France and England in North America, Part VII, Vol 2: A Half-Century of Conflict
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Title: France and England in North America, Part VII, Vol 2: A Half-Century of Conflict
Author: Francis Parkman
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FRANCE AND ENGLAND IN NORTH AMERICA, PART VII, VOL 2: A HALF-CENTURY OF CONFLICT ***
Francis Parkman’s Works.
NEW LIBRARY EDITION.
VOL. VII.
[Illustration: Sir William Pepperrell.
_Copyright 1897 by Little, Brown, & C^o._
_Goupil & C^o. Paris._]
_Sir William Pepperrell._
From the painting by John Smibert.
A HALF CENTURY OF CONFLICT, II., _Frontispiece_
A HALF-CENTURY OF
CONFLICT.
FRANCE AND ENGLAND IN
NORTH AMERICA.
PART SIXTH.
BY
FRANCIS PARKMAN.
IN TWO VOLUMES.
VOL. II.
BOSTON:
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY.
1898.
_Copyright, 1892_,
BY FRANCIS PARKMAN.
_Copyright, 1897_,
BY LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY.
University Press:
JOHN WILSON AND SON, CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER XVI.
1716-1761.
SEARCH FOR THE PACIFIC.
PAGE
The Western Sea.--Schemes for reaching it.--Journey of
Charlevoix.--The Sioux Mission.--Varennes de la Vérendrye:
his Enterprise; his Disasters; visits the Mandans; his Sons;
their Search for the Western Sea; their Adventures.--The
Snake Indians.--A Great War-party.--The Rocky Mountains.--A
Panic.--Return of the Brothers; their Wrongs and their Fate 3
CHAPTER XVII.
1700-1750.
THE CHAIN OF POSTS.
Opposing Claims.--Attitude of the Rival Nations.--America a
French Continent.--England a Usurper.--French Demands.--
Magnanimous Proposals.--Warlike Preparation.--Niagara.--
Oswego.--Crown Point.--The Passes of the West secured 44
CHAPTER XVIII.
1744, 1745.
A MAD SCHEME.
War of the Austrian Succession.--The French seize Canseau and
attack Annapolis.--Plan of Reprisal.--William Vaughan.--
Governor Shirley: he advises an Attack on Louisbourg.--The
Assembly refuses, but at last consents.--Preparation.--
William Pepperrell.--George Whitefield.--Parson Moody.--The
Soldiers.--The Provincial Navy.--Commodore Warren.--Shirley
as an Amateur Soldier.--The Fleet sails 59
CHAPTER XIX.
1745.
LOUISBOURG BESIEGED.
Seth Pomeroy.--The Voyage.--Canseau.--Unexpected Succors.--
Delays.--Louisbourg.--The Landing.--The Grand Battery
taken.--French Cannon turned on the Town.--Weakness of
Duchambon.--Sufferings of the Besiegers: their Hardihood;
their Irregular Proceedings.--Joseph Sherburn.--Amateur
Gunnery.--Camp Frolics.--Sectarian Zeal.--Perplexities of
Pepperrell 90
CHAPTER XX.
1745.
LOUISBOURG TAKEN.
A Rash Resolution.--The Island Battery.--The Volunteers.--The
Attack.--The Repulse.--Capture of the “Vigilant.”--A
Sortie.--Skirmishes.--Despondency of the French.--English
Camp threatened.--Pepperrell and Warren.--Warren’s
Plan.--Preparation for a General Attack.--Flag of
Truce.--Capitulation.--State of the Fortress.--Parson
Moody.--Soldiers dissatisfied.--Disorders.--Army and
Navy.--Rejoicings.--England repays Provincial Outlays 117
CHAPTER XXI.
1745-1747.
DUC D’ANVILLE.
Louisbourg after the Conquest.--Mutiny.--Pestilence.--Stephen
Williams: his Diary.--Scheme of Conquering Canada.--Newcastle’s
Promises.--Alarm in Canada.--Promises broken.--Plan against
Crown Point.--Startling News.--D’Anville’s Fleet.--Louisbourg
to be avenged.--Disasters of D’Anville.--Storm.--Pestilence.--
Famine.--Death of D’Anville.--Suicide of the Vice-Admiral.--
Ruinous Failure.--Return Voyage.--Defeat of La Jonquière 145
CHAPTER XXII.
1745-1747.
ACADIAN CONFLICTS.
Efforts of France.--Apathy of Newcastle.--Dilemma of Acadians:
their Character.--Danger of the Province.--Plans of
Shirley.--Acadian Priests.--Political Agitators.--Noble’s
Expedition.--Ramesay at Beaubassin.--Noble at Grand-Pré.--A
Winter March.--Defeat and Death of Noble.--Grand-Pré
reoccupied by the English.--Threats of Ramesay against the
Acadians.--The British Ministry will not protect them 169
CHAPTER XXIII.
