisburg itself was, of course, too big a target to be missed, as a rule, and the besiegers soon got so close that they simply had to be hit themselves now and then. But generally speaking it may be truthfully said that while in an ordinary battle it takes a man's own weight in cartridges to kill him, in this most extraordinary siege it took at least a horse's weight as well. The approach to the wall defied all the usual precautions of regular war, but the circumstances justified its boldness. With only four thousand men at the start, with nearly half of this total on the sick list at one rather critical juncture, with very few trained gunners and without any corpse of engineers at all, the provincials adapted themselves to the situation so defiantly that they puzzled, shook, and overawed the French, who thought them two or three times stronger than they really were. Recklessly defiant though they were however, they did provide the breaching batteries with enough cover for the purpose in hand. This is amply proved both by the fewness of their casualties and by the evidence of Bastide, the British engineer at Annapolis, who inspected the lines of investment on his arrival twelve days before the surrender and reported them sufficiently protected. Where the provincials showed their prentice hands to genuine disadvantage was in their absurdly solemn and utterly futile councils of war. No schoolboy's debating club could well have done worse than the council held to consider Duchambon's stereotyped answer to the usual summons sent in at the beginning of the siege. The formula that his cannon would answer for him provoked a tremendous storm in the council's teacup and immediately resulted in the following resolution. Advised unanimously that the town of Lewisburg be attacked this night. But confronted with a great dissatisfaction in many of the officers and soldiers at the designed attack of the town this night, it was advised unanimously by a second council called in great haste that the said attack be deferred for the present. This present lasted during the rest of the siege. Once the New Englanders had settled down, however, they wisely began to increase their weight of metal as well as to decrease the range at which they used it. They set to work with a will to make a breach at the north-west gate of Lewisburg, near where the inner angle of the walls abutted on the harbour. And they certainly needed all their indomitable perseverance when it came to arming their new north-western or Titcombe's battery. The twenty-two pounders had required two hundred men a piece. The forty-two pounders took three hundred. Two of these unwieldy guns were hauled a couple of miles round the harbour in the dark from that royal battery which Vaughn had taken by the grace of God and the courage of thirteen men, and then successfully mounted at Titcombe's just where they could do the greatest damage to their former owners, the French. Well-trained gunners were exceedingly scarce. Pepperall could find only six among his four thousand men, but Warren lent him three more, whom he could ill-spare as no one knew when a fleet might come out from France. With these nine instructors to direct them, Pepperall's men closed in their line of fire till besieged and besiegers came within such easy musket shot of one another that taunting challenges and invitations could be flung across the intervening space. Each side claimed advantages and explained shortcomings to its own satisfaction. A New England diarist says, We began our fire with as much fury as possible, and the French returned it as warmly with cannon, mortars, and continual showers of musket balls, but by eleven o'clock we had beat them all from their guns. A French diarist of the same day says that the fire from the walls was stopped on purpose, chiefly to save powder, while the same reason is assigned for the British order to cease fire exactly one hour later. The practice continued to be exceedingly bad on both sides, so bad indeed that the New Englanders suffered more from the bursting of their own guns than from the enemy's fire. The nine instructors could not be everywhere, and all their good advice could not prevent the eager amateurs from grossly overloading the double-shotted pieces. Another forty-two pound gun burst at the Grand Battery, Captain Hale is dangerously hurt by the bursting of another gun. He was the mainstay of our gunnery since Captain Rhodes' misfortune. A misfortune due to the same cause, but in spite of all such drawbacks on the British side, Louisbourg got much the worst of it. The French had to fire from the centre-outwards at a semi-circle of batteries that fired back convergingly at them. Besides, it was almost as hard to hit the thin irregular line of British batteries as it was to miss the deep wide target of overcrowded Louisbourg. The walls were continually being smashed from without and patched up from within. The streets were plowed from end to end. Many houses were laid in ruins. Only one remained intact when the siege was over. The non-combatants who now exceeded the garrison effectives were half-buried in the smothering casemates underground, and though the fighting men had light air and food enough, and though they were losing very few and killed and wounded, they too began to feel that Louisbourg must fall if it was not soon relieved from outside. The British, on the contrary, grew more and more confident, both afloat and ashore, though they had one quite alarming scare ashore. They knew their navy outmatched the French, and they saw that while warren was being strengthened de Chambon was being left as devoid of naval force as ever. But their still greater confidence ashore was for the time being very rudely shaken when they heard that marron, the same French guerrilla leader who had been sent down from Quebec against Annapolis, with six or seven hundred whites and Indians, had been joined by the promised reinforcements from France and was coming to take the camp in rear. The truth was that the reinforcements never arrived, that marron had failed to take Annapolis, and that there was no real danger from his own dwindling force, even if it had