Louisbourg And Boston
For thirty years England and France now remained at peace, and England
had many reasons for desiring peace to continue. Anne, the last of the
Stuart rulers, died in 1714. The new King, George I, Elector of Hanover,
was a German and a German unchangeable, for he was already fifty-four,
with little knowledge of England and none of the English, and with an
undying love for the dear despotic ways easily followed in a small
German principality. He and his successor George II were thinking
eternally of German rather than of English problems, and with German
interests chiefly regarded it was well that England should make a friend
of France. It was well, too, that under a new dynasty, with its title
disputed, England should not encourage France to continue the friendly
policy of Louis XIV towards James, the deposed Stuart Pretender. England
had just made a new, determined, and arrogant enemy by forcing upon
Spain the deep humiliation of ceding Gibraltar, which had been taken in
1704 by Admiral Rooke with allied forces. The proudest monarchy in
Europe was compelled to see a spot of its own sacred territory held
permanently by a rival nation. Gibraltar Spain was determined to
recover. Its loss drove her into the arms of the enemies of England and
remains to this day a grievance which on occasion Spanish politicians
know well how to make useful.
Great Britain was now under the direction of a leader whose policy was
peace. A nation is happy when a born statesman with a truly liberal mind
and a genuine love of his country comes to the front in its affairs.
Such a man was Sir Robert Walpole. He was a Whig squire, a plain country
gentleman, with enough of culture to love good pictures and the ancient
classics, but delighting chiefly in sports and agriculture, hard
drinking and politics. When only twenty-seven he was already a leader
among the Whigs; at thirty-two he was Secretary for War; and before he
was forty he had become Prime Minister, a post which he really created
and was the first Englishman to hold. Friendship with France marked a
new phase of British policy. Walpole's baffled enemies said that he was
bribed by France. His shrewd insight kept France lukewarm in its support
of the Stuart rising in 1715, which he punished with great severity. But
it was as a master of finance that he was strongest. While continental
nations were wasting men and money Walpole gloried in saving English
lives and English gold. He found new and fruitful modes of taxation, but
when urged to tax the colonies he preferred, as he said, to leave that
to a bolder man. It is a pity that any one was ever found bold enough to
do it.
Walpole's policy endured for a quarter of a century. He abandoned it
only after a bitter struggle in which he was attacked as sacrificing the
national honor for the sake of peace. Spain was an easy mark for those
who wished to arouse the warlike spirit. She still persecuted and burned
heretics, a great cause of offense in Protestant Britain, and she was
rigorous in excluding foreigners from trading with her colonies. To be
the one exception in this policy of exclusion was the privilege enjoyed
by Britain. When the fortunes of Spain were low in 1713, she had been
forced not merely to cede Gibraltar but also to give to the British the
monopoly of supplying the Spanish colonies with negro slaves and the
right to send one ship a year to trade at Porto Bello in South America.
It seems a sufficiently ignoble bargain for a great nation to exact: the
monopoly of carrying and selling cargoes of black men and the right to
send a single ship yearly to a Spanish colony. We can hardly imagine
grave diplomats of our day haggling over such terms. But the eighteenth
century was not the twentieth. From the treaty the British expected
amazing results. The South Sea Company was formed to carry on a vast
trade with South America. One ship a year could, of course, carry
little, but the ships laden with negroes could smuggle into the colonies
merchandise and the one trading ship could be and was reloaded
fraudulently from lighters so that its cargo was multiplied manyfold.
Out of the belief in huge profits from this trade with its exaggerated
visions of profit grew in 1720 the famous South Sea Bubble which
inaugurated a period of frantic speculation in England. Worthless shares
in companies formed for trade in the South Seas sold at a thousand per
cent of their face value. It is a form of madness to which human greed
is ever liable. Walpole's financial insight condemned from the first the
wild outburst, and his common sense during the crisis helped to stem the
tide of disaster. The South Sea Bubble burst partly because Spain stood
sternly on her own rights and punished British smugglers. During many
years the tension between the two nations grew. No doubt Spanish
officials were harsh. Tales were repeated in England of their
brutalities to British sailors who fell into their hands. In 1739 the
story of a certain Captain Jenkins that his ear had been cut off by
Spanish captors and thrown in his face with an insulting message to his
government brought matters to a climax. Events in other parts of Europe
soon made the war general. When, in 1740, the young King of Prussia,
Frederick II, came to the throne, his first act was to march an army
into Silesia. To this province he had, he said, in the male line, a
better claim than that of the woman, Maria Theresa, who had just
inherited the Austrian crown. Frederick conquered Silesia and held it.
