Canada: The Empire of the North — From 1713 to 1755, part 2

Late in 1744 Europe breaks into that flame of war known as the Austrian Succession.

Before either Quebec or Boston knows of open war, Louisburg has word of it and sends her rangers burning fishing towns and battering at the rotten palisades of Annapolis (Port Royal).

Port Royal is commanded by that same Paul Mascarene of former wars, grown old in service.

The French bid him save himself by surrender before their fleet comes.

Though Mascarene has less than a hundred men, the weather is in his favor.

It is September.

Winter will drive the invaders home, so he sends back word that he will bide his time till the hostile fleet comes.

As for the Abbé Le Loutre, let the treacherous priest beware how he brings his murderous Indians within range of the fort guns!

Meanwhile the Acadian habitants are threatened with death if they do not rise to aid the {216} French, but they too bide their time, for if they rebel and fail, that too means death; and "_the Neutrals_" refuse to stir till the invaders, from lack of provisions, are forced to decamp, and the Abbé Le Loutre, with his black hat drawn down over his eyes, vanishes into forest with his crew of painted warriors.

News of the war and of the ravaging of Acadian fishing towns set Massachusetts in flame.

To Boston, above all New England towns, was Louisburg a constant danger.

The thing seemed absolute stark madness,--the thoughtless daring of foolhardy enthusiasts,--but it is ever enthusiasm which accomplishes the impossible; and April 30, 1745, after only seven weeks of preparation, an English fleet of sixty-eight ships--some accounts say ninety, including the whalers and transports gathered along the coast towns--sails into Gabarus Bay, behind Louisburg, where the waters have barely cleared of ice.

William Pepperrell, a merchant, commands the four thousand raw levies of provincial troops, the most of whom have never stepped to martial music before in their lives.

Admiral Warren has come up from West India waters with his men-of-war to command the united fleets.

Early Monday morning, against a shore wind, the boats are tacking to land, when the alarm bells begin ringing and ringing at Louisburg and a force of one hundred and fifty men dashes downshore for Flat Cove to prevent the landing.

Pepperrell out-tricks the enemy by leaving only a few boats to make a feint of landing at the Cove, while he swings his main fleet inshore round a bend in the coast a mile away.

Here, with a prodigious rattling of lowered sails and anchor chains, the crews plunge over the rolling waves, pontooning a bridge of small boats ashore.

By nightfall the most of the English have landed, and spies report the harbor of Louisburg alive with torches where the French are sinking ships to obstruct the entrance and setting fire to fishing stages that might interfere with cannon aim.

The next night, May 1, Vaughan's New Hampshire boys--raw farmers, shambling in their gait, singing as they march--swing through the woods along the marsh {217} behind the fort, and take up a position on a hill to the far side of Louisburg, creating an enormous bonfire with the French tar and ships' tackling stored here.

The result of this harmless maneuver was simply astounding.

It will be recalled that Louisburg had an outer battery of forty cannon on this side.

The French soldiers holding this battery mistook the bonfire for the {218} English attacking forces, and under cover of darkness abandoned the position,--battery, guns, powder and all,--which the English promptly seized.

This was the Royal Battery, which commanded the harbor and could shell into the very heart of the fort.

[Illustration: WILLIAM PEPPERRELL] The next thing for the English was to get their heavy guns ashore through a rolling surf of ice-cold water.

For two weeks the men stood by turns to their necks in the surf, steadying the pontoon gangway as the great cannon were trundled ashore; and this was the least of their difficulties.

The question was how to get their cannon across the marsh behind the fort to the hill on the far side.

The cannon would sink from their own weight in such a bog, and either horses or oxen would flounder to death in a few minutes.

Again, the fool-hardy enthusiasm of the raw levies overcame the difficulty.

They built large stone boats, raft-shaped, such as are used on farms to haul stones over ground too rough for wagons.

Hitching to these, teams of two hundred men stripped to midwaist, they laboriously hauled the cannon across the quaking moss to the hills commanding the rear of the fort, bombs and balls whizzing overhead all the while, fired from the fort bastions.

It was cold, damp spring weather.

The men who were not soaked to their necks in surf and bog were doing picket duty alongshore, sleeping in their boots.

Consequently, in three weeks, half Pepperrell's force became deadly ill.

At this time, within two days, occurred both a cheering success and a disheartening rebuff.

A French man-of-war with seventy cannon and six hundred men was seen entering Louisburg.

As if in panic fright, one of the small English ships fled.

The French ship pursued.

In a trice she was surrounded by the English fleet and captured.

The flight of the little vessel had been a trick.

