LOUISBOURG
I found it a far different thing arriving at Louisbourg by
land from arriving by sea. In the latter case, one enjoys
a rapid _coup d’œil_ from the moment one turns Lighthouse
Point, of the harbour, Goat Island, the new village of
Louisburg, and the site and ruins of the old town on the
left. The first impression is that of a rapid transition
from a violent running sea into a spacious harbour strangely
quiet, considering what seems to be the exposed state of
the entrance. But this exposure is not real, because Louisburg
Harbour is protected by a sunken bar, not uncovered
even at low tide. After the rugged and precipitous rocks
succeed a series of hillocks here and there covered with
stunted firs, and the land for a mile inland is poor and
barren. An air of desolation broods about the place, which
is hardly lessened by the great and grimy scaffoldings which
form the wharves of the coal company, or the groups of
fishermen’s cottages close to the water’s edge, although the
eye catches glimpses of two or three trim white painted
churches scattered along the borders of the harbour.
But were the prospect greyer and more morose to the
ignorant eye, nothing could destroy the light which the
spectacle will ever lend to him who has read Louisbourg’s
story, or restrain the thrill it imparts when seen for the
first time.
To the visitor by road or rail the surroundings of the
modern village of Louisburg are apt to disenchant. Not
even the presence of the two French cannon at the railway
station, updrawn a few years ago from the depths of the
harbour, quite offset the mile long stroll upon a creaking
plank side walk through a succession of hideous clap-boarded
stores, the bank, the lawyer’s office, the post-office,
and eating-house. The older dwellings of the village
are already falling into decay, and one old woman, one of
the M’Alpines, who had seen better days, complained that
the walls of her house, her home for forty years, scarce
now sufficed to keep out the weather; and she and her
faithful companion trembled lest it should not endure as
long as their few remaining years. For it was no longer
theirs: it had somehow together with most of the others
passed out of their hands into those of the coal company,
which like most corporations knew no mercy towards
poor tenants.
But there is a great ray of light in New Louisburg,
and as for me I shall not easily forget the memory of one
plucky English clergyman who, amidst poverty and squalor,
and social and spiritual dreariness, for twenty-eight years
has fought a cheery battle against these forces, and under
conditions in many ways far harder than those which face
a Houndsditch curate, has not trampled down his flag, or
even allowed himself to be discouraged. His name is the
Rev. Fraser Draper—(although I have called him, and I
believe he calls himself an Englishman, there is a Scottish
element in him), and his parish covers, I think, some forty
square miles. To this he ministers either on a bicycle
or afoot. Far less affluent is he than the Roman Catholic
priest, who would seem to have so many votaries hereabouts,
or even of the Presbyterian minister; yet this Anglican is
the man for his work and his flock, and has strongly stirring
within him that cheery manly something which is
more the backbone and support of an Englishman’s religion
than the Thirty-nine Articles, and shines more in a
selfish world than all the candles on all the altars. My
friend is a great authority on the history and topography of
Louisbourg (mark the spelling—Louisburg is the modern
town), and has himself quite a collection of objects of
interest connected with both sieges. He told me of the
visits to him of Lord and Lady Minto, Lord Dundonald
and others, and of the pleasure it gave him to show them
over the site of the famous town. From his parsonage in
the very centre of the harbour’s crescent shore there arises,
three miles away to the right, a small upstanding column
on the horizon. This was my beacon as I set out for Old
Louisbourg—the shaft erected by the men of Massachusetts
fifteen years ago to commemorate William Pepperell and
the first siege of Louisbourg in 1745.
A French officer reported that Louisbourg was so strong
that it might be held against any assault by an army of
women. Yet English prisoners who had dwelt in the
fortress believed Louisbourg might be taken, and their hopes
were eagerly seized upon and shared by Governor Shirley of
Massachusetts, a lawyer by profession, full of energy and enterprise,
who now resolved upon the capture of Louisbourg.
Unless the English had control of the whole coast from
Cape Sable to the mouth of the St. Lawrence, the safety, nay,
the very existence of New England was in constant jeopardy.
The discontent and bad discipline of the Louisbourg garrison,
which consisted of 1300 men, was a promising factor. The
ramparts were, moreover, said to be defective in more than
one place, and, besides this, if the French ships which came
over sea with provisions and reinforcements could be intercepted,
Shirley felt there was no small chance of success. He
wrote instantly to London asking the Government to help
him with ships. Without waiting for a reply a little fleet was
raised, and a land force of 4000 men, chiefly composed of
artisans, farmers, fishermen, and labourers, commanded by a
merchant named Pepperell, was mustered for the expedition.