In 1744 he was allied with Spain and France, while Britain allied
herself with Austria, and thus Britain and France were again at war.
In America both sides had long seen that the war was inevitable. Never
had French opinion been more arrogant in asserting France's right to
North America than after the Treaty of Utrecht. At the dinner-table of
the Governor in Quebec there was incessant talk of Britain's incapacity,
of the sheer luck by which she had blundered into the occupation of
great areas, while in truth she was weak through lack of union and
organization. A natural antipathy, it was said, existed between her
colonies and herself; she was a monarchy while they were really
independent republics. France, on the other hand, had grown stronger
since the last war. In 1713 she had retained the island of Cape Breton
and now she had made it a new menace to British power. Boston, which had
breathed more freely after the fall of Port Royal in 1710, soon had
renewed cause for alarm in regard to its shipping. On the southern coast
of Cape Breton, there was a spacious harbor with a narrow entrance
easily fortified, and here France began to build the fortress of
Louisbourg. It was planned on the most approved military principles of
the time. Through its strength, the boastful talk went, France should
master North America. The King sent out cannon, undertook to build a
hospital, to furnish chaplains for the service of the Church, to help
education, and so on. Above all, he sent to Louisbourg soldiers.
Reports of these wonderful things reached the English colonies and
caused fears and misgivings. New England believed that Louisbourg
reflected the pomp and wealth of Versailles. The fortress was, in truth,
slow in building and never more than a rather desolate outpost of
France. It contained in all about four thousand people. During the
thirty years of the long truce it became so strong that it was without a
rival on the Atlantic coast. The excellent harbor was a haven for the
fishermen of adjacent waters and a base for French privateers, who were
a terror to all the near trade routes of the Atlantic. On the military
side Louisbourg seemed a success. But the French failed in their effort
to colonize the island of Cape Breton on which the fortress stood. Today
this island has great iron and other industries. There are coal-mines
ear Louisbourg; and its harbor, long deserted after the fall of the
power of France, has now an extensive commerce. The island was indeed
fabulously rich in coals and minerals. To use these things, however, was
to be the task of a new age of industry. The colonist of the eighteenth
century--a merchant, a farmer, or a fur trader--thought that Cape Breton
was bleak and infertile and refused to settle there. Louisbourg remained
a compact fortress with a good harbor, free from ice during most of the
year, but too much haunted by fog. It looked out on a much-traveled sea.
But it remained set in the wilderness.
Even if Louisbourg made up for the loss of Port Royal, this did not,
however, console France for the cession of Acadia. The fixed idea of
those who shaped the policy of Canada was to recover Acadia and
meanwhile to keep its French settlers loyal to France. The Acadians were
not a promising people with whom to work. In Acadia, or Nova Scotia, as
the English called it, these backward people had slowly gathered during
a hundred years and had remained remote and neglected. They had cleared
farms, built primitive houses, planted orchards, and reared cattle. In
1713 their number did not exceed two or three thousand, but already they
were showing the amazing fertility of the French race in America. They
were prosperous but ignorant. Almost none of them could read. After the
cession of their land to Britain in 1713 they had been guaranteed by
treaty the free exercise of their religion and they were Catholics to a
man. It seems as if history need hardly mention a people so feeble and
obscure. Circumstances, however, made the rôle of the Acadians
important. Their position was unique. The Treaty of Utrecht gave them
the right to leave Acadia within a year, taking with them their personal
effects. To this Queen Anne added the just privilege of selling their
lands and houses. Neither the Acadians themselves, however, nor their
new British masters were desirous that they should leave. The Acadians
were content in their old homes; and the British did not wish them to
help in building up the neighboring French stronghold on Cape Breton. It
thus happened that the French officials could induce few of the Acadians
to migrate and the English troubled them little. Having been resolute in
acquiring Nova Scotia, Britain proceeded straightway to neglect it. She
brought in few settlers. She kept there less than two hundred soldiers
and even to these she paid so little attention that sometimes they had
no uniforms. The Acadians prospered, multiplied, and quarreled as to the
boundaries of their lands. They rendered no military service, paid no
taxes, and had the country to themselves as completely as if there had
been no British conquest. They rarely saw a British official. If they
asked the British Governor at Annapolis to settle for them some vexed
question of rights or ownership he did so and they did not even pay a
fee.
