threat of Iroquois marauding hung over the little city and in
1660 Castle St. Louis witnessed a strange spectacle. It was the
burning at the stake by the French of an Iroquois captive as a
retaliation against the savages for their outrages. The Indian met
his fate with fortitude, but reviled his captors unceasingly and
predicted a dire future for the city. At length death put an end to
his sufferings and his predictions. His spirit, according to the
priests who were standing by, winged its way to the place of the
redeemed, having been freed from sin by the fiery ordeal through
which its body had passed.
Time went its way and brought the second siege of Quebec to Castle
St. Louis. The bold and impetuous Frontenac was now at the helm of
state and it was due to a three-headed expedition of his against
the English colonies that this second siege was brought about.
Incidentally, this expedition may be looked upon in another light
as the opening blow in that long struggle between New France
and New England which was to result in the extinguishing of the
latter power in the New World. Three war parties set out from the
fortifications at Quebec, Montreal and Three Rivers. The first
reached the Dutch settlement of Corlaer (Schenectady) on the Hudson
and brought about the horrible and historic Schenectady massacre.
In similar fashion the other parties fell upon towns in New
England. The northern English colonies which had hitherto been kept
asunder by jealousies united against a common foe and equipped an
expedition which was to set forth from Massachusetts against Quebec.
The vessels of the fleet consisted of thirty-two ships ranging
in size from the _Six Friends_, a roisterer of the seas which
had been engaged in the dangerous West India trade, and mounted
forty-four guns, to humble fishing smacks. The commander was
William Phips, afterward Sir William Phips, a strange favorite
of Fortune whose adventurous and large-fisted career carried him
through gold-seeking in the Spanish Main, knighthood from the
British Crown, and the governorship, by royal appointment, of
Massachusetts. Volunteers were called for and nearly four thousand
men responded to the call. Provisions were laid in for four months
and all was ready for the start.
After waiting so long in Boston for help from England that winter
was almost at hand, Sir William at length gave the order to sail
and the New England armada was launched upon its career. Its only
lacks were a pilot who knew the St. Lawrence River, a sufficiency
of gunpowder and a commander competent to direct the expedition.
The eventual failure of the undertaking was not hard to forecast.
The fleet anchored a little below Quebec in the autumn of 1690.
Frontenac was ready and waiting for it. A messenger was sent from
the fleet to the French governor demanding surrender. He was taken
in a canoe to the landing place and blindfolded. Then he was
directed up the steep streets and crooked stairs of the little
city by a devious path to Castle St. Louis where Frontenac, with
his aides in full uniform, was waiting to receive him. During his
progress onward he was jostled and pushed to make him think that
there were immense crowds of people in the little city, and hoarse
orders were shouted near his ear to imaginary soldiery. At length
he stood in the council-room of our little fort and the bandage
was taken from his eyes. The scene of splendor before him at first
filled him with confusion, but he quickly recovered poise and
delivered his message.
“No,” returned Frontenac, “I will answer your general only by the
mouths of cannon, that he may learn that a man like me is not to be
summoned in this fashion. Let him do his best and I will do mine!”
During the short and futile siege which followed, the cannonading
between the vessels of Sir William’s fleet and the French
fortification was so terrific that experienced military officers
declared that they had heard nothing like it. At length the
besiegers sailed away baffled and the furious little fort grumbled
down to another season of peace. Phips reached Boston in November,
and the rest of his fleet straggled in one by one, such as were not
lost in the storms of the perilous Nova Scotia coast. Frontenac, in
celebration of the deliverance of Quebec, established the little
church of Notre Dame de la Victoire which stands in Quebec as a
memorial of those days.
