Montcalm and Wolfe — Chapter 19, Part 1

Louisbourg The stormy coast of Cape Breton is indented by a small land-locked bay, between which and the ocean lies a tongue of land dotted with a few grazing sheep, and intersected by rows of stone that mark more or less distinctly the lines of what once were streets.

Green mounds and embankments of earth enclose the whole space, and beneath the highest of them yawn arches and caverns of ancient masonry.

This grassy solitude was once the "Dunkirk of America;" the vaulted caverns where the sheep find shelter from the ram were casemates where terrified women sought refuge from storms of shot and shell, and the shapeless green mounds were citadel, bastion, rampart, and glacis.

Here stood Louisbourg; and not all the efforts of its conquerors, nor all the havoc of succeeding times, have availed to efface it.

Men in hundreds toiled for months with lever, spade, and gunpowder in the work of destruction, and for more than a century it has served as a stone quarry; but the remains of its vast defences still tell their tale of human valor and human woe.

Stand on the mounds that were once the King's Bastion.

The glistening sea spreads eastward three thousand miles, and its waves meet their first rebuff against this iron coast.

Lighthouse Point is white with foam; jets of spray spout from the rocks of Goat Island; mist curls in clouds from the seething surf that lashes the crags of Black Point, and the sea boils like a caldron among the reefs by the harbor's mouth; but on the calm water within, the small fishing vessels rest tranquil at their moorings.

Beyond lies a hamlet of fishermen by the edge of the water, and a few scattered dwellings dot the rough hills, bristled with stunted firs, that gird the quiet basin; while close at hand, within the precinct of the vanished fortress, stand two small farmhouses.

All else is a solitude of ocean, rock, marsh, and forest.

[576] [Footnote 576: Louisbourg is described as I saw it ten days before writing the above, after an easterly gale.

] At the beginning of June, 1758, the place wore another aspect.

Since the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle vast sums had been spent in repairing and strengthening it; and Louisbourg was the strongest fortress in French or British America.

Nevertheless it had its weaknesses.

The original plan of the works had not been fully carried out; and owing, it is said, to the bad quality of the mortar, the masonry of the ramparts was in so poor a condition that it had been replaced in some parts with fascines.

The circuit of the fortifications was more than a mile and a half, and the town contained about four thousand inhabitants.

The best buildings in it were the convent, the hospital, the King's storehouses, and the chapel and governor's quarters, which were under the same roof.

Of the private houses, only seven or eight were of stone, the rest being humble wooden structures, suited to a population of fishermen.

The garrison consisted of the battalions of Artois, Bourgogne, Cambis, and Volontaires Étrangers, with two companies of artillery and twenty-four of colony troops from Canada,--in all three thousand and eighty regular troops, besides officers;[577] and to these were added a body of armed inhabitants and a band of Indians.

In the harbor were five ships of the line and seven frigates, carrying in all five hundred and forty-four guns and about three thousand men.

[578] Two hundred and nineteen cannon and seventeen mortars were mounted on the walls and outworks.

[579] Of these last the most important were the Grand Battery on the shore of the harbor opposite its mouth, and the Island Battery on the rocky islet at its entrance.

[Footnote 577: _Journal du Siége de Louisbourg_.

Twenty-nine hundred regulars were able to bear arms when the siege began.

_Houllière, Commandant des Troupes, au Ministre, 6 Août_, 1758. ] [Footnote 578: Le Prudent, 74 guns; Entreprenant, 74; Capricieux, 64;

Célèbre, 64; Bienfaisant, 64; Apollon, 50; Chèvre, 22; Biche, 18;

Fidèle, 22; Écho, 26; Aréthuse, 36; Comète, 30. The Bizarre, 64, sailed for France on the eighth of June, and was followed by the Comète.

] [Footnote 579: _État d'Artillerie_, appended to the Journal of Drucour.

There were also forty-four cannon in reserve.

] The strongest front of the works was on the land side, along the base of the peninsular triangle on which the town stood.