This is not, however, the whole story. England's neglect of the colony
was France's opportunity. Perhaps the French court did not follow
closely what was going on in Acadia. The successive French Governors of
Canada at Quebec were, however, alert; and their policy was to incite
the Abenaki Indians on the New England frontier to harass the English
settlements, and to keep the Acadians an active factor in the support of
French plans. The nature of French intrigue is best seen in the career
of Sebastien Rale. He was a highly educated Jesuit priest. It was long a
tradition among the Jesuits to send some of their best men as
missionaries among the Indians. Rale spent nearly the whole of his life
with the Abenakis at the mission station of Norridgewock on the Kennebec
River. He knew the language and the customs of the Indians, attended
their councils, and dominated them by his influence. He was a model
missionary, earnest and scholarly. But the Jesuit of that age was prone
to be half spiritual zealot, half political intriguer. There is no doubt
that the Indians had a genuine fear that the English, with danger from
France apparently removed by the Treaty of Utrecht, would press claims
to lands about the Kennebec River in what is now the State of Maine, and
that they would ignore the claims of the Indians and drive them out. The
Governor at Quebec helped to arouse the savages against the arrogant
intruders. English border ruffians stirred the Indians by their drunken
outrages and gave them real cause for anger. The savages knew only one
way of expressing political unrest. They began murdering women and
children in raids on lonely log cabins on the frontier. The inevitable
result was that in 1721 Massachusetts began a war on them which dragged
on for years. Rale, inspired from Quebec, was believed to control the
Indians and, indeed, boasted that he did so. At last the English struck
at the heart of the trouble. In 1724 some two hundred determined men
made a silent advance through the forest to the mission village of
Norridgewock where Rale lived, and Rale died fighting the assailants. In
Europe a French Jesuit such as he would have worked among diplomats and
at the luxurious courts of kings. In America he worked among savages
under the hard conditions of frontier life. The methods and the aims in
both cases were the same--by subtle and secret influence so to mold the
actions of men that France should be exalted in power. In their high
politics the French sometimes overreached themselves. To seize points of
vantage, to intrigue for influence, are not in themselves creative. They
must be supported by such practical efforts as will assure an economic
reserve adequate in the hour of testing. France failed partly because
she did not know how to lay sound industrial foundations which should
give substance to the brilliant planning of her leaders.
To French influence of this kind the English opposed forces that were
the outcome of their national character and institutions. They were
keener traders than the French and had cheaper and better goods, with
the exception perhaps of French gunpowder and of French brandy, which
the Indians preferred to English rum. Though the English were less alert
and less brilliant than the French, the work that they did was more
enduring. Their settlements encroached ever more and more upon the
forest. They found and tilled the good lands, traded and saved and
gradually built up populous communities. The British colonies had twenty
times the population of Canada. The tide of their power crept in slowly
but it moved with the relentless force that has subsequently made nearly
the whole of North America English in speech and modes of thought.
When, in 1744, open war between the two nations came at last in Europe,
each prepared to spring at the other in America--and France sprang
first. In Nova Scotia, on the narrow strait which separates the mainland
from the island of Cape Breton, the British had a weak little fishing
settlement called Canseau. Suddenly in May, 1744, when the British at
Canseau had heard nothing of war, two armed vessels from Louisbourg with
six or seven hundred soldiers and sailors appeared before the poor
little place and demanded its surrender. To this the eighty British
defenders agreed on the condition that they should be sent to Boston
which, as yet, had not heard of the war. Meanwhile they were taken to
Louisbourg where they kept their eyes open. But the French continued in
their offensive. The one vital place held by the British in Nova Scotia
was Annapolis, at that time so neglected that the sandy ramparts had
crumbled into the ditch supposed to protect them, and cows from the
neighboring fields walked up the slope and looked down into the fort. It
was Duvivier, the captor of Canseau, who attacked Annapolis. He had
hoped much for help from the Indians and the Acadians, but, though both
seemed eager, both failed him in action. Paul Mascarene, who defended
Annapolis, was of Huguenot blood, which stimulated him to fight the
better against the Catholic French. Boston sent him help, for that
little capital was deeply moved, and so Annapolis did not fall, though
it was harassed during the whole summer of 1744; and New England, in a
fever at the new perils of war, prepared a mighty stroke against the
French.
