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    [Illustration: W^m Pepperrell]

                 _Decisive Events in American History_




                                  THE
                          TAKING OF LOUISBURG
                                  1745


                                   BY
                           SAMUEL ADAMS DRAKE
              AUTHOR OF “BURGOYNE’S INVASION OF 1777” ETC.


                            BOSTON MDCCCXCI
                       LEE AND SHEPARD PUBLISHERS
           10 MILK STREET NEXT “THE OLD SOUTH MEETING HOUSE”
                      NEW YORK CHAS. T. DILLINGHAM
                          718 AND 720 BROADWAY

                            Copyright, 1890,
                          By Lee and Shepard.




                                CONTENTS


  CHAPTER                                                            PAGE
  I. Colonial Seacoast Defences                                         9
  II. Louisburg Revisited                                              13
  III. Louisburg to Solve Important Political and Military Problems    24
  IV. Résumé of Events to the Declaration of War                       33
  V. “Louisburg must be taken”                                         46
  VI. The Army and its General                                         59
  VII. The Army at Canso                                               73
  VIII. The Siege                                                      80
  IX. The Siege Continued                                             101
  X. Afterthoughts                                                    126

    [Illustration: ISLAND BATTERY, WITH LOUISBURG IN THE DISTANCE.]




                        THE TAKING OF LOUISBURG
                                  1745




                                   I
                       COLONIAL SEACOAST DEFENCES


The creation of great maritime fortresses, primarily designed to hold
with iron hand important highways of commerce, like Gibraltar, or simply
to guard great naval arsenals, like Kronstadt, or, again, placed where
some great river has cleft a broad path into the heart of a country,
thus laying it open to invasion, has long formed part of the military
policy of all maritime nations.

In the New World the Spaniards were the first to emphasize their
adhesion to these essential principles by the erection of strongholds at
Havana, Carthagena, Porto Bello, and Vera Cruz, not more to guarantee
the integrity of their colonial possessions, than to protect themselves
against the rapacity of the titled freebooters of Europe, to whom the
treasure fleets of Mexico and the East offered a most alluring prey.
When Spain carried the purse, all the crowned heads of Europe seem to
have turned highwaymen.

With this single exception the seaboard defences of the Atlantic coast,
even as late as the middle of the eighteenth century, were of the most
trivial character, nor was it owing to any provision for defence that
the chief ports of the English colonies enjoyed the long immunity they
did. England left her colonies to stand or fall upon their own
resources. Fortunate beyond expectation, they simply throve by neglect.
France, with a widely different colonial policy, did a little better,
but with a niggardly hand, while her system was squeezing the life-blood
out of her colonists, drop by drop. Had there been a Drake or a Hawkins
in the Spanish service, Spain might easily have revenged all past
affronts by laying desolate every creek and harbor of the unprotected
North Atlantic coast. She had the armed ports, as we have just shown.
She had the ships and sailors. What, then, was to have prevented her
from destroying the undefended villages of Charleston, Philadelphia, New
York, and Boston?

Though she set about it so tardily, France was at length compelled to
adopt a system of defence for Canada, or see Canada wrested from her
control. In a most sweeping sense the St. Lawrence was the open gateway
of Canada. There was absolutely no other means of access to all its vast
territory except through the long, little known, and scarce-travelled
course of the Mississippi—a route which, for many reasons besides its
isolation, removed it from consideration as an avenue of attack.

Quebec was as truly the heart of Canada as the St. Lawrence was its
great invigorating, life-giving artery. It is true that Quebec began to
assume at a very early day something of its later character as half
city, half fortress, but the views of its founders were unquestionably
controlled as much by the fact of remoteness from the sea, as by
Quebec’s remarkable natural capabilities for blocking the path to an
enemy.

Yet even before the memorable and decisive battle on the Plains of
Abraham, by which Canada was lost to France forever, the St. Lawrence
had been thrice ascended by hostile fleets, and Quebec itself once taken
by them. Mere remoteness was thus demonstrated to be no secure safeguard
against an enterprising enemy. But what if that enemy should seize and
fortify the mouth of the St. Lawrence itself? He would have put a
tourniquet upon the great artery, to be tightened at his pleasure, and
the heart of the colony, despite its invulnerable shield, would