The Taking of Louisburg 1745

The Taking of Louisburg 1745
Samuel Drake

Samuel Adams Drake

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 little back from it, or again inclining out toward it, one of its zigzags approaches within a mile of Louisburg. At this point, several low, lumpy ridges push off for the seashore, through long reaches of boggy moorland, now and then disappearing beneath a shallow pond or stagnant pool, which lies glistening among the hollows between. Where it is uneven the land is stony and unfertile; where level, it is a bog. This rendered the land side as unfavorable to a besieging force as the nest of outlying rocks and reefs did the sea approaches. A continued rainfall must have made it wholly untenable for troops.

The Fortified Line.

It is one of these ridges just noticed as breaking away from the main range toward the seashore, and so naturally bent, also, as to touch the sea at one end and the harbor at the other, that the French engineers converted into a regular fortification; while within the space thus firmly enclosed by both nature and art, the old city of the lilies stretched down a gentle, grassy slope to the harbor shore.

Demolition of the City.

Not one stone of this city remains upon another to-day. After the second siege (1758) the English engineers were ordered to demolish it, and so far as present appearances go, never was an order more effectually carried out. All that one sees to-day, in room of it, is a poor fishing hamlet, straggling along the edge of the harbor, the dwellings being on one side, and the fish-houses and stages on the other side of the Sydney road, which suddenly contracts into a lane, and then comes to an end, along with the village itself, in a fisherman’s back-yard.

Not so, however, with the still massive earthworks, for the British engineers were only able, after many months’ labor, and with a liberal use of powder, to partly execute the work of demolition assigned them.

I spent several hours, at odd times, in wandering about these old ruins, and could not help being thankful that for once, at least, the destroying hand of man had been compelled to abandon its work to the rains and frosts of heaven.

Citadel or King’s Bastion.

Beginning with the citadel, in which the formalities of the surrender took place, I found it still quite well defined, although nothing now remains above ground except some old foundation walls to show where long ranges of stone buildings once stood. Here were the different military offices, the officers’ quarters and the chapel. The shattered bomb-proofs, however, were still distinguishable, though much choked up with débris, and their well-turned arches remain to show how firmly the solid masonry resisted the assaults of the engineers. In these damp holes the women, children, and non-combatants passed most of the forty-seven days of the siege. From this starting-point one may continue the walk along the ramparts, without once quitting them, for fully a mile, to the point where they touch the seashore among the inaccessible rocks and heaving surf of the ocean itself.

The Casemates.

These ramparts nowhere rise more than fifty feet above the sea-level, but are everywhere of amazing thickness and solidity. The moat was originally eighty feet across, and the walls stood thirty feet above it, but these dimensions have been much reduced by the work of time and weather. A considerable part of the line was further defended by a marsh, through which a storming column would have found it impossible to advance, and hardly less difficult to make a retreat. The besiegers were therefore obliged to concentrate their attack upon one or two points, and these had been rendered the most formidable of the whole line in consequence of the knowledge that the other parts were comparatively unassailable. In other words, the besieged were able to control, in a measure, where the besiegers should attack them.

Natural Obstacles made use of.

Although the partly ruined bomb-proofs are the only specimens of masonry now to be seen in making this tour, the broad and deep excavation of the moat and covered-way, and the clean, well-grassed slopes of the glacis, promise to hold together for another century at least. Brambles and fallen earth choke up the embrasures. It is necessary to use care in order to avoid treading upon a toad or a snake while you are groping among the mouldy casemates or when crossing the parade. Those magical words “In the King’s name,” so often proclaimed here with salvos of artillery, have now no echo except in the sullen dash of the sea against the rocky shores outside the perishing fortress, and

“What care these roarers for the name of King?”

Graveyard, Point Rochefort.

Still following the sheep-paths that zigzag about so as nearly to double the distance, I next turned back toward the harbor, leaving on my right the bleak and wind-swept field in which, to the lasting reproach of New England, five hundred of her bravest sons lie without stone or monument to mark their last resting-place. It is true that most of these men died of disease, and not in battle; yet to see the place as I saw it, in all its pitiful nakedness, isolation, and neglect, is the one thing at Louisburg that a New Englander would gladly have missed; and he will be very apt to walk on with a slower and less confident step, and with something less of admiration for the glory which consigns men to such oblivion as this.

Royal Battery.