This expedition was to undertake nothing less than the capture of
Louisbourg itself. The colonial troops had been so often reminded of
their inferiority to regular troops as fighting forces that, with
provincial docility, they had almost come to accept the estimate. It was
well enough for them to fight irregular French and Indian bands, but to
attack a fortress defended by a French garrison was something that only
a few bold spirits among them could imagine. Such a spirit, however, was
William Vaughan, a Maine trader, deeply involved in the fishing industry
and confronted with ruin from hostile Louisbourg. Shirley, the Governor
of Massachusetts, a man of eager ambition, took up the proposal and
worked out an elaborate plan. The prisoners who had been captured at
Canseau by the French and interned at Louisbourg now arrived at Boston
and told of bad conditions in the fortress. In January, 1745, Shirley
called a session of the General Court, the little parliament of
Massachusetts, and, having taken the unusual step of pledging the
members to secrecy, he unfolded his plan. But it proved too bold for the
prudent legislators, and they voted it down. Meanwhile New England trade
was suffering from ships which used Louisbourg as a base. At length
public opinion was aroused and, when Shirley again called the General
Court, a bare majority endorsed his plan. Soon thereafter New England
was aflame. Appeals for help were sent to England and, it is said, even
to Jamaica. Shirley counted on aid from a British squadron, under
Commodore Peter Warren, in American waters, but at first Warren had no
instructions to help such a plan. This disappointment did not keep New
England from going on alone. In the end Warren received instructions to
give the necessary substantial aid, and he established a strict blockade
which played a vital part in the siege of the French fortress.
In this hour of deadly peril Louisbourg was in not quite happy case.
Some of the French officers, who would otherwise have starved on their
low pay, were taking part in illicit trade and were neglecting their
duties. Just after Christmas in 1744, there had been a mutiny over a
petty question of butter and bacon. Here, as in all French colonies,
there were cliques, with the suspicions and bitterness which they
involve. The Governor Duchambon, though brave enough, was a man of poor
judgment in a position that required both tact and talent. The English
did not make the mistake of delaying their preparations. They were
indeed so prompt that they arrived at Canseau early in April and had to
wait for the ice to break up in Gabarus Bay, near Louisbourg, where they
intended to land. Here, on April 30, the great fleet appeared. A watcher
in Louisbourg counted ninety-six ships standing off shore. With little
opposition from the French the amazing army landed at Freshwater Cove.
Then began an astonishing siege. The commander of the New England
forces, William Pepperrell, was a Maine trader, who dealt in a little of
everything, fish, groceries, lumber, ships, land. Though innocent of
military science, he was firm and tactful. A British officer with strict
military ideas could not, perhaps, have led that strange army with
success. Pepperrell knew that he had good fighting material; he knew,
too, how to handle it. In his army of some four thousand men there was
probably not one officer with a regular training. Few of his force had
proper equipment, but nearly all his men were handy on a ship as well as
on land. In Louisbourg were about two thousand defenders, of whom only
five or six hundred were French regulars. These professional soldiers
watched with contempt not untouched with apprehension the breaches of
military precedent in the operations of the besiegers. Men harnessed
like horses dragged guns through morasses into position, exposed
themselves recklessly, and showed the skill, initiative, and resolution
which we have now come to consider the dominant qualities of the Yankee.