tried to relieve Louisbourg in June. But the rumour ran quickly through the whole camp, probably not without peperol's own encouragement, and at once produced not a panic, but the most excellent effect. Discipline never good had been growing worse, punishments were unknown, officers and men were petitioning for leave to go home, quite regardless of the need for their services at the front, demands for promotion for extra allowances, and for increased pay were becoming a standing nuisance. Then, just as the leaders were at their wits end what to do, marron's threatened attack came to their aid, and their brave armed mob once more began to wear the semblance of an army. Centuries, pickets and outposts appeared as if by magic, officers went their rounds with seal, the camp suddenly ceased to be a disorderly playground for everyone off duty, the breaching batteries redoubled their efforts against the walls. The threat of danger once passed however the men soon slipped back into their careless ways. A New England chronicler records that those who were on the spot have frequently in my hearing laughed at the recital of their own irregularities and expressed their admiration when they reflected on the most miraculous preservation of the army from destruction. Men off duty amused themselves with free and easy musketry, which would have been all very well if there had not been such a dearth of powder for the real thing. Races, wrestling and coits were better, while fishing was highly commendable, both in the way of diet as well as in the way of sport. Such entries as three lobsters and six trouts appeared in several diaries. Nor were other forms of gaiety forgotten. Even in Massachusetts Puritan could recommend a sermon for general distribution in the camp, because it will please your whole army as it shows them the way to gain by their gallantry the hearts and affections of the ladies. And even a city of the great awakening like Boston could produce a letter like the following. I hope this will find you at Lewisburg with a bowl of punch, a pipe and a pack of cards and whatever else you desire. I had forgot to mention a pretty Frenchman Bozelle. Your friend Luke has lost several beaver hats already concerning the expedition. He is so very zealous about it that he has turned poor Bouchier out of his house for saying he believed you wouldn't take the place. Damn his blood, says Luke. Let him be an Englishman or a Frenchman and not pretend to be an Englishman when he is a Frenchman in his heart. If drinking to your success would take Cape Britain, you must be in possession of it now, for it's a standing toast. The day this letter was written in Boston, May 6th, Warren had already begun the regular blockade. Only a single ship eluded him, an ably-handed bask, which stood in and rounded to under the walls of Lewisburg after running the gauntlet of the Royal Battery, on which the French fired with all their might to keep its own fire down. A second vessel was forced to ground. Her captain fought her to the last, but Warren's boat crews took her. Some men who escaped from her brought to Chambon the news that a third French ship, the Vigilant, was coming to the relief of Lewisburg with ammunition in other stores. This ship had 560 men aboard, that is, as many as all the regulars in Lewisburg. On May 31st the garrison heard a tremendous cannonading out at sea. It grew in volume as Warren's squadron was seen to surround the stranger, who was evidently making a gallant fight against long odds. Presently it ceased. The clustered vessels parted, spread out, and took up their stations exactly as before, except that a new vessel was now flying the British flag. This was the Vigilant, which had been put in charge of a prized crew, while her much needed stores had been sent in to the provincial army. The French in Lewisburg were naturally much discouraged to see one of their best frigates flying the Union Jack, but they still hoped she might not really be the anxiously expected Vigilant. Warren, knowing their anxiety, determined to take advantage of it at the first opportunity. He had not long to wait. A party of New Englanders wandering too far inland were ambushed by the French Indians, who promptly scalped all the prisoners. Warren immediately sent in a formal protest to Duchampon, with a covering letter from the captain of the Vigilant, who willingly testified to the good treatment he and his crew were receiving on board the British men of war. Warren's messenger spoke French perfectly, but he concealed his knowledge by communicating with Duchampon through an interpreter. This put the French off their guard, and induced them to express their dismay without reserve when they read the news about the Vigilant. Everything they said was of course reported back to Warren, who immediately passed it on to Pepperyl. Warren now thought the time had come to make a bold decisive stroke. He had just been reinforced by two more frigates out from England. Tidcombe's famous Brace of 42s had just begun to hammer in the northwest gate of Louisburg. Pepperyl's lines of investment were quite complete. The chance was too tempting to let slip, especially as it was safe strategy to get into Louisburg before the French could be relieved either by land or sea. Still there was the island battery to reckon with. It was full of fight and it flanked the narrow entrance in the most threatening way. Warren paused to consider the strength of this last outpost of the French defenses and called a council of war to help him. For once a council favored extreme measures, whereupon Warren sent in word to Pepperyl, asking for 1,500 provincials and proposing a combined assault immediately. The plan was that Warren should sail in past the island battery and attack the harbor face of Louisburg with every soldier, sailor and ship's gun at his disposal, while Pepperyl carried the landward face by assault. This plan might have succeeded, though at considerable loss, if Pepperyl's whole 4,000 had been effective, but as he then had 1,900 sick and wounded and 600 guarding his rear against the rumored advance of Marin from Annapolis, it was quite evident that if he gave