Although lacking military experience, Pepperell possessed
courage and good judgment, and was anxious to distinguish
himself. On the 24th March 1745 the ships left Boston,
reaching Canso ten days later. Here they remained three
weeks, waiting for the ice to melt in the bays and harbours.
Here, too, they were joined by the English commodore,
Warren, whom King George had sent to assist in the capture
of Louisbourg.
The command of Louisbourg was in the hands of M.
Duchambon. One night, just after a public ball, a captain,
attired in his night-clothes, came rushing into the Governor’s
chamber to report that a strange fleet had been sighted by
the sentries entering Gabarus Bay, five miles distant. Soon
the cannons were booming loudly from the walls, and a peal
of bells rang through the town. Pepperell made a pretence
of landing his troops at a certain point so as to deceive the
French. A skirmish took place, in which the French were
beaten back and some of them taken prisoners. Before
nightfall 2000 of the New Englanders had planted foot on
the shore, and the next day the siege of Louisbourg was
begun. A hard and dangerous task was the landing of the
artillery and stores, owing to the rolling surf. There being
no wharf, the men had to wade through the sea to bring
the guns, ammunition, and provisions on shore. This alone
consumed an entire fortnight. Batteries were thrown up, in
spite of sallies made from the town by French and Indians
to prevent them. An outside battery was captured, mounted
with twenty-eight heavy guns, which now belched forth shot
and shell amongst the besieged. Warehouses and other
places took fire, and great columns of smoke hid the fort
from view for days at a time. The walls were at last seen
to crumble, and when the guns of the Americans began
to close up on the fortress, Duchambon summoned to
surrender, replied that he would when forced to do so by
the cannon of the foe. Upon the island battery being
silenced, the English fleet entered the harbour and turned
upon him its 500 guns. Duchambon’s supply of gunpowder
being now exhausted, Louisbourg surrendered after a siege
lasting forty-nine days.
The fall of Louisbourg, the key to French power in
North America, seemed almost incredible to the French.
It was resolved at Versailles that an expedition should be
sent out to Cape Breton to recapture it at all hazards. One
of the finest fleets that ever left the shores of France sailed
from Rochelle the following year, commanded by the Duc
d’Anville, consisting of thirty-nine ships of war, with orders to
recapture Louisbourg and Cape Breton, and to ravage Boston
and the New England coasts. But a fierce tempest dispersed
the whole squadron. When, at Chebucto, D’Anville arrived
with the remnants of his fleet, his mortification was so great
as to induce an apoplectic stroke, from which he died, and
on an island in what is to-day known as Halifax Harbour,
his body was buried. On the afternoon of the very day on
which the French commander died, his Vice-admiral, Destournelles,
arrived with three more ships. More than 2000
men of the fleet were stricken with fever and perished.
Destournelles, seeing no hope for success, proposed that the
expedition should be abandoned and that the fleet should
return to France, a proposal which most of his officers
resisted. They desired to attack Annapolis, which was weak
and had a small garrison. Once it was captured, Acadia
was regained for France. Admiral Destournelles, thinking
his action reflected on his character and honour, retired, and
next morning they found him stabbed by his own hand
through the breast.
Ere the French fleet could reach Annapolis, another
great storm arose, scattering the ships, and after 2500 brave
Frenchmen had been lost in this ill-fated expedition, the only
course remaining was to return.
In 1748 was signed the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, and
Louisbourg was handed back to France. Ten years later
Pitt resolved upon its final destruction, and the story of the
second siege is known to every schoolboy. In the interval
between the two sieges the fortress had been considerably
strengthened, and its new commandant, M. Drucour, was a
man of great ability.
[Illustration: THE ROAD TO LOUISBOURG.]
[Illustration: LOUISBOURG—THE LAST OF THE DAUPHIN GATE.]
The summer sun battled with sea-fog upon the miles
of brown moorland, scrubbed birch, and rocky beach as I
set out for Old Louisbourg—the scant ruins of the French
fortress—lying some three miles away on a low-lying spit
of land, Point Rochefort, on the south-western side of
the harbour. This present village—a collection of shops
and miners’ and fishermen’s cottages, and the wharves
and lofty ruins of the coal company—occupies the site
of the old royal battery which Brigadier-General James
Wolfe seized and turned on the enemy. A century and
a half ago from this distance the eye could have discerned
across the harbour the roofs, spires, and stately battlements
of a busy town. Now one’s only beacon along the barren
shore is that slender shaft the Americans have there erected
to commemorate the first siege. I followed the winding,
rock-strewn road to this once-famed spot, where stood the
“Dunkirk of the North.” A moderate familiarity with the
military maps of the period enables one to trace out the
chief features of the neighbourhood. To-day it is all a
desert. There is no place like it, save Carthage. I crossed
the bridge over the land-locked inlet called the Barachois.