In time Warren arrived with a British squadron and then the French were
puzzled anew. They could not understand the relations between the fleet
and the army, which seemed to them to belong to different nations. The
New Englanders appeared to be under a Governor who was something like an
independent monarch. He had drawn up elaborate plans for his army,
comical in their apparent disregard of the realities of war, naming the
hour when the force should land "unobserved" before Louisbourg,
instructing Pepperrell to surprise that place while every one was
asleep, and so on. Kindly Providence was expected even to give
continuous good weather. "The English appear to have enlisted Heaven in
their interests," said a despairing resident of the town; "so long as
the expedition lasted they had the most beautiful weather in the world."
There were no storms; the winds were favorable; fog, so common on that
coast, did not creep in; and the sky was clear.
Among the French the opinion prevailed that the English colonists were
ferocious pirates plotting eternally to destroy the power of France.
Their liberty, however, it was well understood, had made them strong;
and now they quickly became formidable soldiers. Their shooting, bad at
first, was, in the end, superb. Sometimes in their excess of zeal they
overcharged their cannon so that the guns burst. But they managed to hit
practically every house in Louisbourg, and since most of the houses were
of wood there was constant danger of fire. Some of the French fought
well. Even children of ten and twelve helped to carry ammunition.
The Governor Duchambon tried to keep up the spirits of the garrison by
absurd exaggeration of British losses. He was relying much on help from
France, but only a single ship reached port. On May 19, 1745, the
besieged saw approaching Louisbourg a great French ship of war, the
Vigilant, long looked for, carrying 64 guns and 560 men. A northwest
wind was blowing which would have brought her quickly into the harbor.
The British fleet was two and a half leagues away to leeward. The great
ship, thinking herself secure, did not even stop to communicate with
Louisbourg but wantonly gave chase to a small British privateer which
she encountered near the shore. By skillful maneuvering the smaller ship
led the French frigate out to sea again, and then the British squadron
came up. From five o'clock to ten in the evening anxious men in
Louisbourg watched the fight and saw at last the Vigilant surrender
after losing eighty men. This disaster broke the spirit of the
defenders, who were already short of ammunition. When they knew that the
British were preparing for a combined assault by land and sea, they made
terms and surrendered on the 17th of June, after the siege had lasted
for seven weeks. The garrison marched out with the honors of war, to be
transported to France, together with such of the civilian population as
wished to go.
The British squadron then sailed into the harbor. Pepperrell's strange
army, ragged and war-worn after the long siege, entered the town by the
south gate. They had fought as crusaders, for to many of them Catholic
Louisbourg was a stronghold of Satan. Whitfield, the great English
evangelist, then in New England, had given them a motto--Nil desperandum
Christo duce. There is a story that one of the English chaplains, old
Parson Moody, a man of about seventy, had brought with him from Boston
an axe and was soon found using it to hew down the altar and images in
the church at Louisbourg. If the story is true, it does something to
explain the belief of the French in the savagery of their opponents who
would so treat things which their enemies held to be most sacred. The
French had met this fanaticism with a savagery equally intense and
directed not against things but against the flesh of men. An inhabitant
of Louisbourg during the siege describes the dauntless bravery of the
Indian allies of the French during the siege: "Full of hatred for the
English whose ferocity they abhor, they destroy all upon whom they can
lay hands." He does not have even a word of censure for the savages who
tortured and killed in cold blood a party of some twenty English who had
been induced to surrender on promise of life. The French declared that
not they but the savages were responsible for such barbarities, and the
English retorted that the French must control their allies. Feeling on
such things was naturally bitter on both sides and did much to decide
that the war between the two nations should be to the death.
The fall of Louisbourg brought great exultation to the English colonies.
It was a unique event, the first prolonged and successful siege that had
as yet taken place north of Mexico. An odd chance of war had decreed
that untrained soldiers should win a success so prodigious. New England,
it is true, had incurred a heavy expenditure, and her men, having done
so much, naturally imagined that they had done everything, and talked as
if the siege was wholly their triumph. They were, of course, greatly
aided by the fleet under Warren, and the achievement was a joint triumph
of army and navy. New England alone, however, had the credit of
conceiving and of arousing others to carry out a brilliant exploit.
Victory inspires to further victory. The British, exultant after
Louisbourg, were resolved to make an end of French power in America.
