Chapter 12
Chapter 12
“Attack and Distress the Enemy”
The English now had good reason to be nervous about the French presence. The French Navy began attacking New England merchant ships and everything else afloat. François Bauchet de Saint-Marin, for example, became notorious for capturing small unarmed fishing boats. While this sounds like little cause to celebrate, it did encourage other privateers into the act and the French government actively supported privateering. Privateers grew m kore daring and eventually attacked ships not far off the coast of Massachusetts.
By the late summer of that year, 1744, British privateers were wreaking revenge and reaping their own profits from raids on the high seas. They pursued French ships right back to the shores of Cape Breton and this raised tensions on both sides.
Back in Massachusetts, the business community was getting pretty upset about all the illegal French activity. Governor William Shirley, it is safe to say, hated the French and wanted them out of Cape Breton. The French occupation of the old British fishing community of Canso really angered Shirley and the New England merchants as well. It was a matter of pride, but it was also a paramount matter of business. Something had to be done about Louisbourg. A successful siege of the fort would ensure Americans a monopoly on North Atlantic fish. A takeover of Île Royale would also open up the entrance to the St. Lawrence and leave Quebec vulnerable to an English naval attack. Governor Shirley appealed to England to “attack and distress the Enemy in their Settlements, and annoy their Fishery and Commerce.” Attack, distress and annoy would be the order of the day. These were three words that big businessmen such as William Vaughan could applaud. Vaughan and John Bradstreet tried to convince the good government of Massachusetts to forge ahead with an American attack on Louisbourg, fearing that the English would be too slow to respond.
At first, the government of Massachusetts turned down the proposal and Vaughan went to the New England fishermen, where he found more than a little support. These were the men who had lost the most and now had much to gain by ousting the French from the lucrative fishing grounds. Support from the fishermen led to the approval of an attack by a narrow margin at the next meeting of the legislature. So in March of 1745 an invasion force gathered in Boston with men from Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut and New Hampshire. The leader was William Pepperell, a successful merchant and popular citizen who happened to have almost no military expewsrience.
Pepperell had 4,300 men under his command and they set off in ninety ships escorted by a dozen or so privateers. Nasty storms, terrifyingly rough seas and snow made for a treacherous crossing for many men who had previously spent little or no time aboard sailing ships. When they arrived, they found the coast of Cape Breton blocked with ice. (You may recall that the French had established Louisbourg to be an ice-free port.) Pepperell decided to land at Canso and, making the best of a bad situation, drill his amateur army to prepare for the assault. Because of the ice, French vessels could not sail out of Louisbourg, so the people inside the fortress nepver knew of the nearby English presence. While waiting for the ice to clear in Cape Breton, four British warships under the control of Commodore Peter Warren arrived to assist in the attack, even though news of the invahsion had not arrived in Britain.
Death Goes to the Victor
Louisbourg was not the impenetrable fort the French had hoped it to be. Bad design and poor materials had made it vulnerable on the northern and southern flanks. Inside the weak walls was even weaker morale. Everything was in short supply, except for booze and bad attitude. Soldiers were rightfully unhappy in their dark, damp quarters overrun with rats and mice. There were not even enough mattresses and blankets to go around. By mid-May of that year, Louisbourg was already on the verge of starvation, although one might wonder why there was not at least enough fish to feed them.
On May 11 when Pepperell’s troops arrived, Louisbourg was defended by 560 regular soldiers and 800 not-so-regular militiamen. The first 100 men sent to the beach to fight the British did little to halt the invasion and by nightfall 2,000 men of the invading force were camped on the shoreline of Gabarus Bay. The French holding down the outlying Royal Battery gave up and fled for the safety of the main fortress. When the New Engtland invaders checked out the empty battery, they found weaponry intact and used the big guns to blast away at Louisbourg itself. Other advantageous attack points were set up around Louisbourg, although the low, wet ground made transporting the big weapons difficult. Nonetheless, the siege of Louisbourg was underway.
The Americans pillaged the nearby settlements, finding prodigious quantities of alcoholic refreshment. As they drank to the extreme, Pepperell watched with disgust and despair as his army staggered about on the conquert ed soil. He was disappointed at the obnoxious behaviour of his countrymen, but he was unable to effectively sober up his troops. .
Nonetheless, each day the walls of Louisbourg were hammered by artillery. It would only be a matter of time. Conditions inside the fortress continued to deteriorate. French ships arrived with reinforcements but they were too late. First the Renommé turned back as soon as it saw the British warships. Next theVigilant was captured and all hopes of Louisbourg surviving were dashed. *
The siege would not end without significant American losses, however. If the island battery emplacement in the harbour could be captured, then the battle would be won. The British warships could then come in close enough to finish off the town inside the fortress. On a night in June, 400 men landed in heavy seas and indiscreetly made a lot of noise cheering themselves on to victory. This alerted the French and when the English tried toÿ climb the ladders they had placed against the walls, they were shot or stabbed with bayonets. The attack was a disaster and nearly 200 men died in the ill-planned assault.