Warren another 1,500 he would have to assault the landward face alone. Under these circumstances he very sensibly declined to cooperate in the way Warren had suggested, but he offered 600 men both from his army and the transports for the vigilant, whose prize crew would thus be released from duty aboard their own vessels. Warren, who was just over 40, replied with some heat. But Pepperyl, who was just under 50, kept his temper admirably and carried the day. Warren, however, still urged Pepperyl to take some decisive step. Both Fleet and Army agreed that a night attack on the island battery was the best alternative to Warren's impracticable plan. Vaughn jumped at the idea, hoping to repeat in another way his success against the Royal Battery. He promised that if he was given a free hand he would send Pepperyl the French flag within 48 hours, but Vaughn was not to lead. The whole attack was entrusted to men who specially volunteered for it and who were allowed to choose their own officers. A man called Brooks happened to be on the crest of the wave of camp popularity at the moment, so he was elected Colonel for this great occasion. The volunteers soon began to assemble at the Royal Battery, but they came in by driblets and most of them were drunk. The commandant of the Battery felt far from easy. I doubt whether straggling fellows three, four or seven out of a company ought to go on such service. They seemed to be impatient for action. If there were a more regular appearance it would give me greater satisfaction. His misgivings were amply justified, for the men who Pepperyl was just beginning to form into bodies with some kind of cohesion were once more being allowed to dissolve into the original armed mob. The night of June 7th was dark and calm, a little before twelve, three hundred men wisely discarding oars paddled out from the Royal Battery and met another hundred who came from Lighthouse Point. The paddles took them along in silence while they circled the island looking for the narrow landing-place where only three boats could go abreast between the destroying rocks on which the surf was breaking. Presently they found the tiny cove and a hundred and fifty men landed without being discovered, but then with incredible folly they suddenly announced their presence by giving three cheers. The French commandant had cautioned his garrison to be alert, on account of the unnatural darkness, and at this very moment he happened himself to be pacing up and down the rampart overlooking the spot where the volunteers were expressing their satisfaction and having surprised him so well. His answer was instantaneous and effective. The battery blazed with cannon, swivels, and small arms, which fired point-blank at the men ashore and with true aim at the boats crowded together round the narrow landing-place. Undaunted though undisciplined, the men ashore rushed at the walls with their scaling ladders and began the assault. The attempt was vain. The first men up the rungs were shot, stabbed, or cut down. The ladders were smashed or thrown aside. Not one attacker really got home. Meanwhile the leading boats in the little cove were being knocked into splinters by the storm of shot. The rest sheared off. None but the hundred and fifty men ashore were left to keep up the fight with the garrison. For once the odds were entirely with the French, who fired from under perfect cover, while the unfortunate provincials fired back from the open rocks. This exchange of shots went on till daylight when one hundred and nineteen provincials surrendered at discretion. Their total loss was one hundred and eighty-nine, nearly half the force employed. Despairing Lewisburg naturally made the most of this complete success. The bells were rung and the cannon were fired to show the public joy, and to put the best face on the general situation. The chambon surpassed himself in gross exaggerations. He magnified the hundred and fifty men ashore into a thousand, and the two hundred and fifty afloat into eight hundred, while he bettered both these statements by reporting that the whole eighteen hundred had been destroyed except the hundred and nineteen who had been taken prisoners. The chambon's triumph was short-lived. The indefatigable provincials began a battery at Lighthouse Point, which commanded the island at less than half a mile. They had seized this position some time before and called it Gorham's Post after the colonel whose regiment held it. Fourteen years later there was another, and more famous, Gorham's Post on the south shore of the St. Lawrence near Quebec opposite Wolf's Cove. The arming of this battery was a stupendous piece of work. The guns had to be taken round by sea, out of range of the island battery, hauled up low, but very dangerous cliffs, and then dragged back overland another mile and a quarter. The directing officer was Colonel Gridley, who drew the official British maps and plans of Lewisburg in 1745, and who thirty years later traced the American defences on the slopes of Bunkers Hill. The chambon had attempted to make an attack on Gorham's Post as soon as it was established. His idea was that his men should follow the same route as the British guns had followed, that is, that they should run the gauntlet between the British fleet and army, land well north of Gorham's Post, and take it by surprise from the rear. But his detachment, which was wholly inadequate, failed to strike its blow, and was itself very nearly cut off by Warren's guard boats on its crestfallen return to Lewisburg. Gridley's lighthouse battery soon overmatched the island battery, where powder was getting dangerously scarce. Many of the French guns were knocked off their mountings while the walls were breached. Finally the British bombardment became so effective that Frenchmen were seen running into the water to escape the bursting shells. It was now past the middle of June, and the siege had lasted more than a month. The circle of fire was closing in on the beleaguered garrison. Their total effectives had sunk to only a thousand men. This thousand labored harder in its losing cause than might have been expected. Perhaps the mutineers hoped to be