On my left, before the mouth of the harbour, lay Goat
Island, where the French had a strong battery. Immediately
in front are the remains of Wolfe’s siege works, when
the young warrior knew he had the town in his grasp;
and here, a pistol-shot further on, stood the Dauphin’s
Gate, where the same leader and his victorious soldiers,
“swarthy with wind and sun, and begrimed with smoke
and dust,” entered on the morning of the 27th of July
1758. Some ruins of the Dauphin’s Bastion still remain,
and a little further on are the relics of the bomb-proof
casemates of the King’s Bastion. I gained the summit
of one of the green mounds which once were citadel,
bastion, ramparts, and glacis. “Here,” I could say with
Parkman, “stood Louisbourg; and not all the efforts of
its conquerors, nor all the havoc of succeeding times, have
availed to efface it. Men in hundreds toiled for months,
toiled with lever, spade, and gunpowder, in the work of
destruction, and for more than a century it has served as
a stone quarry; but the remains of its vast defences still
tell their tale of human valour and human woe.” A cow,
a few lean sheep, a little group of fishermen’s children,
are all that infest the spot and unwittingly consort with
the spirits of the past. Here, at a charge of ten millions
sterling, the most celebrated contemporary military engineers
of France had reared a fortress without parallel in the New
World. Within its ramparts dwelt some 10,000 souls.
On this barren, wind-swept point, nestled a busy town
behind sheltering walls, crowned by a citadel and adorned
by lofty buildings. Here numerous regiments in the
white-coated uniform of France, naval officers, monks,
missionaries, mingled with the fisherfolk and the New
England traders. To-day all is silence and desolation.
Nearly seven miles in circumference is Louisbourg
Harbour, whose mouth is so blocked with reefs and islands
that the entrance is hardly above half a mile wide. This
was commanded by Goat Island carrying an effective
battery. For a distance of several miles westward the
shores of the Bay of Gabarus offered a stern and precipitous
natural barrier to the foe, broken here and there by
entrenched caves or inlets. Breastworks formed of wooden
stakes also help to prevent a landing. I strolled over
the uneven turf with feelings of deep emotion. It is
still easy to trace the lines of the fortifications, to mark
the sites of the buildings, and the lines of the chief streets.
In the Rue du Roy I picked up a fragment of a French
ramrod; and a fisherman offered me a French wine-bottle
of curious shape he had found in the cellar of the
Governor’s house. Grape-shot and bullets still strew
the site. But only too well did the victors do their work
of demolition. For six months soldiers and sailors toiled
at the task, and the remnants of two bastions, with bomb-proof
casements, a heap of stones here, a pile of bricks
there, are all that remain, On the site of the Intendant’s
palatial dwelling is the wooden cottage of a fisherman.
In the teeth of a high wind I pushed along the shore
west of the King’s Bastion. There I saw and felt the
breastworks of spruce still protruding from the surf-swept
beach. I saw where Lord Dundonald fell, and where his
bones now lie, and gazed across to Coromandière Cove to
the spot where Wolfe landed. The very rock that felt the
impact of his boat’s prow is still reverently pointed out.
Should not all this theatre of stirring events be preserved
as historic ground? Its former renown was universal; its
present oblivion is a national reproach.
I was interested in ascertaining to whom the ground of
Louisbourg now belongs. Some years ago a claimant
appeared in the person of a Captain Kenelly, who, purchasing
the land of certain squatters, proceeded to put his
own peculiar ideas concerning the preservation of Louisbourg
into execution. But it is to be feared that the worthy
captain, besides having no very clear title, was altogether
ill-advised in his proceedings. He even went the length of
repointing the French masonry, skirting the site of the town
with a barbed-wire fence, and exacting a fee for admission
to tourists.
Few are the tourists who penetrate to this spot, and
those that come hail chiefly from New England. Fifteen
years ago, on the 150th anniversary of the first capture of
Louisbourg by Sir William Pepperell, funds were raised
in Boston for a monument to commemorate the event, and
a band of pious pilgrims duly established a granite shaft
on the site of the Dauphin’s Gate. And again, quite
recently, a large party from Halifax, consisting of members
of the Halifax Board of Trade (_anglicè_ Chamber of Commerce)
and their friends, arrived on a holiday excursion,
bringing with them a brass band. On that deserted Atlantic
shore, near the forgotten cemetery which holds the graves
of thousands of French, English, and American dead, there
floated out on the air the strains of “The Maple Leaf”—the
first martial music to awaken echoes in this spot for a
century and a half.