This front, about twelve hundred yards in extent, reached from the sea on the left to the harbor on the right, and consisted of four bastions with then-connecting curtains, the Princess's, the Queen's, the King's, and the Dauphin's. The King's Bastion formed part of the citadel.

The glacis before it sloped down to an extensive marsh, which, with an adjacent pond, completely protected this part of the line.

On the right, however, towards the harbor, the ground was high enough to offer advantages to an enemy, as was also the case, to a less degree, on the left, towards the sea.

The best defence of Louisbourg was the craggy shore, that, for leagues on either hand, was accessible only at a few points, and even there with difficulty.

All these points were vigilantly watched.

There had been signs of the enemy from the first opening of spring.

In the intervals of fog, rain, and snow-squalls, sails were seen hovering on the distant sea; and during the latter part of May a squadron of nine ships cruised off the mouth of the harbor, appearing and disappearing, sometimes driven away by gales, sometimes lost in fogs, and sometimes approaching to within cannon-shot of the batteries.

Their object was to blockade the port,--in which they failed; for French ships had come in at intervals, till, as we have seen, twelve of them lay safe anchored in the harbor, with more than a year's supply of provisions for the garrison.

At length, on the first of June, the southeastern horizon was white with a cloud of canvas.

The long-expected crisis was come.

Drucour, the governor, sent two thousand regulars, with about a thousand militia and Indians, to guard the various landing-places; and the rest, aided by the sailors, remained to hold the town.

[580] [Footnote 580: _Rapport de Grucour.

Journal du Siége_.

] At the end of May Admiral Boscawen was at Halifax with twenty-three ships of the line, eighteen frigates and fireships, and a fleet of transports, on board of which were eleven thousand and six hundred soldiers, all regulars, except five hundred provincial rangers.

[581] Amherst had not yet arrived, and on the twenty-eighth, Boscawen, in pursuance of his orders and to prevent loss of time, put to sea without him; but scarcely had the fleet sailed out of Halifax, when they met the ship that bore the expected general.

Amherst took command of the troops;

and the expedition held its way till the second of June, when they saw the rocky shore-line of Cape Breton, and descried the masts of the French squadron in the harbor of Louisbourg.

[Footnote 581: Of this force, according to Mante, only 9,900 were fit for duty.

The table printed by Knox (I. 127) shows a total of 11,112, besides officers, artillery, and rangers.

The _Authentic Account of the Reduction of Louisbourg, by a Spectator_, puts the force at 11,326 men, besides officers.

Entick makes the whole 11,936. ] Boscawen sailed into Gabarus Bay.

The sea was rough; but in the afternoon Amherst, Lawrence, and Wolfe, with a number of naval officers, reconnoitred the shore in boats, coasting it for miles, and approaching it as near as the French batteries would permit.

The rocks were white with surf, and every accessible point was strongly guarded.

Boscawen saw little chance of success.

He sent for his captains, and consulted them separately.

They thought, like him, that it would be rash to attempt a landing, and proposed a council of war.

One of them alone, an old sea officer named Ferguson advised his commander to take the responsibility himself, hold no council, and make the attempt at every risk.

Boscawen took his advice, and declared that he would not leave Gabarus Bay till he had fulfilled his instructions and set the troops on shore.

[582] [Footnote 582: Entick, III.

224. ] West of Louisbourg there were three accessible places, Freshwater Cove, four miles from the town, and Flat Point, and White Point, which were nearer, the last being within a mile of the fortifications.

East of the town there was an inlet called Lorambec, also available for landing.

In order to distract the attention of the enemy, it was resolved to threaten all these places, and to form the troops into three divisions, two of which, under Lawrence and Whitmore, were to advance towards Flat Point and White Point, while a detached regiment was to make a feint at Lorambec.

Wolfe, with the third division, was to make the real attack and try to force a landing at Freshwater Cove, which, as it proved, was the most strongly defended of all.