pardoned if they made a firm defence. Perhaps the militia thought they ought not to be outdone by the mutineers and hireling foreigners. But whatever the reason, great efforts were certainly made to build up by night when the British knocked down by day. Two could play at that game, however, and the British had the men and means to win. Their western batteries from the land were smashing the walls into ruins. Their royal battery wrecked the whole inner waterfront of Lewisburg. Breaches were yawning elsewhere. British facines were visible in large quantities, ready to fill up the ditch, which was already half full of debris. The French scouts reported hundreds of scaling ladders on the reverse slopes of the nearest hillocks. Warren's squadron had just been again reinforced, and now numbered eleven sail, carrying 554 guns and 3,000 men. There was no sign of help by land or sea for shrunken, battered, and despairing Lewisburg. Food, ammunition, stores were all running out. Moreover, the British were evidently preparing a joint attack, which would result in putting the whole garrison to the sword if a formal surrender could not be made in time. Now that the island battery had been silenced, there was no reason why Warren's plan should not be crowned with complete success. Accordingly, he arranged with Pepperel to run in with the first fair wind at the head of the whole fleet, which, with the provincial armed vessels, now numbered 24 sail, carried 770 guns, and was manned by 4,000 sailors. Half these men could be landed to attack the inner waterfront, while Pepperel could send another 2,000 against the walls. The total odds against Lewisburg would thus be about 4 to 1 in men and over 8 to 1 in guns actually engaged. But this threatened assault was never made. In the early morning of June 27, the non-combatants in Lewisburg unanimously petitioned de Chambon to surrender forthwith. They crept out of their underground dungeons and gazed with mortal apprehension at the overwhelming forces that stood arrayed against their crumbling walls and dwindling garrison. Noon came, and their worst fears seemed about to be realized. But when the drums began beating, it was to a parlay, not to arms. A sigh of ineffable relief went up from the whole of Lewisburg, and every eye followed the little white flutter of the flag of truce as it neared that terrible breaching battery opposite the west gate. A provincial officer came out to meet it. The French officer and he saluted, then both moved into the British lines and beyond, to where Warren and Pepperel were making their last arrangements on Green Hill. After a short consultation, the British leaders sent in a joint reply to say that de Chambon could have till eight the next morning to make his proposals. These proved to be so unacceptable that Pepperel refused to consider them, and at once sent counter-proposals of his own. De Chambon had now no choice between annihilation and acceptance, so he agreed to surrender Lewisburg the following day. He was obliged to guarantee that none of the garrison should bear arms against the British in any part of the world for a whole year. Every one in Lewisburg was of course promised full protection for both property and person. De Chambon's one successful stipulation was that his troops should march out with the honours of war, drums beating, bayonets fixed, and colours flying. Warren and Pepperel willingly accorded this on the twenty-eighth, and the formal transfer took place next day, exactly seven weeks since the first eager New Englanders had waited ashore through the thundering surf of Gaboris Bay. The total losses in killed and wounded were never precisely determined. Each side minimised its own and maximised the enemies. But as de Chambon admitted a loss of one hundred and forty-five, and as the provincials claimed to have put three hundred out of action, the true number is probably about two hundred, or just over ten percent of the whole garrison. The provincials reported their own killed quite correctly, at a hundred. The remaining deaths on both sides were due to disease. The provincial wounded were never grouped together in any official returns. They amounted to about three hundred. This brings the total casualties in Pepperel's army up to four hundred and gives the same percentage as the French. The highest proportion of casualties among all the different forces was the fifteen percent lost by the French on board the vigilant in less than five hours fighting. The lowest was in Warren's squadron and the provincial marine, about five in each. The loss of material suffered by the French was, of course, on quite a different scale. Every fortification and other building in Lewisburg, with the remarkable exception of a single house, was at least partly demolished by the nine thousand cannonballs and six hundred shells that hit the target of a hundred acres peopled by four thousand souls. On the twenty ninth, the French marched out with the honors of war, laid down their arms, and were put under guard as prisoners, pending their transport to France. Duchampon handed the keys to Pepperel at the south gate. The victorious but disgusted provincials marched in by the west gate and found themselves set to protect the very houses that they had hoped to plunder. Was it not high time to recoup themselves for serving as soldiers at six pence a day? Great Babylon had fallen and ought to be destroyed, of course, with due profit to the destroyers. There was a regular Lewisburg legend, current in New England, that stores of goods and money were to be found in the strong rooms of every house. So we can understand the indignation of the men, whose ideas were colored by personal contact with smuggling and privateering, and sometimes with downright piracy, when they were actually told off as sentries over these mythical hordes of wealth. One diarist made the following entry immediately after he had heard the news. Sabbath day, ye 16th June, old style, they came to terms for us to enter ye city tomorrow, and poor's terms they be, too. Another added that there was a great noise and hubbub amongst ye soldiers about ye plunder, some a cursing, some a