"Delenda est Canada!" cried Governor Shirley to the General Court of
Massachusetts, and the response of the members was the voting of men and
money on a scale that involved the bankruptcy of the Commonwealth. Other
colonies, too, were eager for a cause which had won a success so
dazzling, and some eight thousand men were promised for an attack on
Canada, proud and valiant Massachusetts contributing nearly one-half of
the total number. The old plan was to be followed. New York was to lead
in an attack by way of Lake Champlain. New England was to collect its
forces at Louisbourg. Here a British fleet should come, carrying eight
battalions of British regulars, and, with Warren in command, the whole
armada should proceed to Quebec. Nothing came of this elaborate scheme.
Neither the promised troops nor the fleet arrived from England. British
ministers broke faith with the colonists in the adventure with quite too
light a heart.
Stories went abroad of disorder and dissension in Louisbourg under the
English and of the weakness of the place. Disease broke out. Hundreds of
New England soldiers died and their bones now lie in graves, unmarked
and forgotten, on the seashore by the deserted fortress; at almost any
time still their bones, washed down by the waves, may be picked up on
the beach. There were sullen mutterings of discontent at Louisbourg.
Soldiers grumbled over grievances which were sometimes fantastic. Rumor
had been persistent in creating a legend that vast wealth, the
accumulated plunder brought in by French privateers, was stored in the
town. From this source a rich reward in booty was expected by the
soldiers. In fact, when Louisbourg was taken, all looting was forbidden
and the soldiers were put on guard over houses which they had hoped to
rob. For the soldiers there were no prizes. Louisbourg was poor. The
sailors, on the other hand, were fortunate. As a decoy Warren kept the
French flag flying over the harbor, and French ships sailed in, one of
them with a vast treasure of gold and silver coin and ingots from Peru
valued at £600,000. One other prize was valued at £200,000 and a third
at £140,000. Warren's own share of prize money amounted to £60,000,
while Pepperrell, the unrewarded leader of the sister service, piled up
a personal debt of £10,000. Quarrels occurred between soldiers and
sailors, and in these the New Englanders soon proved by no means the
cowards which complacent superiority in England considered them; rather,
as an enlightened Briton said, "If they had pickaxe and spade they would
dig a way to Hell itself and storm that stronghold."
Behind all difficulties was the question whether, having taken
Louisbourg, the British could continue to hold it. France answered with
a resolute "No." To retake it she fitted out a great fleet. Nearly half
her navy gathered under the Duc d'Anville and put to sea on June 20,
1746. If in the previous summer God had helped the English with good
weather, by a similar proof His face now appeared turned a second time
against the French. In the great array there were more than sixty ships,
which were to gather at Chebucto, now Halifax, harbor, and to be joined
there by four great ships of war from the West Indies. Everything went
wrong. On the voyage across the Atlantic there was a prolonged calm,
followed by a heavy squall. Several ships were struck by lightning. A
magazine on the Mars blew up, killing ten and wounding twenty-one men.
Pestilence broke out. As a crowning misfortune, the fleet was scattered
by a terrific storm. After great delay d'Anville's ship reached
Chebucto, then a wild and lonely spot. The expected fleet from the West
Indies had indeed come, but had gone, since the ships from France, long
overdue, had not arrived. D'Anville died suddenly--some said of
apoplexy, others of poison self-administered. More ships arrived full of
sick men and short of provisions. D'Estournel, who succeeded d'Anville
in chief command, in despair at the outlook killed himself with his own
sword after the experience of only a day or two in his post. La
Jonquière, a competent officer, afterwards Governor of Canada, then led
the expedition. The pestilence still raged, and from two to three
thousand men died. One day a Boston sloop boldly entered Chebucto harbor
to find out what was going on. It is a wonder that the British did not
descend upon the stricken French and destroy them. In October, La
Jonquière, having pulled his force together, planned to win the small
success of taking Annapolis, but again storms scattered his ships. At
the end of October he finally decided to return to France. But there
were more heavy storms; and one French crew was so near starvation that
only a chance meeting with a Portuguese ship kept them from killing and
eating five English prisoners. Only a battered remnant of the fleet
eventually reached home ports.