The beginning of the eighteenth century saw the fortifications
of Quebec strengthened and enlarged. Vauban, the great engineer,
furnished the plans which were carried out under Frontenac’s
personal supervision. For twenty leagues around, the habitants
were pressed into service and even the gentlefolk of the colony
volunteered for work with pick and spade, so eager was the
sentiment to carry out Vauban’s plans. A line of solid earthworks
was extended on the flank of the city from Cape Diamond to the
St. Charles River, and now for the first time the summit of Cape
Diamond was fortified, this redoubt with sixteen cannon being the
foundation of the present-day citadel of Quebec. In the foundation
of the new work a copper plate, discovered at the demolition of the
old walls in 1854, was buried bearing the following inscription:
In the year of grace 1693 under the reign of the Most August,
Most Invincible and Most Christian King, Louis the Great,
Fourteenth of that name, the most Excellent and Most Illustrious
Lord, Louis de Buade, Count of Frontenac, twice viceroy of all
New France, after having three years before repulsed, routed and
completely conquered the rebellious inhabitants of New England,
who besieged this town of Quebec and who threatened to renew
the attack this year, constructed, at the charge of the King,
this citadel, with the fortifications therewith connected, for
the defence of the country and the safety of the people and for
confounding yet again a people perfidious towards God and towards
its lawful king. And he has laid this first stone.
In 1709 the sturdy colonists of New England planned another
expedition against Quebec. This time the home government had
promised to help. But arrangements were delayed and it became
late autumn before the expedition was ready to set out. Under the
circumstances a fight against the frigid winter of Quebec as well
as its stone strongholds was not to be considered.
The next attempt upon the little city took place in 1711, when a
strong fleet under Admiral Sir Hovenden Walker set sail from Boston
on the 30th of July. Under a different commander this effort might
have resulted in success to the British arms, but Admiral Walker
scorned all advice and drove his big frigates on so recklessly
amidst the dense fogs and sharp reefs of Newfoundland, that eight
battleships were beaten to pieces by the waves and rocks. Eight
hundred and eighty-four people, thirty-four of them women, were
drowned. Admiral Walker sailed ignominiously back to Boston, and in
Quebec the happy French changed the name of their little church of
Notre Dame de la Victoire to that of Notre Dame des Victoires.
Yet the persistence of the English was at length to have its way.
In 1720 the walls of Quebec were enlarged and made mightier,
and the citadel, largely in the form in which it exists to-day,
was erected. Vaudreuil, the last governor of New France, loudly
proclaimed that the city was impregnable. In 1759 came the
expedition of Wolfe against Quebec, the final outcome of which and
the method of attack, with Wolfe’s heroic death on the Plains of
Abraham, is a story that every schoolboy knows.
This conflict was the first in which the citadel took part.
The mighty works in which Vaudreuil trusted so loudly had
been overcome on their first trial, while the high-perched,
precariously-placed little “Castle,” which Champlain had first
built and which his successors had altered to suit their times, had
withstood innumerable Indian attacks and had seen three assaults
by Europeans fail against it. The spirit of the men who manned the
forts had changed with their times.
There is another tale of siege and Quebec which is not widely
familiar and yet which all Americans should know. It is the story
of Montgomery’s expedition during the Revolution--an expedition
in which he lost his life and in which Benedict Arnold played a
conspicuous part.
Richard Montgomery was a lieutenant in Wolfe’s army and was
thoroughly familiar with Quebec. At the outbreak of the War of
Independence he was deputized to lead an army up the Hudson and
by the familiar approach along the Richelieu River and the St.
Lawrence to Quebec. Benedict Arnold led another force through the
tangled forests of northern Maine and New Hampshire, reaching
Quebec ahead, even, of Montgomery. The combined forces laid
siege to the city through the winter, and in the most desperate
assault of all, one in which Wolfe’s feat of scaling the cliff was
attempted, Montgomery lost his life. After six months the United
States troops departed, confessing failure.
From that time to this the military history of Quebec has been
uneventful. In the early part of the nineteenth century old Castle
St. Louis, which had stood so many storms and assaults, succumbed
to fire. The site is now an open square with some relics and a fine
view over the river.
The great citadel of Quebec rises three hundred and fifty feet
above the river and covers nearly forty acres. The portion of the
works overlooking the St. Lawrence is called the Grand Battery,
while the surmounting pinnacle of the citadel is known as the
King’s Bastion. From the King’s Bastion a most glorious panorama
is spread out before one, embracing the city, the great river,
hundreds of miles of forest and farm land, the Laurentian mountains
in the distance in one direction and the green hills of Vermont far
away in another.
