William Wood

“ At daybreak of the 12th the whole fleet stood into Gabarus Bay, a large open roadstead running west from the little Louisbourg 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 Pepperrell managed very cleverly. ”

“ Even the elements, as the anonymous Habitant de Louisbourg complains 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. Wise-acres had shaken their heads over the crazy idea of taking British cannon balls 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. ”

“ Both fleet and army made their rendezvous at Louisbourg; a larger fleet and a smaller army than those of the year before. Two new toasts were going the rounds of the Service: 'Here's to the eye of a Hawke and the heart of a Wolfe!' and 'Here's to British colours on every French fort, port, and garrison in America!' Of course they were standing toasts. The men who drank them already felt the presage of Pitt's great Empire Year of 1759. ”

“ Get rich and go home. The English-speaking peoples, whose ancestors once went to England as oversea emigrants, and two-thirds of whom are now themselves the scions 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 Louisbourg, 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. ”

“ English-speaking civilians who have written about Louisbourg have sometimes taken partial account of the ordinary Frenchman's repugnance to oversea 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 condemned to service in remote and thoroughly uncongenial countries. Louisbourg was remote, weeks away from exchanges with Quebec, months from exchanges with any part of France or Switzerland. ”

“ 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 in 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 ”

“ Pepperrell's dispatches could not exaggerate these 'almost incredible hardships.' Afloat and ashore, awake and asleep, 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 plough 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. ”

“ The only relief from the deadly monotony and loneliness of Louisbourg was to be found in the bad bargains and worse entertainment offered by the camp-followers, who 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 until 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 militiamen can not. ”

“ One vessel sailed for New York with a cargo of claret and brandy that netted her owners a profit of a hundred per cent, even after paying the usual charges demanded by the French custom-house officials for what really was a smuggler's licence.
Fishing, smuggling, and theft were the three great industries of Louisbourg. The traders shared the profits of the smuggling. But the intendant and his officials kept most of the choice thieving for themselves.
The genuine settlers—and a starveling crew they were—wrested their debt-laden livelihood from the local fishing. ”

“ Time, labour, and expense had all gone for worse than nothing, as the positions were at once used by the enemy on each occasion. The wasted expense was of the usual kind-one half spent on inferior construction, the other pocketed by the Louisbourg officials. Drucour himself was not at all to blame, either for the way the works were built or the way in which they had to be abandoned. With odds of more than three to one against him, he had no men to spare for trying to keep the British at arm's length. ”

“ The French were not a colonizing people, their governing officials hated a tour of duty oversea, and Louisbourg was the most unpopular of all the stations in the service. Those Frenchmen who did care for outlandish places went east to India or west to Canada. Nobody wanted to go to a small, dull, out-of-the-way garrison town like Louisbourg, 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. ”

“ Shirley's choice of a commander-in-chief wisely fell on William Pepperrell. 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 and affairs, firmness, diplomacy, and popularity. Popularity was essential, because all the men were volunteers. Pepperrell, who answered every reasonable test, went through the campaign with flying colours and came out of it as the first and only baronet of Massachusetts. ”

“ The British colonies were furious, New England particularly so. But the war at large had not gone severely enough against the French 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 give up her last sea link with Canada. ”

“ 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. Louisbourg 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. ”

“ After a conference with Pepperrell he hurried off to begin the blockade of Louisbourg. A week later, May 21, 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 8,000 men, the French authorities in Louisbourg, whose force was less than 2,000, 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 Louisbourg councils did not even prepare to fight. ”

“ The truth was that the reinforcements never arrived, that Marin 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 Pepperrell's own encouragement, and at once produced, not a panic, but the most excellent effect. Discipline, never good, had been growing worse. ”

“ All the merchants were eager for attack. Louisbourg embodied everything they feared and hated: interference with seaborne 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 Louisbourg and a good chance lost for ever. ”

“ The officers felt the want of a larger outlook even more than the men did; and neither man nor officer ever went to Louisbourg if he could help it. When Montcalm, 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 Montcalm came out to Louisbourg, and nothing but bounties could get a volunteer. ”

“ Even in Canada there was only a handful of French, all told, at the time of the Treaty of Utrecht—twenty-five thousand; while the British colonists in North America numbered fifteen times as many. The respective populations had trebled by the time of the Cession 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 Louisbourg; so the whole cost of building the fortress, thirty million livres, came direct from France. ”

“ The two new regiments, Shirley's and Pepperrell'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 Pepperrell from New England, the hatred of garrison duty in Louisbourg, and resentment at seeing some Englishmen commissioned to command Americans, were three great obstacles in the way. The only other resource was the colonial militia, whose waifs and strays alone could be induced to enlist. ”

“ Nevertheless, Pitt wielded the amphibious might of Britain with a master hand. Sea-power, mercantile and naval, enabled him to 'command the riches of the world' and become the paymaster of many thousand Prussians under Frederick the Great and Ferdinand of Brunswick. He also sent a small British army to the Continent. ”

“ There is no complete naval and military history of Louisbourg, in either French or English. The first siege is a prominent feature in all histories of Canada, New England, and the United States, though it is not much noticed in works written in the mother country. The second siege is noticed everywhere. The beginning and end of the story is generally ignored, and the naval side is always inadequately treated.
Parkman gives a good account of the first siege in 'A Half-Century of Conflict', and a less good account of the second in 'Montcalm and Wolfe'. ”

“ The guns sank out of sight in the engulfing bog; while the toiling men became regular human targets for shot and shell from Louisbourg. 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. ”

“ This road meandered over the least bad line that could be found in that country of alternate rock, bog, sand, scrub, bush, and marshy ponds. The working party was always a thousand strong, and shifts, of course, were constant. Boscawen landed marines to man the works along the shore, and bluejackets for any handy-man's job required. This proved of great advantage to the army, which had so many more men set free for other duties. The landing of stores went on from sunrise to sunset, whenever the pounding surf calmed down enough. Landing the guns was, of course, much harder still. ”

“ These Americans are in general the dirtiest, most contemptible, cowardly dogs that you can conceive. There is no depending upon 'em in action. They fall down dead in their own dirt, and desert by battalions, officers and all.'
Drucour's sorties, made by good French regulars, were much more serious than Boishebert's feeble, irregular attack. On the night of July 8, while Montcalm's Ticonderogan heroes were resting on their hard-won field a thousand miles inland, Drucour's best troops crept out unseen and charged the British right. ”

“ 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 almost 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. ”

“ There was a regular Louisbourg 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 men whose ideas were coloured by personal contact with smuggling and privateering, and sometimes with downright piracy, when they were actually told off as sentries over these mythical hoards of wealth. ”