swearing. Five days later, a third indignant provincial wrote, ye French keep possession yet, and we are forced to stand at their doors to guard them. Another sympathetic chronicler, after pouring out the vials of his wrath on the claws, which guaranteed the protection of French private property, lamented that, by these means, the poor's soldiers lost all their hopes and just a merit of plunder promised them. While Parson Moody was preaching a great thanksgiving sermon, and all the senior officers were among his congregation, there was what responsible officials called excessive stealing in every part of the town. Had this stealing really been very excessive, no doubt it would have allayed the grumbling in the camp, but as a matter of fact there was so little to steal that the looters began to suspect collusion between their leaders and the French. Another fancied rong exasperated the provincial's at this critical time. A rumour ran through the camp that Warren had forestalled Pepperel by receiving the keys himself. Warren was cursed, Pepperel blamed, and a mutinous spirit arose. Then it was suddenly discovered that Pepperel had put the keys in his pocket. Meanwhile the fleet was making haul after haul. When Pepperel marched through the battered west gate at the head of his motley army, Warren had led his squadron into the harbour, and both commanders had saluted the raising of the Union Jack, which marked the change of ownership. But no sooner had the sound of guns and cheering died away than the Union Jack was lowered and the French flag was raised again, both over the citadel of Lewisburg and over the island battery. This stratagem succeeded beyond Warren's utmost expectations. Several French vessels were lured into Lewisburg and captured with stores and men enough to keep the British out for some weeks longer. Their cargos were worth about a million dollars. Then, just as the naval men were wondering whether their harvest was over or not, a fine French frigate made for the harbour quite unsuspectingly and only discovered her fatal mistake too late to turn back. By the irony of circumstances she happened to be called Notre Dame de la Diverance. Among her passengers was the distinguished man of science, Don Antonio de Ulia, on his way to Paris with all the results of those explorations in South America which he afterwards embodied in a famous book of travel. Warren treated him with the greatest courtesy and promised that all his collections should be duly forwarded to the Royal Academy of Sciences. Once this exchange of international amenities had been ended, however, the usual systematic search began. The visible cargo was all cocoa, but hidden underneath were layers and layers of shining silver dollars from Peru, and underneath this double million another two million dollars worth of ingots of silver and ingots of gold. The contrast between the poverty of Lewisburg where so much had been expected and the rich halls of prize money made by the fleet was gall and wormwood to the provincials, but their resentment was somewhat tempered by Warren's genial manner towards them. Warren was at home with all sorts and conditions of men. His own brother, officers, statesmen and courtiers, distinguished strangers like Ulia, and colonel merchants like Peperole were equally loud in his praise, with the lesser and much more easily offended class of the New Englanders found in the ranks he was no less popular. A rousing speech in which he praised the magnificently stubborn work accomplished by my wife's fellow countrymen, a hearty generosity all round, and a special hog's head of the best Jamaica rum for the garrison of the Royal Battery, won him a great deal of goodwill in spite of the fact that his admiral's eighth of the naval prize money amounted to some sixty thousand pounds, while Peperole found himself ten thousand pounds out of pocket at the end of the siege. Peperole, however, was a very rich man, for those colonial days, and he could well afford to celebrate the fall of Lewisburg by giving the chief naval and military officers a dinner, the fame of which will never fade away from some New England memories. Everything went off without a hitch, but as the hour approached there was a growing anxiety on the part of both host and guests, as to whether or not the redoubtable parson moody would keep them listening to his grace till all the meats got cold. He was well known for the length as well as for the strength of his discourses. He had once denounced the devil in a grace of forty minutes. So what was the surprised delight of his fellow revelers when he hardly kept them standing longer than his many seconds? Good Lord, he said, we have so much to thank thee for. The time will be too short. Therefore we must leave it for eternity. Bless our food and fellowship on this joyful occasion for the sake of Christ our Lord. Amen. The mother country's joy was less exuberant. There were so many other things to think of nearer home, among them the British defeat at Fontenoy, and the landing of the young pretender. Nor was the actual victory without alloy, for prescient people feared that a practically independent Colonel army had been encouraged to become more independent still. And who can say the fear was groundless? Lewisburg really did serve to blood New Englanders for Bunkers Hill. But in spite of this one drawback, the news was welcomed, partly because any victory was welcome at such a time, and partly because the fall of Lewisburg was a signal assertion of British sea power on both sides of the Atlantic. London naturally made over much of Warren's share, just as Boston made over much of Pepperels. But the imperial government itself perfectly understood that the fleet and the army were each an indispensable half of one cooperating whole. Warren was promoted rear admiral of the blue, the least that could be given him. Pepperels received much higher honors. He was made a baronet, and like Shirley was given the colonelcy of a regiment which was to bear his name. Such colonelsies do not imply the actual command of men, but are honorary distinctions of which even kings and conquerors are proud. Nor was the provincial marine