All of the old works of Quebec have been retired from active
service in a military sense. The city is protected by modern
fortifications in other quarters.
Two memorials record two great events in the history of the
citadel. The chief is the Wolfe-Montcalm monument erected just
behind the Dufferin Terrace in a little green enclosure known as
the Governor’s Garden. The second is a simple tablet set up in the
face of the cliff on the river-front below the citadel, marking the
spot where the United States General Montgomery fell in the winter
of 1775.
FORT ANNAPOLIS ROYAL
ANNAPOLIS--ANNAPOLIS BASIN, NOVA SCOTIA
More by accident than by design the Sieur de Monts, in 1604, with
his oddly assorted band of adventurers on the foggy Bay of Fundy,
steered into the rocky entrance which leads into the beautiful
landlocked basin of present-day Annapolis in Nova Scotia. One of
his followers, the Baron de Potrincourt, was so enchanted by the
beauty of the scene that he asked a grant of land here. This was
given him, and upon this land in the next year he built himself
first a fort, then a house, and then several more houses. This was
the beginning of Port Royal, now known as Annapolis, the second
oldest fortified place in the Western Hemisphere.
[Illustration:
By Courtesy of The Boston Times
GUNS, PARADE AND ANCIENT OFFICERS’ QUARTERS, FORT ANNAPOLIS ROYAL,
N. S.]
The voyager to-day may repeat de Monts’s experience and with no
design to do that, too. Fogs wrap the eastern and western coasts
of Nova Scotia in an impenetrable blanket most of the time. The
traveller who sails,--let us say,--from St. Johns, New Brunswick,
for the Annapolis Basin, crosses sparkling waters, and then, as he
enters the mountainous cleft which gives entrance to this beautiful
bay, comes into the belt of mist which obscures all of the coast.
He hears the fog horn on the point at the entrance,--which de
Monts did not hear,--and then suddenly, like an apparition, the
land looms into view; there is a lane of shrouded, uncertain
water, between towering misty headlands; and, then, he is beyond
the mists. Annapolis Basin, bright and blue with soft clouds
overhead, like a highland lake, lies before him. At the far head
of the Basin, where the delicate horizon merges into the sky, is
Annapolis. It is not hard to understand Potrincourt’s enthusiasm
for this beautiful spot. It is hard to understand how de Monts
himself could have passed over this locality in favor of the barren
Isle St. Croix for his first settlement, for this is what he did.
The winter of 1604 was passed by the little colonizing expedition
at St. Croix--the sandy island which is now the boundary line
between Canada and Maine. Potrincourt went back to France with de
Monts to secure supplies and settlers for his own pet project,
whose setting was Annapolis Basin, and returned with his chief in
June, 1605, to find that the companions they had left behind them
at St. Croix had had a sorry winter. The whole settlement was then
moved over to Potrincourt’s Port Royal. This was the beginning of
Annapolis.
The makeup of de Monts’s expedition was thoroughly typical of
the colonizing bodies sent out by France in that day. There were
men of the noblest blood of France, of whom our Potrincourt was
a conspicuous example, and there was, also, the sweeping of the
offscouring of the most dissolute cities of the Old World. The
motives which inspired these different men were no doubt as mixed
as the character of the men and as pleasant a theme of speculation,
but with this we will have nothing to do. The second winter of de
Monts’s adventurers, even at sheltered Annapolis, was severe, and
it was with joy that the men saw the spring of 1606 arrive and
bring with it the little ship from France which annually brought
supplies and new blood from the Old World.