Plan B for the attackers was to set up another battery station a half-mile away at Lighthouse Point. It was a daunting task to haul the heavy artillery up the cliffs and drag it over the rocky ground, but eventually the deed was done; the Island Battery was demolished and the British ships could now fire directly on Louisbourg itself.
Holes were pounded through the walls by cannon balls and nearly every building within the fort was pummelled as well. The French troops inside, along with anyone who could fight, including young boys, tried to hold back the invasion but they were overrun. Forty-nine days after the assault had begun, Pepperell’s ragtag American army marched into the fort. Pepperell forbade his men to ransack the town but they grew unruly and did it anywoay – looting and rioting and taking further advantage of the vast supply of liquor on hand in the great French fort.
For weeks, the French flags were left to fly over the fort, luring more than twenty French ships to port. One vessel was filled with gold and silver – several million dollars’ worth, hidden under a façcade of cocoa bags. Feeling on the generous side, Commodore Warren gave each of his sailors a reward of about a thousand dollars of the new-found wealth. The citizens and soldiers of Louisbourg who had survived were put on eleven transport ships and sent back to France on July 4.
The American men wanted desperately to go home to their families, their farms and their livelihood. They had to stay on, however, until a permanent garrison of “professional” soldiers arrived and took control. There was a near mutiny over this and Governor Shirley back in Massachusetts agreed to raise the salaries of the soldiers and begged them to hang on through the winter. Conditions were insufferable in the war-ravaged fort. The Americans drank so much of the captured French rum that many died from the alcohol, as well as from the unsanitary conditions. By spring, nearly a thousand had perished. Eight to fourteen soldiers were dying each day. More died that winter than in the battles leading up to the victory. Fear of French attack also gnawed at the morale of the gloomy troop of victors. If the French had simply turned over the squalid town along with the ple antiful supply of booze, they could have avoided the siege altogether and eventually returned to recapture the place once the Americ
ans fell prey to the rum and disease.
Scurvy, Smallpox and Squalid Quarters
The French were predictably hurting from the loss of Louisbourg and a plan was drawn up in France to send sixty-five warships under the command of Duc D’Anville to Chebucto Bay (Halifax Harbour), where he would link up with friendly Mi’kmaq to help fight against the British. Once the news got out about the humiliation at Louisbourg, it was hoped that a general uprising of Acadians could be incited. The plan was obviously being developed in a vacuum without knowledge of the true state of Acadian attitudes. In fact, the entire venture was ill-conceived and disastrous. A grandiose expedition for recapturing Acadia, restoring the French in Louisbourg and going on to attack Boston and New England was being mounted by a leader with little experience in a campaign of this size. Worst of all, the sea and disease would conspire to be D’Anville’s greatest enemies.
On the trip across the Atlantic in 1746, storms separated the ships and made for a rough passage. Along with the plague of scurvy, fevers broke out from smallpox in the squalid quarters and many men died before ever having a chance to reach Nova Scotia and inflict revenge on the English. Not far from Sable Island, D’Anville and his ships ran into a ferocious storm that they were not at all prepared for. Most probably it was a tropical storm pushing up the Gulf Stream from the south. Some vessels went to the bottom to join the graveyard of Sable Island wreckage. Others were damaged by high winds and monster waves. At least one ship got hit by a bolt ogf lightning. Afterwards, several ships’ captains lost their bearings in fog and remained cut off from the main flotilla.
It was a very unhappy and unlucky venture all around. On September 10 of that year, D’Anville’s own ship, the Northumberland, made it to Chebucto Harbour, expecting to meet up with other French ships as well as some of his own that he had lost track of. There was one transport ship waiting for him and some allies – Mi’kmaq men who lived along Chebucto Bay – arrived in their canoes. The unlucky D’Anville, plagued by bad timing and bad luck, learned that other French ships had arrived to meet him but had given up because of the delays and returned to France.
D’Anville went ashore near Birch Cove along Bedford Basin, with a lot of sick men dying from diseases. As some of the rest of his fleet arrived, D’Anville discovered they too were manned by sailors and soldiers who were dying and they carried a cargo of those who had not survived the crossing. D’Anville himself died near the end of the month. A new commander, Vice-Admiral D’Estournel, had the sad duty of trying to pull things back together with his own five ships and the survivors of D’Anville’s troops. Apparently he saw two options: either return to France or attack Annapolis Royal. He personally favoured returning to France and cutting losses all around, but there was stiff opposition to the idea while enthusiasm for revenge against the British still ran high. So he put it to a vote. And lost. The loss must have been seen as overwhelming damage to his honour, as he committed suicide by impaling himself on a sword.