forgotten. Ruse, of the Shirley, was sent to England with dispatches, and was there made a post-captain in the Royal Navy for his gallantry in action against the vigilant. He afterwards enjoyed a distinguished career and died an admiral. It was in his ship, the Sutherland, that Wolf wrote the final orders for the Battle of the Plains fourteen years after this first siege of Lewisburg. End of Chapter 2. The Sea Link Lost, 1745. Recorded by Jody Crangle. www.voiceoversandvocals.com Lewisburg was the most thoroughly hated place in all America. The French government hated it, as Napoleon hated the peninsula, because it was a drain on their resources. The British government hated it because it cut into their overseas communications. The American colonists hated it because it was a standing menace to their ambitious future. And everyone who had to live in it, no matter whether he was French or British, European or American, naval or military, private or official, hated it as only exiles can. But perhaps even exiled Frenchmen detested it less hardly than to disgusted provincials who formed its garrison from the summer of 1745 to the spring of the following year. Warren and Pepperell were obliged to spend half their time in seeing court-martial justice done. The blue jackets fretted for some home port in which to enjoy their plentiful prize money. The provincials fretted for home at any cost. They were angry at being kept on duty at six pence a day after the siege was over. They chafed against the rules about looting, as well as against what they thought the unjust difference between the millions sterling that had been captured at sea, under full official sanction and the ridiculous collection of odds and ends that could be stolen on land at the risk of pains and penalties. Imagine the rage of the sullen Puritan, even if he had a sense of humor, when after hearing a blue jacket discussing plans for spending a hundred golden guineas, he had to make such entries in his diary as these of private Benjamin crafts. Saturday, received a half pint of rum to drink King's health, the Lord look upon us and prepare us for his holy day. Sunday, blessed be the Lord that has given us to enjoy another Sabbath. Monday, last night I was taken very bad. The Lord be pleased to strengthen my inner man. May be all be prepared for his holy will. Received part of plunder. Nine small-toothed combs. No wonder there was trouble in plenty. The routine of a small and uncongenial station is part of a regular second nature, though a very disagreeable part. But it maddens militia men when the stir of active service is passed, and they think they are being kept on such duty over time. The Massachusetts men had the worst pay and the best ringleaders, so they were the first to break out openly. One morning they fell in without their officers, marched on to the General Parade, and threw their mustots down. This was a dramatic but ineffectual form of protest because nearly all the muskets were the private property of the men themselves, who soon came back to take their favorite weapons up again. One of their most zealous chaplains, however, was able to enter in his diary, perhaps not without a qualm, but certainly not without of proper pride in New England's spirit the remark of a naval officer that he had thought the New England men were cowards, but that now he thought that if they had a pickaxe and spade they would dig ye way to hell and storm it. The only relief from the deadly monotony and loneliness of Lewisburg was to be found in the bad bargains and worse entertainment offered by the camp followers who were quickly gathered, like a flock of vultures, to pick the carcass to the bone. There were few pickings to be had, but these human parasites held on till the bones were bare. Of course they gave an inordinate amount of trouble. They always do, but well-organized armies keep them in their place while militian men cannot. Between the camp followers and the men, Peperole was almost driven mad. He implored Shirley to come and see things for himself. Shirley came. He arrived at the end of August, accompanied both by his own wife and by Warrens. He delivered a patriotic speech in which he did not stent his praise of what had really been a great and notable achievement. His peroration called forth some genuine enthusiasm. It began with a promise to raise the pay of the Massachusetts contingent by fifteen shillings a month and ended with free rum all round and three cheers for the king. The prospect thereupon brightened a little. The mutineers kept quiet for several days and a few men even agreed to re-enlist until the following June. Shirley was very much pleased with the immediate result and still more pleased with himself. His next dispatch assured the Duke of Newcastle that nobody else could have quelled the incipient mutiny so well, nor was the boast in one sense vain since nobody else had the authority to raise the men's pay. But discontent again became rife when it began to dawn on the provincials that they would have to garrison Louisburg until the next open season. The unwelcome truth was that except for a few raw recruits no reliefs were forthcoming from any quarter. The promised regulars had left Gibalders so late that they had to be sent to Virginia for the winter lest the sudden change to cold and clammy Louisburg should put them on the sick list. The two new regiments, Shirley's and Pepperyl's, which were to be recruited in the American colonies and form part of the Imperial Army, could not be raised in time. There even seemed to be some doubt as to whether they could be raised at all. The absence of Pepperyl from New England, the hatred of garrison duty in Louisburg, and resentment at seeing some Englishman commissioned to command Americans, were three great obstacles in the way. The only other resource was the colonial militia whose waves and strays alone could be induced to enlist. Thus, once the ice began to form, the despairing provincial garrison saw that there could be no escape. The only discharge was death. What were then known as camp-fever had already broken out in August, as many as twenty-seven funerals in a single day