In this ship there was one arrival who must be given a special
consideration. A poet-lawyer,--a strange combination, at
that,--Marc Lescarbot eventually was to write his name in fame as
the author of one of the earliest histories of New France, one of
the most authentic records in existence of the early adventures of
the French in the New World; but in our regard of him now we must
consider the high spirit and bold emprise which he brought with him
to cheer his companions and to help them through the rigors of this
early settlement. A rhymester of some skill, he tuned his lyre to
the most trivial events to keep his associates in good spirits, and
in this last endeavor displayed an ingenuity which cannot help but
endear him to all generations which like brave deeds done in blithe
ways. He organized the Ordre de la Bon Temps, the only requirements
for membership in which were presence in the little colony, and
the duties of whose members were on successive days to provide a
banquet for their brethren. There was formality attached to the
office, too. Theatrical masques were gotten up and odd tasks were
devised for all Knights of the Merry Time. Lescarbot infused a
brave spirit into even the most dreary of the odd crew which made
up this colony. We can picture the merry adventurers in their rude
little fort engaged in their pranks of drollery thousands of miles
away from home and with inhospitable wilderness and bleak shores
for environs.
The charter of the colony was revoked in 1607, by one of those
pleasing inconsistencies of royalty which inspire in the student
of the past so thorough a belief in the theory of the divine right
of kings, and the brave Order of the Merry Time to a man, with
retainers and family vessels, embarked upon the skittish little
vessels in which they entrusted themselves to the Atlantic and
sailed back to France. It was not for three years that any of them
returned, but in 1610 perseverance on de Potrincourt’s part had
triumphed over royal pudding-headedness once more, and in that
year he came back again to his colony. It is related that he found
everything in Port Royal exactly as he had left it, not a lock or
a bar in the little fort having been disturbed by the Indians, who
displayed, in addition to their honesty, another engaging trait of
fidelity to friendship by the many manifestations of joy which they
made at having with them again their friends, the Frenchmen. Not
again was Port Royal to be entirely deserted.
In 1613 the Jesuits of Port Royal, a class to themselves, abandoned
the place and attempted the settlement of a picturesque inlet
on Mount Desert Island on the coast of present-day Maine, their
inlet still bearing the name of Frenchmen’s Bay. The freebooting
Argall, a piratical seafarer from the new colony of Virginia far
south on the Atlantic Coast, heard of this settlement and descended
upon it in force. Most of the French were killed after a brave
but ineffectual resistance, and fire and axe were given to their
settlement. In the following year this Argall heard of the presence
of Port Royal, for news travelled slowly in those days, and
proceeded against that point after completing his work of pillage
at Mount Desert and St. Croix. Taking the little place by surprise
with a superior force, he scattered the inhabitants, burned the
village, and razed the fort to the ground. Potrincourt, a survivor,
returned to France and fell fighting at the siege of Mery in the
following year.
From this time until the signing of the treaty of St.
Germain-en-Laye in 1632, Port Royal and Acadia were held in the
hands of the British, and during this time occurred that odd
experiment of Sir William Mackenzie to make of Acadia a New
Scotland or Caledonia. The Scottish knight obtained the concession
of the Acadian peninsula from King James in 1621 and founded a
colony on the site or very near the site of Port Royal, building
a fort at this point. Charles I renewed the charter granted by
his predecessor, and created an order of minor nobility known as
the Knights Baronets of Nova Scotia. It became Mackenzie’s idea to
establish in the New Caledonia the feudal institutions of the Old
World. His colony was not a success even during its short life, and
in 1632 Port Royal passed by treaty to the French, thus putting an
end effectually to New Caledonia and its Knights Baronets of the
dissolute Charles’s erection.
The see-saw between French and English was once more to incline in
the English favor as regards Acadia. The cession of this peninsula
to the French had always been looked on with disfavor by the New
England colonists, because it gave their hereditary enemies a
secure base from which to send out privateering expeditions against
their shipping. In 1654, Cromwell the Protector dispatched a force
to ensure the subjugation of the Dutch on the Island of Manhattan.
Peace with Holland was concluded by England before this purpose
was effected, and it was then determined to turn these arms to
the reconquest of Acadia. An expedition was accordingly fitted
out secretly in Massachusetts and dispatched upon its mission.
The French forts on the Penobscot and at St. John were speedily
reduced. Le Borgne was at Port Royal with one hundred and fifty men
but he attempted little resistance and the post once more came into
English possession.
Until 1667 Port Royal was in the hands of the English, and then by
the Treaty of Breda the whole of Acadia was returned to the French.