A few days later four hundred English in whaleboats attempted the mad project of attacking the Island Battery at the harbor entrance.

The boats set out about midnight with muffled oars, but a wind rose, setting a tremendous surf lashing the rocks, and yet the invaders might have succeeded but for a piece of rashness.

A hundred men had gained the shore when, with the thoughtlessness of schoolboys, they uttered a jubilant yell.

{219} Instantly, porthole, platform, gallery, belched death through the darkness.

The story is told that a raw New England lad was in the act of climbing the French flagstaff to hang out his own red coat as English flag when a Swiss guard hacked him to pieces.

The boats not yet ashore were sunk by the blaze of cannon.

A few escaped back in the darkness, but by daylight over one hundred English had been captured.

Cannon, mortars, and musketoons were mounted to command the fort inside the walls, and a continuous rain of fire began from the hills.

In vain Duchambon, the French commander, waited for reënforcements from Canada.

Convent, hospital, barracks, all the houses of the town, were peppered by bombs till there was not a roof intact in the place.

The soldiers, of whom there were barely two thousand, were ready to mutiny.

The citizens besought Duchambon to surrender.

Provisions ran out.

Looking down from the tops of the walls, cracking jokes with the English across the ditch, the French soldiers counted more than a thousand scaling ladders ready for hand-to-hand assault, and a host of barrels filled with mud behind which the English sharpshooters crouched.

It had just been arranged between Warren and Pepperrell that the {220} former should attack by sea while the latter assaulted by land, when on June 16 the French capitulated.

How the New England enthusiasts ran rampant through the abandoned French fort need not be told.

How Parson Moody, famous for his long prayers, hewed down images in the Catholic chapel till he was breathless and then came to the officers' state dinner so exhausted that when asked to pronounce blessing he could only mutter, "Good Lord, we have so much to thank Thee for, time is too short; we must leave it to eternity.

Amen"; how the New Englanders, unused to French wines, drank themselves torpid on the stores of the fort cellar; how the French the next year made superhuman effort to regain Louisburg, only to have a magnificent fleet of one hundred and fifty sail wrecked on Sable Island, Duke d'Anville, the commander, dying of heartbreak on his ship anchored near Halifax, his successor killing himself with his own sword,--cannot be told here.

Louisburg was the prize of the war, and England threw the prize away by giving it back to France in the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748. The English government paid back the colonies for their outlay, but of all the rich French pirate ships loaded with booty, captured at Louisburg by leaving the French flag flying, not a penny's worth went to the provincial troops.

Warren's seamen received all the loot.

[Illustration: RUINS OF THE FORTIFICATIONS AT LOUISBURG] Like all preceding treaties, the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle left unsettled the boundaries between New France and New England.

In Acadia, in New York, on the Ohio, collisions were bound to come.

In Acadia the English send their officers to the Isthmus of Chignecto to establish a fort near the bounds of what are now Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.

The priestly spy, Louis Joseph Le Loutre, leads his wild Micmac savages through the farm settlement round the English fort, setting fire to houses putting a torch even to the church, and so compelling the habitants of the boundary to come over to the French and take sides.

The treaty has restored Louisburg to the French, but the very {221} next year England sends out Edward Cornwallis with two thousand settlers to establish the English fort now known as Halifax.

By 1752 there are four thousand people at the new fort, though the Indian raiders miss no occasion to shoot down wayfarers and farmers;

and the French Governor at Quebec continues his bribes--as much as eight hundred dollars a year to a man--to stir up hostility to the English and prevent the Acadian farmers taking the oath of fidelity to England.

So much for the peace treaty in Acadia.

It was not peace; it was farce.

[Illustration: CONTEMPORARY PLAN OF THE ATTACK ON LOUISBURG] In New York state matters were worse.

The Iroquois had been acknowledged allies of the English, and before 1730 the English fort at Oswego had been built at the southeast corner of Lake Ontario to catch the fur trade of the northern tribes coming down the lakes to New France, and to hold the Iroquois' friendship.

Also, as French traders pass up the lake to Fort Frontenac (Kingston) and Niagara with their national flag flying from the prow of canoe and flatboat, chance bullets from the {222} English fort ricochet across the advancing prows, and soldiers on the galleries inside Fort Oswego take bets on whether they can hit the French flag.

Prompt as a gamester, New France checkmates this move.

Peter Schuyler has been settling English farmers round Lake Champlain.

At Crown Point, long known as Scalp Point, where the lake narrows and portage runs across to Lake George and the Mohawk land, the French in 1731 erect a strong fort.

