THE LINK RECOVERED
1748
Louisbourg 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
oversea communications. The American colonists hated it
because it was a standing menace to their ambitious
future. And every one 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 heartily
than the disgusted Provincials who formed its garrison
from the summer of 1745 to the spring of the following
year. Warren and Pepperrell were obliged to spend half
their time in seeing court-martial justice done. The
bluejackets 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 sixpence 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 million
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 humour, when, after hearing a
bluejacket discussing plans for spending a hundred golden
guineas, he had to make such entries in his diary as
these of Private Benjamin Crafts: 'Saturday. Recd a
half-pint of Rum to Drinke ye 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
Sabath. Monday. Last Night I was taken verry Bad. The
Lord be pleased to strengthen my Inner Man. May we all
be Prepared for his Holy Will. Recd part of Plunder--9
Small tooth combs.'
No wonder there was trouble in plenty. The routine of a
small and uncongenial station is part of a regular's
second nature, though a very disagreeable part. But it
maddens militiamen when the stir of active service is
past and they think they are being kept on such duty
overtime. 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 muskets 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 favourite 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 a proper pride in New England 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 Pick ax and Spade they would digg ye way
to Hell and storm it.'
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.
Between the camp-followers and the men Pepperrell 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 Warren's.
He delivered a patriotic speech, in which he did not
stint 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
Louisbourg till 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 Gibraltar so late that they had to be sent to Virginia
for the winter, lest the sudden change to cold and clammy
Louisbourg should put them on the sick list. 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.
Thus, once the ice began to form, the despairing Provincial
garrison saw there could be no escape. The only discharge
was death. What were then known as camp fevers had already
broken out in August. As many as twenty-seven funerals
in a single day passed by the old lime-kiln on the desolate
point beyond the seaward walls of Louisbourg. 'After we
got into the Towne, a sordid indolence or Sloth, for want
of Discipline, induced putrid fevers and dyssentrys,
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, rivalling that of the early
Jesuits, ran through those 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 Grand Batery. Visited [a long list of names] all verry
Sick. [More names] Dy'd. Am but poorly myself, but able
to keep about.'
No survivor ever forgot the miseries of that dire winter
in cold and clammy Louisbourg. When April brought the
Gibraltar regiments from Virginia, Pepperrell sent in to
Shirley his general report 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 Louisbourg by the king's
commission. Shirley had meanwhile been revolving new
plans, this time for the complete extirpation of the
French in Canada during the present summer of 1746. He
suggested that Warren should be the naval joint commander,
and Warren, of course, was nothing loth.
Massachusetts again rose grandly to the situation. She
voted 3,500 men, with a four pound sterling bounty to
each one of them. New Hampshire, Connecticut, and 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 won 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 8,000 men.
The French in 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 groundless. The regulars were sent
on an abortive expedition against the coast of France,
while the Duke of Newcastle ordered Shirley 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 loth to give up without
striking a single blow that they raised a small force,
on their own account, to take Crown Point and gain control
of Lake Champlain. [Footnote: An account of this expedition
will be found in Chapter ii 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 armada to retake
Louisbourg and harry the coast to 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
17,000 men, or more than twice as many as those in the
contingents lately raised for taking Canada.
New York and Massachusetts at once recalled their Crown
Point expeditions. Boston was garrisoned by 8,000 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 trebled 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 1746 had recently edified Bostonians with a
song of triumph over fallen Louisbourg:
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,
Rein in his steeds, and rest upon High Noon
To view our Victory over Cape Brittoon.
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:
O 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 Duc d'Anville, one of the
illustrious La Rochefoucaulds, whose family name is known
wherever French is read. He was not wanting either in
courage or good 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 crew
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
manoeuvres. The French had not; and, in face of the
British command of the sea, they could not have them.
The French harbours 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.
D'Anville's problem was insoluble from the start, Four
large men-of-war from the West Indies were to join him
at Chibucto Bay, now the harbour of Halifax, under Admiral
Conflans, the same who was defeated by Hawke in Quiberon
Bay thirteen years later, on the very day that Wolfe was
buried. Each contributory part of the great French naval
plan failed in the working out. D'Anville's command was
a collection of ships, not a co-ordinated fleet. The
French dockyards had been neglected; so some of the ships
were late, which made it impossible to practise manoeuvres
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 sailers; while nearly all the
holds were left unscoured, which, of course, helped to
propagate the fevers, scurvy, 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 d'Anville, roused their suspicions
while his weakness in telling them they were bound for
Louisbourg almost produced a mutiny.
The fleet left France at midsummer, 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 till the last week
of September that d'Anville made the excellently safe
harbour of Halifax. The four ships under Conflans 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 had then gone home. D'Anville was now in
no position to attack Louisbourg, 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; some said from
a stroke of apoplexy, while others whispered suicide.
His successor, d'Estournel, 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 Jonquiere, afterwards governor-general
of Canada, thereupon succeeded d'Estournel. This commander,
the third within three days, was an excellent naval
officer and a man of strong character. He at 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. Yet La Jonquiere still persisted in sailing
for Annapolis. One vessel was burned, while four others
were turned into hospital ships, which trailed astern,
dropping their dead overside, hour after hour, as they
went.
But Annapolis was never attacked. The dying fleet turned
back and at last reached Port Louis, 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 that seem wellnigh impossible. First her crew's
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 sail-ho! 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 Jonquiere again sailed
for Louisbourg. But when he was only four days out he
was overtaken off Cape Finisterre by a superior British
fleet, under Anson and Warren, and was totally defeated,
after a brave resistance.
In 1748 the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle gave Louisbourg
back to the French. 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. 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.