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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 beat
only at his dictation.

We will now pass on to the gradual development of this idea in the minds
of those who held the destiny of Canada in their keeping.




                                   II
                          LOUISBURG REVISITED


The annals of a celebrated fortress are sure to present some very
curious and instructive phases of national policy and character. Of none
of the fortresses of colonial America can this be said with greater
truth than of Louisburg, once the key and stronghold of French power in
Canada.

No historic survey can be called complete which does not include the
scene itself. Nowhere does the reality of history come home to us with
such force, or leave such deep, abiding impressions, as when we stand
upon ground where some great action has been performed, or reach a spot
hallowed by the golden memories of the past. It gives tone, color,
consistency to the story as nothing else can, and, for the time being,
we almost persuade ourselves that we, too, are actors in the great drama
itself.

The Cape Breton Coast.

It is doubtless quite true that the first impressions one gets when
coming into Louisburg from sea must be altogether disappointing. Indeed,
speaking for myself, I had formed a vague notion, I know not how, that I
was going to see another Quebec, or, at least, something quite like that
antique stronghold, looming large in the distance, just as the history
of the fortress itself looms up out of its epoch. On the contrary, we
saw a low, tame coast, without either prominent landmark or seamark to
denote the harbor, except to those who know every rock and tree upon it,
lifting nowhere the castellated ruins that one’s eyes are strained to
seek, and chiefly formidable now on account of the outlying shoals,
sunken reefs, and intricate passages that render the navigation both
difficult and dangerous to seamen.

Lighthouse Point.

On drawing in toward the harbor, we pass between a cluster of three
small, rocky islets at the left hand, one of which is joined to that
shore by a sunken reef; and a rocky point, of very moderate elevation,
at the right, on which the harbor lighthouse stands, the ship channel
being thus compressed to a width of half a mile between the innermost
island and point.

The harbor is so spacious as to seem deserted, and so still as to seem
oppressive.

Island Battery.

The island just indicated was, in the days of the Anglo-French struggles
here, the key to this harbor, but the opposite point proved the
master-key. Neither of the great war fleets that took part in the two
sieges of Louisburg ventured to pass the formidable batteries of that
island, commanding as they did the entrance at short range, and masking
the city behind them, until their fire had first been silenced from the
lighthouse point yonder. When that was done, Louisburg fell like the
ripe pear in autumn.

Old Louisburg.

The old French city and fortress, the approach to which this Island
Battery thus securely covered, rose at the southwest point of the
harbor, or on the opposite to the present town of Louisburg, which is a
fishing and coaling station for six months in the year, and for the
other six counts for little or nothing. In summer it is land-locked; in
winter, ice-locked. Pack ice frequently blockades the shores of the
whole island until May, and snow sometimes lies in the woods until June.
Yet in Cape Breton they call Louisburg an open harbor, and its choice as
the site for a fortress finally turned upon the belief that it was
accessible at all seasons of the year. As to that, we shall see later.

Face of the Country.

As for the country lying between Sydney and Louisburg, all travellers
agree in pronouncing it wholly without interesting features. And the few
inhabitants are scarcely more interesting than the country. In a word,
it is roughly heaved about in a series of shaggy ridges, sometimes
rising to a considerable height, through which the Mira, an arm of the
sea, forces its way at flood-tide. There is a settlement or two upon
this stream, as there was far back in the time of the French occupation,
but everything about the country wears a forlorn and unprosperous look;
the farms being few and far between, the houses poor, the land thin and
cold, and the people—I mean them no disparagement—much like the land,
from which they get just enough to live upon, and no more. Fortunately
their wants are few, and their habits simple.

Remains of the Fortress.

Louisburg is certainly well worth going nine hundred miles to see, but
when, at last, one stands on the grass-grown ramparts, and gets his
first serious idea of their amazing strength and extent, curiosity is
lost in wonder, wonder gives way to reflection, and reflection leads
straight to the question, “What do all these miles of earthworks mean?”
And I venture to make the assertion that no one who has ever been to
Louisburg will rest satisfied till he has found his answer. The story is
long, but one rises from its perusal with a clearer conception of the
nature of the struggle for the mastery of a continent.

Perhaps the one striking thought about this place is its utter futility.
Man having no further use for it, nature quietly reclaims it for her own
again. Sheep now walk the ramparts instead of sentinels.

Dominating Hills.

Upon looking about him, one sees the marked feature of all this region
in the chain of low hills rising behind Louisburg. But a little back
from the coast the hills rise higher, are drawn more compactly together,
and assume the semi-mountainous character common to the whole island.

Green Hill.

As this chain of hills undulates along the coast here, sometimes bending
a