The seafaring Kenelly is dead, his schemes are in abeyance,
and his title to the land is vigorously disputed.
Indeed, there seems to be little doubt that the whole site
of this fortress is Imperial property, and the sooner an
arrangement is devised which will give Louisbourg into
the charge of the Battlefields Commission or some body
appointed to conserve it, the better. It would be an eternal
reproach to the Dominion if it allows these sacred vestiges
to be swept from the face of the earth, save for the memorial
which the piety of Americans have placed on British ground
in memory of the exploit of their forebears. Why should
we British do less for our victory and our victors? And,
may I add, for the valour of a defeated foe?
There is much agricultural land hereabouts, chiefly
cultivated by Highland Scots. “Quaint, indeed, are the
ways of many of them,” says one traveller, “amusing their
maxims, and droll their wit.” Can it be that this writer
forms his notion of Highland drollery from the exhibitions
of Mr. Harry Lauder? The truth is being forced upon a
reluctant and prejudiced world that the Scots and the Jews
are the true humorists of the world, but I do not think that
humour is typical of the Gaelic folk. Personally I have
seen none of it in them either in Old World or New, and
my experience of the “droll Highlanders” of Cape Breton
is that their ideas of drollery are rather Lancastrian in their
cold-bloodedness. Hospitable these folk are, doubtless,
but only upon occasion and when the mood takes them. I
have heard of a traveller, a mining engineer, whose buggy
broke down, and who sought in vain for refreshment for
miles in this part of Cape Breton. “Some bread.” “We’ve
nae bread.” “Some cheese.” “We’ve nae cheese.” “Some
water.” “The well’s dried up; try the store.” This was
a colloquy which took place after a half-a-dozen attempts
with folk who shook their heads and had “nae English.”
At the store, as he enumerated each item of his wants, the
storekeeper looked blank and replied, “We’ve nae call
for it.”
“Have you no crackers?”
“We’ve nae call for them; there’s some ship’s biscuit
and some molasses.”
Ship’s biscuit and molasses! Hurrah! God’s own
country! Ship’s biscuit, unless very mouldy, are milk-white;
molasses is, in respect of its saccharine quality,
something like honey. So we have come to twenty
square miles of tillable country not exactly flowing, but in
one spot oozing, let us say, something resembling milk and
honey. One wonders, casting an eye over the sun-kissed
rolling earth, at the quivering pines, birch and beeches, why
human beings should for so long be content with so small a
measure of material prosperity as this.
“Them,” says a guide in my ear, “why, them fellows is
rich. Ain’t they got stockingsful of guineas in their cellars?
Don’t you waste any pity on them farmers. When they
ain’t farming they’re fishing, and when they ain’t fishing they
take a spell o’ mining. They cling to what they get, and,
barring a little smuggled gin or rum, get their living cheap,
I tell you.”
The country between Glace Bay and Louisbourg ought
to be a famous grazing country, especially for sheep.
The cattle I saw at Mira Bay looked fat and comely, and
in the western parts of Cape Breton a great sheep-raising
industry might well be established. When it is understood
that the food demands of the mining and manufacturing
population are already far greater than the Nova Scotian
farmers can supply, it will be seen at once how great is the
opportunity here to establish a paying market, especially for
mutton, poultry, vegetables, and dairy products.
[Illustration: LOUISBOURG—THE OBELISK COMMEMORATING THE FIRST SIEGE.]
As for sport hereabouts, besides large and small game
in season, the existence of so many small streams ensures
an abundance—even a superabundance—of fish. I heard
an angler on the Mira River who, two days before my
arrival, had caught eighty trout in one day! They were,
for the most part, useless to him, and he had to leave them
behind. Such “sport” is bound to pall—one takes refuge
in the reflection that it cannot last. Cape Breton, like
Newfoundland, is being discovered by hunters of moose,
snarers of trout and salmon, and seekers of wild-fowl and
shore birds from afar, and trains and steamers are pouring
their human freight into the solitudes of yesterday.
Than a “Sportsman’s Paradise” I know no phrase so
absurdly abused; but if getting what he wants and all he
wants in the way of fish and fowl and fauna generally constitutes
a sportsman’s idea of happiness, I know of no place
where he can be quite so happy.