This etext was produced by Gardner Buchanan
CHRONICLES OF CANADA
Edited by George M. Wrong and H. H. Langton
In thirty-two volumes
Volume 8
THE GREAT FORTRESS
A Chronicle of Louisbourg 1720-1760
By WILLIAM WOOD
TORONTO, 1915
PREFACE
Louisbourg was no mere isolated stronghold which could
be lost or won without affecting the wider issues of
oversea 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 Louisbourg 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
Louisbourg showing causes, crises, and results, all
together, 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 Louisbourg from
the foundation to the fall.
W. W.
59 GRANDE ALLEE,
QUEBEC, 2nd January 1915.
CHAPTER I
THE LAST SEA LINK WITH FRANCE
1720-1744
The fortress of Louisbourg 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 till 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, Louisbourg 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 seaway open between Old France and New.
Its legend ran thus: Ludovicoburgum Fundatum et Munitum,
M.DCC.XX ('Louisbourg Founded and Fortified, 1720'). Its
obverse 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 would 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 Louisbourg 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
rechristening could do, however, was done to make Cape
Breton French. Not only was English Harbour now called
Louisbourg, but St Peter's became Port Toulouse, St Anne's
became Port Dauphin, and the whole island itself was
solemnly christened Ile 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 numbers 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 Placentia), the
Acadians preferred to stay at home. In 1717 an effort
was made to bring some of them into Louisbourg. 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 fleurs-de-lis,
when the connection by land between Quebec and the sea
would again be complete. A plan for promoting the
immigration 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 farther 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--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. 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 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. 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 Louisbourg 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
modelled 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. Sea sand was plentiful,
worthless, and cheap. So it was used for the mortar, with
most disastrous results. The stone was hewn from a quarry
of porphyritic trap near by and used for the 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 Louisbourg 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. Louisbourg 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 Louisbourg, and doing it in double
contraband, within five years of the foundation. Cod
caught by Frenchmen from Louisbourg 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 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. 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
to swell the official census of uncongenial Louisbourg.
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 Louisbourg with meat and vegetables.
These 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 Mira river. James Gibson, a
Boston merchant and militiaman, who served against
Louisbourg 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 fine fields 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 intendant sent home a report about a proposed 'German'
settlement near the 'Grand Lake of Mira.' A new experiment
was then being tried, the importation of settlers from
Alsace-Lorraine. But five years afterwards Cape Breton
had been lost to France for ever.
The fact is that the French never really colonized Cape
Breton at large, and Louisbourg least of all. They knew
the magnificent possibilities 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 in 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 Ile 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 Louisbourg is more to the purpose in
hand. The problem of their position, and of its strength
and weakness 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 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. The
British Americans who tried to think out plans of conquest
were wont to under-estimate their own unorganized resources
and to over-estimate the organized resources of the
French, especially when they set their minds on Louisbourg.
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, and 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
Louisbourg, 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
great risks from the intendant's 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 co-operation 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. Co-operation
was impossible between two merely average men; and no
genius was ever sent to such a place as Louisbourg. The
ablest man in either of the principal posts was the
notorious intendant Bigot, who began here on a small
scale the consummate schemes that proved so disastrously
successful at Quebec. Get rich and go home.
The minor governmental life of Louisbourg was of a piece
with the major. There were four or five lesser members
of the Superior Council, which also had jurisdiction over
Ile St Jean, as Prince Edward Island was then called.
The lucrative chances of the custom-house were at the
mercy of four under-paid officials grandiloquently called
a Court of Admiralty. 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 meagre salaries, is proved by the
fact that the best journeyman wig-maker in Louisbourg
'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
Louisbourg no better than the officials did. True, there
were taverns in plenty: even before Louisbourg 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 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. 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 Louisbourg. Between
thirteen and fourteen hundred men were got under arms
for the siege of 1745. Those who lived in Louisbourg had
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 round, 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 Indian 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
Louisbourg was an occasional convenience, it had also
peculiar dangers for a squadron from the weaker of 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 for only 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 very 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. 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.
The harbour of Louisbourg ran about two miles north-east
and south-west, 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 little more than a clear
quarter of a mile by the reefs and islands running out
from the south-western 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 fleet remained outside, because fogs and storms
made it a very dangerous lee shore, and because, then as
now, ships would not pit themselves against forts unless
there was no rival fleet to fight, and unless other
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
Gabarus Bay, which ran for miles south-west of Louisbourg.
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 north-east peninsula,
where the lighthouse stood, commanded the Island Battery;
and the land side of Louisbourg 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 glacis 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
embrasures for one hundred and forty-eight guns all round;
though not more than ninety were ever actually mounted.
On the seaward face Louisbourg 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
Louisbourg 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 channel 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 1st 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 Louisbourg 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. 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.
And what other foreign station could have been more
thoroughly uncongenial, except, perhaps, a convict station
in the tropics? Bad quarters were endurable 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 Louisbourg,
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. Add to this his want
of faith in 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.'