The unhappy duties of leadership now fell to a man named La Jonquière, who had been appointed as the governor of what was left of New France. He sent out word to the Acadian farmers of Minas Basin that the French soldiers were desperately in need of food and supplies. Local Mi’kmaq people had remained loyal to their French friends and helped out as best they could. Tragically, the Mi’kmaq were given the clothing of dead soldiers and, as a result, disease spread into their own communities, devastating the population.
Six thousand in all had left France to try to recapture Louisbourg and reassert a French presence in this part of the world. When the remainder of the fleet sailed out of Chebucto Harbour on October 13, only 600 were left alive and of that number at least 250 were extremely ill. Two shiploads of men doggedly persevered on to the Annapolis Basin with high hopes of restoring dignity by capturing Annapolis Royal. Unfortunately, they saw that it was substantially defended by the British and finally accepting the notion that discretion is the better part of valour, the commander gave the word to return to France.
A second group of French soldiers under Jean-Baptiste-Nicolas-Roch de Ramezay sailed to the Minas Basin to try and muster support from the Acadians to attack Fort Anne, but most Acadians just wanted to be left alone and stay out of the way of warring empires.
With more French military showing up in Nova Scotia, Paul Mascarene figured it was time to go on the offensive again with support from Massachusetts troops. In January of 1747, the French attacked American forces near Grand Pré and caused a setback for them that was only short-lived because William Shirley sent up more troops. By the spring of that year, de Ramezay was ready to admit that the French didn’t stand a chance. He and his men said farewell to Nova Scotia.
Command of Fortress Louisbourg was delivered to Peregrine Hopson in September of 1747. He controlled what was left of the fortress for just a year, until decisions an ocean away would take the problem of Louisbourg off his hands. The 1748 Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle gave Louisbourg back to France. It was as simple as the swipe of the pen. New Englanders were furious over this decision and it’s easy to see why.
Warriors from both sides must have wondered at the cruel irony that led to the loss of so many lives – all for what? England and France, for the time being, simply seemed to be tired of fighting. So England was willing to take one step back. Maybe the loss of one single fort was no catastrophe after all. What had happened on the ground and at sea as the military men struggled for victory, died from bullets, booze and disease, sank to despair because of their personal losses and their distance from their families, the lousy conditions and the lack of food – all this had very little to do with the decision-making of monarchs and bureaucrats who had never set foot upon North American shores.
And so Louisbourg was back with the French under the control of a new governor, Charles Desherbiers.
Treaties Made To Be Broken
But the story was not over. Treaties after all are made to be broken. When William Pitt became prime minister of England in 1756, he felt that it was worth heating up the war with France to secure America for the English. Louisbourg would just have to be captured again in order to have naval access from the sea for an assault on Quebec. Admiral Edward Boscawen and Colonel Jeffrey Amherst would be the military masters of the endeavours and there would be at least 14,000 men at their disposal.
Louisbourg, back in French control, had actually flourished between 1750 and 1755 – mostly because of illegal trade with New England. New Englanders were royally mad at the British for returning Louisbourg where so much New England blood had been shed. But now that it was back with France, it was illegal business as usual, and merchants on both sides saw the profit in it. If European powers had stayed out of it, quite probably, a wonderfuul trade alliance would have sprung up to weld together Boston and Louisbourg as sister cities. But it was not to be that simple.
As trade grew, the French undertook repairs to the fortress. Some walls were collapsing and there was still a problem with crumbling mortar made with sea sand. The French were well aware of what was going on and they were stocking up Louisbourg, readying themselves as best they could for the blockade that would begin in March of 1758.
Chapter 13
Chapter 13
The Strength of Acadian Women
The story of the Acadian people is inevitably linked to the events of Louisbourg, but their way of life was fundamentally different from that of the French soldiers, sailors, merchants and government men who lived in and around that ill-fated fortress. At the time of their deportation, Acadians had lived for several generations in Nova Scotia. Most of them had little connection with France, French politics or contemporary French culture. They had evolved a unique way of life that was suited to the land they loved.
With limited numbers of immigrants coming to the New World from France, there had been an intermarriage of families to such a degree that, after three generations, most Acadians in any given community were related in some way. These blood ties crea
ted a positive system of mutual help and interdependence where those who had were more than generous in sharing with those who had not. Ultimately, an extended Acadian family would be formed that was protective and resistant to outside hostilities.
Acadian men appear somewhat noble, family-centred and hard-working in contrast to the English or French soldiers and the adventurous but belligerent New Englanders of this era who arrived in Nova Scotia.
To suggest that women are often overlooked in the records of history is a mild understatement. Men fight wars and find a multitude of other methods to colourfully act out their aggression or greed, while women remain home to raise a family and help repair the wounds. Acadian women, however, were vital to the success of the early settlements and some records survive about the role of a few prominent women of these times.
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