As for the English traders at Fort Oswego catching the tribes from the north, New France counterchecks that by sending Portneuf in April of 1749, only a year after the peace, to the Toronto portage where the Indians come from the Upper Lakes by way of Lake Simcoe.

What is now known as Toronto is named Rouillé, after a French minister; and as if this were not checkmate enough to the English advancing westward, the Sulpician priest from Montreal, Abbé Picquet, zealously builds a fort straight north of Oswego, on the south side of the St. Lawrence, to keep the Iroquois loyal to France.

Picquet calls his fort "Presentation."

His enemies call it "Picquet's Folly."

It is known to-day as Ogdensburg.

Look at the map.

France's frontier line is guarded by forts that stand like sentinels at the gateways of all waters leading to the interior,--Ogdensburg, Kingston, Toronto, Niagara, Detroit, Michilimackinac, and La Vérendrye's string of forts far west as the Rockies.

New York's frontier line is guarded by one fort only,--Oswego.

Here too, as in Acadia, the peace is a farce.

[Illustration: FORT PRESENTATION] But it was in the valley of the Ohio where the greatest struggle over boundaries took place.

One year after the peace, Céloron de Bienville is sent in July, 1749, to take possession of the {223} Ohio for France.

France claims right to this region by virtue of La Salle's explorations sixty years previously, and of all those French bushrangers who have roved the wilds from the Great Lakes to Louisiana.

Small token did France take of La Salle's exploits while he lived, but great store do her statesmen set by his voyages now that he has been sixty years dead.

"But pause!"

commands the English Governor of Virginia.

"Since time immemorial have our traders wandered over the Great Smoky Mountains, over the Cumberlands, over the Alleghenies, down the Tennessee and the Kanawha and the Monongahela and the Ohio to the Mississippi."

As a matter of fact, one Major General Wood had in 1670 and 1674 sent his men overland, if not so far as the Mississippi, then certainly as far as the Ohio and the valley of the Mississippi.

But Wood was a private adventurer.

For years his exploit had been forgotten.

No record of it remained but an account written by his men, Batts and Hallam.

The French declared the record was a myth, and it has, in fact, been so regarded by the most of historians.

Yet, curiously enough, ranging through some old family papers of the Hudson's Bay Company in the Public Records, London, I found with Wood's own signature his record of the trip across the mountains to the Indians of the Ohio and the Mississippi.

It is probable that the {224} English cared quite as much for claims founded on La Salle's voyage as the French cared for claims founded on the horseback trip of Major General Wood's men.

The fact remained: here were the English traders from Virginia pressing northward by way of the Ohio; here were the French adventurers pressing south by way of the Ohio.

As in Acadia and New York, peace or no peace, a clash was inevitable.

[Illustration: CONTEMPORARY VIEW OF OSWEGO] Duquesne has come out governor of Canada, and by 1753 has dispatched a thousand men into the Ohio valley, who blaze a trail through the wilderness and string a line of forts from Presqu' Isle (Erie) on Lake Erie southward to Fort Duquesne at the junction of the Allegheny and Monongahela, where Pittsburg stands to-day.

One December night at Fort Le Boeuf, on the trail to the Ohio, the French commandant was surprised to see a slim youth of twenty years ride out of the rain-drenched, leafless woods, followed by four or five whites and Indians with a string of belled pack-horses.

The young gentleman introduces himself with great formality, though he must use an interpreter, for he does not speak French.

He is Major George Washington, sent by Governor Dinwiddie of Virginia to know why the French have been seizing the fur posts of English traders in this region.

The French commander, Saint Pierre, receives the young Virginian courteously, plies master and men with such lavish hospitality that Washington has much trouble to keep his drunk Indians from deserting, and dismisses his visitor with the smooth but bootless response that as France and England are at peace he cannot answer Governor Dinwiddie's message till he has heard from the Governor of Canada, Marquis Duquesne.

Not much satisfaction for emissaries who had forded ice-rafted rivers and had tramped the drifted forests for three hundred miles.

[Illustration: GOVERNOR DINWIDDIE OF VIRGINIA] By January of 1754 Washington is back in Virginia.

By May he is on the trail again, blazing a path through the wilderness down the Monongahela towards the French fort; for what purpose one may guess, though these were times of piping peace.

Come {225} an old Indian chief and an English bushwhacker one morning with word that fifty French raiders are on the trail ten miles away; for what purpose one may guess, spite of peace.

Instantly Washington sends half a hundred Virginia frontiersmen out scouting.

They find no trace of raiders, but the old chief picks up the trail of the ambushed French.