During their occupancy the English had spent large sums repairing
the fortifications in Acadia under their control, and in this
undertaking the importance of Port Royal was duly recognized.
For the next generation the French made Port Royal their base, and
the place acquired an evil reputation with the English because of
the marauding sea expeditions which proceeded from out of there.
Finally, in 1690, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts raised a
levy and empowered Sir William Phips to go against the ancient
stronghold. This doughty gentleman was successful in his mission
and the port was in English hands again--this time hands of
destruction.
After the departure of their enemies the French rebuilt Port Royal
and it became, once more, a busy shipping point and the haunt of
privateers. It is not difficult to-day to appreciate the fine
strategic value of Port Royal, set at the head of its beautiful
landlocked basin, but it is difficult, to-day, as the river now
stands, to appreciate how vessels of any burthen could go up to its
wharves. But at that time, doubtless, the river had not filled up
to the degree that it has to-day.
In 1704 and again in 1705, the pertinacious New Englanders went
upon futile expeditions against Port Royal, each time being
driven off without much loss and each time evincing a singular
lack of spirit in their enterprise, a lack of spirit all the more
remarkable when one considers the undertakings which they faced
and carried through at other times in their history. The taking of
Port Royal seems to have become a sort of obsession with them--a
theme for an idle hour, a pet worry which they would take up
when all other worries failed them. Finally, in 1710, before the
onslaught of a combined force of Her Majesty Queen Anne’s soldiery
and New England militia, Port Royal fell to the English for the
last time, bravely and gallantly fighting against overwhelming
odds. Its spirited commandant, M. Subercase, with a famished army
of one hundred and fifty men, marched out through the ranks of
three thousand five hundred enemies and the red flag of England
was raised where the white one of France had flown. Port Royal was
renamed Annapolis in honor of the English sovereign, and Colonel
Vetch, with four hundred and fifty men, occupied the fort. Though
it was endangered by French arms several times thereafter, the
little fort was never again out of English possession.
The sod ramparts of the fort have been carefully maintained and are
to-day the cherished possession of Annapolis--or Annapolis Port
Royal, as its inhabitants, making an odd mixture of its names,
prefer to call it. From them one may gaze down the placid little
river over a scene very like that upon which its French and
English commanders looked on their separate turns and different
generations. It is difficult really to visualize the events through
which the little fort has passed, but if one considers that its
history goes as far back beyond the days of the American Revolution
as the beginning of the twentieth century comes this side of the
Revolution, one begins to perceive how big is its historical
background as events go in America.
The officers’ quarters,--a quaint, sturdy, low building,--and the
magazine are still standing in the fort at Port Royal, both very
ancient and very suggestive edifices, neither one as ancient as the
walls of the little fort.
THE CITADEL AT HALIFAX
NOVA SCOTIA
The province of Acadia had been in English possession for nearly
half a century when, in 1749, the powers that were in the Mother
Country decided that Annapolis, the little game-cock city of the
peninsula, whose history went back to 1605, was not a fitting place
for the capital of the province. Its harbor, while beautiful and
secure, was not large enough for the purposes that England had in
mind; moreover, it was on the western side of the peninsula, so
that to get to it from Europe one must pass around Cape Sable and
up the foggy Bay of Fundy. And so we find that the home authorities
projected a new city, which was to be the capital of the province
and whose location was to be the magnificent harbor of Chebucto
on the east coast of Acadia. That they did not go astray in their
anticipations of the future is proved by the present-day Halifax,
Nova Scotia’s principal city, the child of the plans of these
Englishmen of 1749.
The value of Chebucto as a harbor had been known for many years
before this time, we may assume. It had been for many years a
rendezvous for British vessels in American waters. When D’Anville’s
misfortuned fleet of French men-of-war was scattered by the
elements, its remnants came together in Chebucto Bay. That there
was some form of settlement on the shores of the bay ere this
time is highly probable, but the existence of human life in
any organized form here, if such existence there was, has been
completely over-shadowed in retrospect by the magnitude of the
enterprise by which the present-day Halifax was founded.