When on shore Wolfe was an habitual invalid, and when at sea every heave of the ship made him wretched; but his ardor was unquenchable.

Before leaving England he wrote to a friend: "Being of the profession of arms, I would seek all occasions to serve;

and therefore have thrown myself in the way of the American war, though I know that the very passage threatens my life, and that my constitution must be utterly ruined and undone."

On the next day, the third, the surf was so high that nothing could be attempted.

On the fourth there was a thick fog and a gale.

The frigate "Trent" struck on a rock, and some of the transports were near being stranded.

On the fifth there was another fog and a raging surf.

On the sixth there was fog, with rain in the morning and better weather towards noon, whereupon the signal was made and the troops entered the boats;

but the sea rose again, and they were ordered back to the ships.

On the seventh more fog and more surf till night, when the sea grew calmer, and orders were given for another attempt.

At two in the morning of the eighth the troops were in the boats again.

At daybreak the frigates of the squadron, anchoring before each point of real or pretended attack, opened a fierce cannonade on the French intrenchments; and, a quarter of an hour after, the three divisions rowed towards the shore.

That of the left, under Wolfe, consisted of four companies of grenadiers, with the light infantry and New England rangers, followed and supported by Fraser's Highlanders and eight more companies of grenadiers.

They pulled for Freshwater Cove.

Here there was a crescent-shaped beach, a quarter of a mile long, with rocks at each end.

On the shore above, about a thousand Frenchmen, under Lieutenant-Colonel de Saint-Julien, lay behind entrenchments covered in front by spruce and fir trees, felled and laid on the ground with the tops outward.

[583] Eight cannon and swivels were planted to sweep every part of the beach and its approaches, and these pieces were masked by young evergreens stuck in the ground before them.

[Footnote 583: Drucour reports 985 soldiers as stationed here under Saint-Julien there were also some Indians.

Freshwater Cove, otherwise Kennington Cove, was called La Cormorandière by the French.

] The English were allowed to come within close range unmolested.

Then the batteries opened, and a deadly storm of grape and musketry was poured upon the boats.

It was clear in an instant that to advance farther would be destruction; and Wolfe waved his hand as a signal to sheer off.

At some distance on the right, and little exposed to the fire, were three boats of light infantry under Lieutenants Hopkins and Brown and Ensign Grant; who, mistaking the signal or wilfully misinterpreting it, made directly for the shore before them.

It was a few roads east of the beach; a craggy coast and a strand strewn with rocks and lashed with breakers, but sheltered from the cannon by a small projecting point.

The three officers leaped ashore, followed by their men.

Wolfe saw the movement, and hastened to support it.

The boat of Major Scott, who commanded the light infantry and rangers, next came up, and was stove in an instant; but Scott gained the shore, climbed the crags, and found himself with ten men in front of some seventy French and Indians.

Half his followers were killed and wounded, and three bullets were shot through his clothes; but with admirable gallantry he held his ground till others came to his aid.

[584] The remaining boats now reached the landing.

Many were stove among the rocks, and others were overset; some of the men were dragged back by the surf and drowned; some lost their muskets, and were drenched to the skin: but the greater part got safe ashore.

Among the foremost was seen the tall, attenuated form of Brigadier Wolfe, armed with nothing but a cane, as he leaped into the surf and climbed the crags with his soldiers.

As they reached the top they formed in compact order, and attacked and carried with the bayonet the nearest French battery, a few rods distant.

The division of Lawrence soon came up; and as the attention of the enemy was now distracted, they made their landing with little opposition at the farther end of the beach whither they were followed by Amherst himself.

The French, attacked on right and left, and fearing, with good reason, that they would be cut off from the town, abandoned all their cannon and fled into the woods.

About seventy of them were captured and fifty killed.

The rest, circling among the hills and around the marshes, made their way to Louisbourg, and those at the intermediate posts joined their flight.

The English followed through a matted growth of firs till they reached the cleared ground; when the cannon, opening on them from the ramparts, stopped the pursuit.