passed by the old blind kiln on the desolate point beyond the seaward walls of Louisburg. After we got into the town a sordid indolence or snoth, for want of discipline, induced putrid fevers and dissentries, which at length became contagious and the people died like rotten sheep. Medical men were ignorant and few. Proper attendance was wholly lacking. But the devotion of the Puritan chaplains, rivaling that of the early Jesuits, ran through these awful horrors like a thread of gold. Here is a typical entry of one day's pastoral care. Prayed at hospital, prayed at citadel, preached at brand battery, visited a very long list of names, all very sick. More names. Died. And but poorly myself, but able to keep about. No survivor ever forgot the miseries of that dire winter in cold and clammy Louisburg. When April brought the Gibraltar regiments from Virginia, Pepero sent in to surely his general port on the three thousand men with whom he had begun the autumn. Barely one thousand were fit for duty. Eleven hundred lay sick and suffering in the ghastly hospital. Eight hundred and ninety lay buried out on the dreary tongue of land between the lime pit and the fog-bound ice-encumbered sea. Warren took over the command of all the forces as he had been appointed Governor of Louisburg by the King's Commission. Surely had meanwhile been revolving new plans, this time for the complete extirpation of the French and Canada during the present summer of 1746. He suggested that Warren should be the naval joint commander, and Warren, of course, was nothing loath. Massachusetts again rose grandly to the situation. She voted thirty-five hundred men with a four-pound sterling bounty to each one of them. New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island followed well. New York and New Jersey did less in proportion. Maryland did less still. Virginia would only pass a lukewarm vote for a single hundred men. Pennsylvania, as usual, refused to do anything at all. The legislature was under the control of the Quakers, who, when it came to war, were no better than parasites upon the body politic. They never objected to enjoying the commercial benefits of conquest any more than they objected to living on land which could never have been either one or held without the arms they reprobated. But their principles forbade them to face either the danger or expense of war. The honour of the other Pennsylvanians was, however nobly saved by a contingent of four hundred, raised as a purely private venture. Altogether the new provincial army amounted to over eight thousand men. The French and Canada were thoroughly alarmed. Rumour had magnified the invading fleet and army. Till in July the Acadians reported the combined forces British regulars included at somewhere between forty and fifty thousand. But the alarm proved gloundless. The regulars were sent on an abortive expedition against the coast of France, while the Duke of Newcastle ordered surely to discharge the very expensive provincials who were now in imperial pay as cheap as possible. This was then done to the intense disgust of the colonies concerned. New York and Massachusetts, however, were so loath to give up without striking a single blow that they raised a small force on their own account to take crown royal and gain control of Lake Champlain. Footnote. An account of this expedition will be found in Chapter 2 of the War Chief of the Six Nations in this series. Before October came the whole of the colonies were preparing for a quiet winter, except that it was to be preceded by the little raid on Crown Point, when quite suddenly astounding news arrived from sea. This was that the French had sent out a regular amada to retake Louisburg and hurry the coast from the south. Every ship brought in further and still more alarming particulars. The usual exaggerations gained the usual credence, but the real force, if properly handled and combined, was dangerous enough. It consisted of fourteen sail-of-the-line and twenty-one frigates, with transports carrying over three thousand veteran troops. Altogether, about seventeen thousand men are more than twice as many as those in the contingents lately raised for taking Canada. New York and Massachusetts at once were called their Crown Point expeditions. Boston was garrisoned by eight thousand men. All the provinces did their well-scared best. There was no danger except along the coast, for there were enough armed men to have simply mobbed to death any three thousand Frenchmen who marched into the hostile continent, which would engulf them if they lost touch with the fleet, and wear them out if they kept communications open. Those who knew anything of war knew this perfectly well, and they more than half suspected that the French force had been doubled or troubled by the panic-mongers, but the panic spread and spread inland for all that. No British country had ever been so thoroughly alarmed since England had watched the Great Armada sailing up the Channel. The poets and preachers quickly changed their tune. Ames's Almanac for seventeen forty-six had recently edified Bostonians with a song of triumph overfallen Lewisburg. Bright Hesperus, the harbinger of day, smiled gently down on Shirley's prosperous sway, the Prince of Light rode in his burning car to see the overtures of peace and war around the world and bade his charioteer, who marks the periods of each month and year, reign in his steeds and rest upon high noon to view our victory over Cape Breton. But now the Reverend Thomas Prince's litany, rhymed by a later bard, summed up the gist of all the supplications that ascended from the Puritans. Oh Lord, we would not advise, but if in thy providence a tempest should arise to drive the French fleet hence and scatter it far and wide, or sink it in the sea, we should be satisfied and thine the glory be. Strange to say this pious suggestion had been mostly answered before it had been made. Disaster after disaster fell upon the doomed French fleet from the very day it sailed. The admiral was the Duke d'Enville, one of the lustrous La Roche-Vecole, whose family name is known wherever French is read. He was not wanting either encourage or