The disaster did not crush France. In May of the next spring, 1747, a
new fleet under La Jonquière set out to retake Louisbourg. Near the
coast of Europe, however, Admirals Anson and Warren met and completely
destroyed it, taking prisoner La Jonquière himself. This disaster
effected what was really the most important result of the war: it made
the British fleet definitely superior to the French. During the struggle
England had produced a new Drake, who attacked Spain in the spirit of
the sea-dogs of Elizabeth. Anson had gone in 1740 into the Pacific,
where he seized and plundered Spanish ships as Drake had done nearly two
centuries earlier; and in 1744, when he had been given up for lost, he
completed the great exploit of sailing round the world and bringing home
rich booty. Such feats went far to give Britain that command of the sea
on which her colonial Empire was to depend.
The issue of the war hung more on events that occurred in Europe than in
America, and France had made gains as well as suffered losses. It was on
the sea that she had sustained her chief defeats. In India she had
gained by taking the English factory at Madras; and in the Low Countries
she was still aggressive. Indeed, during the war England had been more
hostile to Spain than to France. She had not taken very seriously her
support of the colonies in their attack on Louisbourg and she had failed
them utterly in their designs on Canada. It is true that in Europe
England had grave problems to solve. Austria, with which she was allied,
desired her to fight until Frederick of Prussia should give up the
province of Silesia seized by him in 1740. In this quarrel England had
no vital interest. France had occupied the Austrian Netherlands and had
refused to hand back to Austria this territory unless she received Cape
Breton in return. Britain might have kept Cape Breton if she would have
allowed France to keep Belgium. This, in loyalty to Austria, she would
not do. Accordingly peace was made at Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748 on the
agreement that each side should restore to the other its conquests, not
merely in Europe but also in America and Asia. Thus it happened that the
British flag went up again at Madras while it came down at Louisbourg.
Boston was of course angry at the terms of the treaty. What sacrifices
had Massachusetts not made! The least of them was the great burden of
debt which she had piled up. Her sons had borne what Pepperrell called
"almost incredible hardships." They had landed cannon on a lee shore
when the great waves pounded to pieces their boats and when men wading
breast high were crushed by the weight of iron. Harnessed two and three
hundred to a gun, they had dragged the pieces one after the other over
rocks and through bog and slime, and had then served them in the open
under the fire of the enemy. New Englanders had died like "rotten sheep"
in Louisbourg. The graves of nearly a thousand of them lay on the bleak
point outside the wall. What they had gained by this sacrifice must now
be abandoned. A spirit of discontent with the mother country went abroad
and, after this sacrifice of colonial interests, never wholly died out.
It is not without interest to note in passing that Gridley, the engineer
who drew the plan of the defenses of Louisbourg, thirty years later drew
those of Bunker Hill to protect men of the English race who fought
against England.
Every one knew that the peace of 1748 was only a truce and Britain began
promptly new defenses. Into the spacious harbor of Chebucto, which three
years earlier had been the scene of the sorrows of d'Anville's fleet,
there sailed in June, 1749, a considerable British squadron bent on a
momentous errand. It carried some thousands of settlers, Edward
Cornwallis, a governor clothed with adequate authority, and a force
sufficient for the defense of the new foundation. Cornwallis was
delighted with the prospect. "All the officers agree the harbour is the
finest they have ever seen"--this, of Halifax harbor with the great
Bedford Basin, opening beyond it, spacious enough to contain the fleets
of the world. "The Country is one continuous Wood, no clear spot to be
seen or heard of. D'Anville's fleet ... cleared no ground; they encamped
their men on the beach." The garrison was withdrawn from Louisbourg and
soon arrived at Halifax, with a vast quantity of stores. A town was
marked out; lots were drawn for sites; and every one knew where he might
build his house. There were prodigious digging, chopping, hammering. "I
shall be able to get them all Houses before winter," wrote Cornwallis
cheerily. Firm military discipline, indeed, did wonders. Before winter
came, a town had been created, and with the town a fortress which from
that time has remained the chief naval and military stronghold of Great
Britain in North America. At Louisbourg some two hundred miles farther
east on the coast, France could reëstablish her military strength, but
now Louisbourg had a rival and each was resolved to yield nothing to the
other. The founding of Halifax was in truth the symbol of the renewal of
the struggle for a continent.