Here they had broken branches going through the woods; there a moccasin track punctures the spongy mold; here leaves have been scattered to hide camp ashes.

At midnight, with the rain slashing through the forest black as pitch, Washington sets out with forty men, following his Indian guide.

Through the dark they feel rather than follow the trail, and it is a slow but an easy trick to those acquainted with wildwood travel.

Leave the path by as much as a foot length and the foliage lashes you back, or the windfall trips you up, or the punky path becomes punctured beneath moccasin tread.

By day dawn, misty and gray in the May woods, the English are at the Indian camp and march forward escorted by the redskins, single file, silent as ghosts, alert as tigers.

Raindrip swashes on the buckskin coats.

Muskets are loaded and carefully cased from the wet.

The old chief stops suddenly .

.

.

and points!

There lie the French in a rock ravine sheltered by the woods like a cave.

The next instant the French had leaped up with a whoop.

Washington shouted "Fire!"

When the smoke of the musket crash cleared, ten French lay dead, among them their officer, Jumonville; {226} and twenty-two others surrendered.

No need to dispute whether Washington was justified in firing on thirty bush rovers in time of peace!

The bushrovers had already seized English forts and were even now scouring the country for English traders.

For a week their scouts had followed Washington as spies.

Expecting instant retaliation from Fort Duquesne, Washington retreated swiftly to his camping place at Great Meadows and cast up a log barricade known as Fort Necessity.

A few days later comes a company of regular troops.

By July 1 he has some four hundred men, but at Fort Duquesne are fourteen hundred French.

The French wait only for orders from Quebec, then march nine hundred bushrovers against Washington.

July 3, towards midday, they burst from the woods whooping and yelling.

Washington chose to meet them on the open ground, but the French were pouring a cross fire over the meadow; and to compel them to attack in the open, Washington drew his men behind the barricade.

By nightfall the Virginians were out of powder.

Twelve had been killed and forty-three were wounded.

Before midnight the French beat a parley.

All they desired was that the English evacuate the fort.

To fight longer would have risked the extermination of Washington's troops.

Terms of honorable surrender were granted, and the next day--the day which Washington was to make immortal, July 4--the English retreated from Fort Necessity.

Such was the peace in the Ohio valley.

Though the peace is still continued, England dispatches in 1755 two regiments of the line under Major General Braddock to protect Virginia, along with a fleet of twelve men-of-war under Admiral Boscawen.

France keeps up the farce by sending out Baron Dieskau with three thousand soldiers and Admiral La Motte with eighteen ships.

Coasting off Newfoundland, the English encounter three of the French ships that have gone astray in the fog.

"Is it peace or war?"

shout the French across decks.

"Peace," answers a voice from the English deck; and instantaneously a hurricane cannonade rakes the decks of the French, killing eighty.

Two of the French ships surrendered.

The other escaped through the fog.

Such was the peace!

{227} So began the famous Seven Years' War; and Major General Braddock, in session with the colonial governors, plans the campaign that is to crush New France's pretensions south of the Great Lakes.

Acadia, Lake Champlain, the Ohio,--these are to be the theaters of the contest.

[Illustration: TITLE-PAGE OF WASHINGTON'S JOURNAL] Braddock himself, accompanied by Washington, marches with twenty-two hundred men over the Alleghenies along the old trail of the Monongahela against Fort Duquesne.

Of Braddock, the least said the better.

A

gambler, full of arrogant contempt towards all people and things that were not British, hail-fellow-well-met to his boon companions, heartless towards all outside the pale of his own pride, a blustering bully yet dogged, and withal a gentleman after the standard of the age, he was neither better nor worse than the times in which he lived.

Of Braddock's men, fifteen hundred were British regulars, the rest Virginian bushfighters; and the redcoat troops held such contempt towards the buckskin frontiersmen that friction arose from the first about the relative rank of regulars and provincials.

From the time they set out, the troops had been retarded by countless delays.

There was trouble buying up supplies of beef cattle {228} among the frontiersmen.

Scouts scoured the country for horses and wagons to haul the great guns and heavy artillery.

Braddock's high mightiness would take no advice from colonials about single-file march on a bush trail and swift raids to elude ambushed foes.

Everything proceeded slowly, ponderously, with the system and routine of an English guardroom.

Scouts to the fore and on both flanks, three hundred bushwhackers went ahead widening the bridle path to a twelve-foot road for the wagons;

and along this road moved the troops, five and six abreast, the red coats agleam through the forest foliage, drums rolling, flags flying, steps keeping time as if on parade, Braddock and his officers mounted on spirited horses, the heavy artillery and supply wagons lagging far behind in a winding line.