The first move of the great game was played and won.

[585] [Footnote 584: Pichon, _Mémoires du Cap-Breton_, 284. ] [Footnote 585: _Journal of Amherst_, in Mante, 117. _Amherst to Pitt, 11 June, 1758_.

_Authentic Account of the Reduction of Louisbourg, by a Spectator_, 11. _General Orders of Amherst, 3-7 June, 1759. Letter from an Officer_, in Knox, I. 191; Entick, III.

225. The French accounts generally agree in essentials with the English.

The English lost one hundred and nine, killed, wounded, and drowned.

] Amherst made his camp just beyond range of the French cannon, and Flat Point Cove was chosen as the landing-place of guns and stores.

Clearing the ground, making roads, and pitching tents filled the rest of the day.

At night there was a glare of flames from the direction of the town.

The French had abandoned the Grand Battery after setting fire to the buildings in it and to the houses and fish-stages along the shore of the harbor.

During the following days stores were landed as fast as the surf would permit: but the task was so difficult that from first to last more than a hundred boats were stove in accomplishing it; and such was the violence of the waves that none of the siege-guns could be got ashore till the eighteenth.

The camp extended two miles along a stream that flowed down to the Cove among the low, woody hills that curved around the town and harbor.

Redoubts were made to protect its front, and blockhouses to guard its left and rear from the bands of Acadians known to be hovering in the woods.

Wolfe, with twelve hundred men, made his way six or seven miles round the harbor, took possession of the battery at Lighthouse Point which the French had abandoned, planted guns and mortars, and opened fire on the Island Battery that guarded the entrance.

Other guns were placed at different points along the shore, and soon opened on the French ships.

The ships and batteries replied.

The artillery fight raged night and day; till on the twenty-fifth the island guns were dismounted and silenced.

Wolfe then strengthened his posts, secured his communications, and returned to the main army in front of the town.

Amherst had reconnoitred the ground and chosen a hillock at the edge of the marsh, less than half a mile from the ramparts, as the point for opening his trenches.

A road with an epaulement to protect it must first be made to the spot; and as the way was over a tract of deep mud covered with water-weeds and moss, the labor was prodigious.

A thousand men worked at it day and night under the fire of the town and ships.

When the French looked landward from their ramparts they could see scarcely a sign of the impending storm.

Behind them Wolfe's cannon were playing busily from Lighthouse Point and the heights around the harbor;

but, before them, the broad flat marsh and the low hills seemed almost a solitude.

Two miles distant, they could descry some of the English tents; but the greater part were hidden by the inequalities of the ground.

On the right, a prolongation of the harbor reached nearly half a mile beyond the town, ending in a small lagoon formed by a projecting sandbar, and known as the Barachois.

Near this bar lay moored the little frigate "Aréthuse," under a gallant officer named Vauquelin.

Her position was a perilous one; but so long as she could maintain it she could sweep with her fire the ground before the works, and seriously impede the operations of the enemy.

The other naval captains were less venturous; and when the English landed, they wanted to leave the harbor and save their ships.

Drucour insisted that they should stay to aid the defence, and they complied; but soon left their moorings and anchored as close as possible under the guns of the town, in order to escape the fire of Wolfe's batteries.

Hence there was great murmuring among the military officers, who would have had them engage the hostile guns at short range.

The frigate "Écho," under cover of a fog, had been sent to Quebec for aid; but she was chased and captured; and, a day or two after, the French saw her pass the mouth of the harbor with an English flag at her mast-head.

When Wolfe had silenced the Island Battery, a new and imminent danger threatened Louisbourg.

Boscawen might enter the harbor, overpower the French naval force, and cannonade the town on its weakest side.

Therefore Drucour resolved to sink four large ships at the entrance; and on a dark and foggy night this was successfully accomplished.

Two more vessels were afterwards sunk, and the harbor was then thought safe.

The English had at last finished their preparations, and were urging on the siege with determined vigor.