get sense, but like his fleet he had little experience at sea. The French ships, as usual, were better than the British, but the French themselves were a nation of landsmen. They had no great class of seamen to draw upon at will, a fact which made an average French clue inferior to an average British one. This was bad enough, but the most important point of all was that their fleets were still worse than their single ships. The British always had fleets at sea, constantly engaged in combined maneuvers, but the French had not, and in the face of the British command of the sea they could not have them. The French harbors were watched so closely that the French fleets were often attacked and defeated before they had begun to learn how to work together. Consequently, they found it still harder to unite two different fleets against their almost ubiquitous enemy. Donville's problem was insoluble from the start. Four large men of war from the West Indies were to join him at Chebuk-do Bay, now the harbor of Halifax, under Admiral Conflan, the same who was defeated by Hawke, Kiberon Bay, 13 years later, on the very day that Wolfe was buried. Each contributory part of the great French naval plan failed in the working out. Donville's command was a collection of ships, not a coordinated fleet. The French dockyards had been neglected, so some of the ships were late, which made it impossible to practice maneuvers before sailing for the front. Then, in the bungling hurry of fitting out, the hulls of several vessels were left foul, which made them dull sailors, while nearly all the hulls were left unscoured, which of course helped to propagate the fevers, the curvy plague and pestilence brought on by bad food badly stowed. Nor was this all. Officers who had put in so little sea-time with working fleets were naturally slack and inclined to be discontented. The fact that they were under sealed orders, which had been communicated only to Donville, roused their suspicions while his weakness in telling them they were bound for Louisburg almost produced a mutiny. The fleet left France at mid-summer, had a very rough passage through the Bay of Biscay, and ran into a long dead calm off the Azores. This ended in a storm during which several vessels were struck by lightning, which in one case caused a magazine explosion that killed and wounded over thirty men. It was not until the last week of September that Donville made the excellently safe harbour of Halifax. The four ships, under Conflan, were nowhere to be seen. They had reached the rendezvous at the beginning of the month, had cruised about for a couple of weeks and then gone home. Donville was now in no position to attack Louisburg much less, New England. Some of his vessels were quite unserviceable. There was no friendly port nearer than Quebec. All his crews were sickly, and the five months incessant and ever-increasing strain had changed him into a broken-hearted man. He died very suddenly. In the middle of the night he was led from a stroke of apoplexy while others whispered suicide. His successor, Destranel, summoned a council of war which overruled the plan for an immediate return to France. Presently a thud, followed by groans of mortal agony, was heard in the new commander's cabin. The door was burst open and he was found dying from the thrust of his own sword. La Genquière, afterwards Governor-General of Canada, thereupon succeeded Destranel. This commander, the third within three days, was an excellent naval officer and a man of strong character. He had once set to work to reorganize the fleet, but reorganization was now impossible. Storms wrecked the vessels. The plague killed off the men. Nearly three thousand had died already. Only a single thousand, one-tenth of the survivors were really fit for duty. They were still persisted in sailing for Annapolis. One vessel was burned while four others were turned into hospital ships which trailed a stern dropping their dead over side hour after hour as they went. But Annapolis was never attacked. The dying fleet turned back and at last reached Port Lewis on the coast of Brittany. There it found La Palme, a frigate long since given up for lost, lying at anchor, after a series of adventures impossible. First her cruise rations had been cut down to three ounces a day. Then the starving men had eaten all the rats in her filthy hold, and when rats failed they had proposed to eat their five British prisoners. The captain did his best to prevent this crowning horror, but the men who were now ungovernable had already gone below to cut up one prisoner into three ounce rations when they were brought on deck again just in time by the welcome cry of the whole. The Portuguese stranger fortunately proved to have some sheep which were instantly killed and eaten raw. News of these disasters to the French arms at length reached the anxious British colonies. The militia were soon discharged. The danger seemed past, and the whole population spent a merrier Christmas than any one of them had dared to hope for. In May of the next year, 1747, La Genquière was killed for Louisburg, but when he was only four days out, he was overtaken off Cape Finistère by a superior British fleet under Anson and Warren and was totally defeated after a brave resistance. In 1748, the Treaty of Ixlèche-Pel gave Louisburg back to the French. The British colonies were furious, New England particularly so, but the war at large had not gone severely enough to force them to abandon a stronghold on which they had set their hearts and for which they were ready to give up any fair equivalent. The contemporary colonial sneer, often repeated since and quite commonly believed, was that the important island of Cape Breton was exchanged for a petty factory in India. This was not the case. Every power was weary of the war, but France was ready to go on with it rather than to give up her last sea-link of power. Unless this one point was conceded, the whole British Empire would have been involved in another vast and perhaps quite barren campaign. The only choice the British negotiators could apparently make was a choice between two evils. And of the two, they chose the less.