The landward view was a solitude no longer.

They could be seen in multitudes piling earth and fascines beyond the hillock at the edge of the marsh.

On the twenty-fifth they occupied the hillock itself, and fortified themselves there under a shower of bombs.

Then they threw up earth on the right, and pushed their approaches towards the Barachois, in spite of a hot fire from the frigate "Aréthuse."

Next they appeared on the left towards the sea about a third of a mile from the Princess's Bastion.

It was Wolfe, with a strong detachment, throwing up a redoubt and opening an entrenchment.

Late on the night of the ninth of July six hundred French troops sallied to interrupt the work.

The English grenadiers in the trenches fought stubbornly with bayonet and sword, but were forced back to the second line, where a desperate conflict in the dark took place; and after severe loss on both sides the French were driven back.

Some days before, there had been another sortie on the opposite side, near the Barachois, resulting in a repulse of the French and the seizure by Wolfe of a more advanced position.

Various courtesies were exchanged between the two commanders.

Drucour, on occasion of a flag of truce, wrote to Amherst that there was a surgeon of uncommon skill in Louisbourg, whose services were at the command of any English officer who might need them.

Amherst on his part sent to his enemy letters and messages from wounded Frenchmen in his hands, adding his compliments to Madame Drucour, with an expression of regret for the disquiet to which she was exposed, begging her at the same time to accept a gift of pineapples from the West Indies.

She returned his courtesy by sending him a basket of wine; after which amenities the cannon roared again.

Madame Drucour was a woman of heroic spirit.

Every day she was on the ramparts, where her presence roused the soldiers to enthusiasm; and every day with her own hand she fired three cannon to encourage them.

The English lines grew closer and closer, and their fire more and more destructive.

Desgouttes, the naval commander, withdrew the "Aréthuse" from her exposed position, where her fire had greatly annoyed the besiegers.

The shot-holes in her sides were plugged up, and in the dark night of the fourteenth of July she was towed through the obstructions in the mouth of the harbor, and sent to France to report the situation of Louisbourg.

More fortunate than her predecessor, she escaped the English in a fog.

Only five vessels now remained afloat in the harbor, and these were feebly manned, as the greater part of their officers and crews had come ashore, to the number of two thousand, lodging under tents in the town, amid the scarcely suppressed murmurs of the army officers.

On the eighth of July news came that the partisan Boishébert was approaching with four hundred Acadians, Canadians, and Micmacs to attack the English outposts and detachments.

He did little or nothing, however, besides capturing a few stragglers.

On the sixteenth, early in the evening, a party of English, led by Wolfe, dashed forward, drove off a band of French volunteers, seized a rising ground called Hauteur-de-la-Potence, or Gallows Hill, and began to entrench themselves scarcely three hundred yards from the Dauphin's Bastion.

The town opened on them furiously with grapeshot; but in the intervals of the firing the sound of their picks and spades could plainly be heard.

In the morning they were seen throwing up earth like moles as they burrowed their way forward; and on the twenty-first they opened another parallel, within two hundred yards of the rampart.

Still their sappers pushed on.

Every day they had more guns in position, and on right and left their fire grew hotter.

Their pickets made a lodgment along the foot of the glacis, and fired up the slope at the French in the covered way.

The twenty-first was a memorable day.

In the afternoon a bomb fell on the ship "Célèbre" and set her on fire.

An explosion followed.

The few men on board could not save her, and she drifted from her moorings.

The wind blew the flames into the rigging of the "Entreprenant," and then into that of the "Capricieux."

At night all three were in full blaze;

for when the fire broke out the English batteries turned on them a tempest of shot and shell to prevent it from being extinguished.

The glare of the triple conflagration lighted up the town, the trenches, the harbor, and the surrounding hills, while the burning ships shot off their guns at random as they slowly drifted westward, and grounded at last near the Barachois.

In the morning they were consumed to the water's edge; and of all the squadron the "Prudent" and the "Bienfaisant" alone were left.