1740-1747.
WAR AND POLITICS.
Governor and Assembly.--Saratoga destroyed.--William Johnson.--
Border Ravages.--Upper Ashuelot.--French “Military Movements.”--
Number Four.--Niverville’s Attack.--Phineas Stevens.--The
French repulsed 205
CHAPTER XXIV.
1745-1748.
FORT MASSACHUSETTS.
Frontier Defence.--Northfield and its Minister.--Military
Criticisms of Rev. Benjamin Doolittle.--Rigaud de Vaudreuil:
his Great War-party; he attacks Fort Massachusetts.--Sergeant
Hawks and his Garrison.--A Gallant Defence.--Capitulation.--
Humanity of the French.--Ravages.--Return to Crown Point.--
Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle 230
APPENDIX.
A. France claims all North America except the Spanish Colonies 257
B. French Views of the Siege of Louisbourg 274
C. Shirley’s Relations with the Acadians 312
INDEX 361
A HALF-CENTURY OF CONFLICT.
CHAPTER XVI.
1716-1761.
SEARCH FOR THE PACIFIC.
THE WESTERN SEA.--SCHEMES FOR REACHING IT.--JOURNEY OF
CHARLEVOIX.--THE SIOUX MISSION.--VARENNES DE LA VÉRENDRYE:
HIS ENTERPRISE; HIS DISASTERS; VISITS THE MANDANS; HIS SONS;
THEIR SEARCH FOR THE WESTERN SEA; THEIR ADVENTURES.--THE
SNAKE INDIANS.--A GREAT WAR-PARTY.--THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS.--A
PANIC.--RETURN OF THE BROTHERS; THEIR WRONGS AND THEIR FATE.
In the disastrous last years of Louis XIV. the court gave little
thought to the New World; but under the regency of the Duke of Orléans
interest in American affairs revived. Plans for reaching the Mer de
l’Ouest, or Pacific Ocean, were laid before the Regent in 1716. It was
urged that the best hope was in sending an expedition across the
continent, seeing that every attempt to find a westward passage by
Hudson Bay had failed. As starting-points and bases of supply for the
expedition, it was proposed to establish three posts, one on the north
shore of Lake Superior, at the mouth of the river Kaministiguia,
another at Lac des Cristineaux, now called Lake of the Woods, and the 4
third at Lake Winnipeg,--the last being what in American phrase is
called the “jumping-off place,” or the point where the expedition was
to leave behind the last trace of civilization. These posts were to
cost the Crown nothing; since by a device common in such cases, those
who built and maintained them were to be paid by a monopoly of the
fur-trade in the adjacent countries. It was admitted, however, that
the subsequent exploration must be at the charge of the government,
and would require fifty good men, at three hundred francs a year each,
besides equipment and supplies. All things considered, it was reckoned
that an overland way to the Pacific might be found for about fifty
thousand francs, or ten thousand dollars.[1]
The Regent approved the scheme so far as to order the preliminary step
to be taken by establishing the three posts, and in this same year,
Lieutenant La Noue, of the colony troops, began the work by building a
stockade at the mouth of the Kaministiguia. Little more was done in
furtherance of the exploration till three years later, when the
celebrated Jesuit, Charlevoix, was ordered by the Duke of Orléans to
repair to America and gain all possible information concerning the
Western Sea and the way to it.[2]
In the next year he went to the Upper Lakes, and questioned 5
missionaries, officers, _voyageurs_, and Indians. The results
were not satisfactory. The missionaries and the officers had nothing
to tell; the voyagers and Indians knew no more than they, but invented
confused and contradictory falsehoods to hide their ignorance.
Charlevoix made note of everything, and reported to the Comte de
Toulouse that the Pacific probably formed the western boundary of the
country of the Sioux, and that some Indians told him that they had
been to its shores and found white men there different from the
French.
Believing that these stories were not without foundation, Charlevoix
reported two plans as likely to lead to the coveted discovery. One was
to ascend the Missouri, “the source of which is certainly not far from
the sea, as all the Indians I have met have unanimously assured me;”
and the other was to establish a mission among the Sioux, from whom,
after thoroughly learning their language, the missionaries could, as
he thinks, gain all the desired information.[3]
The Regent approved the plan of the mission; but the hostile
disposition of the Sioux and the Outagamies prevented its execution
for several years. In 1727 the scheme was revived, and the colonial 6
minister at Versailles ordered the governor of Canada to send two
missionaries to the Sioux. But the mission required money, and the
King would not give it. Hence the usual expedient was adopted. A
company was formed, and invested with a monopoly of the Sioux
fur-trade, on condition of building a fort, mission-house, and chapel,
and keeping an armed force to guard them. It was specially provided
that none but pious and virtuous persons were to be allowed to join
the Company, “in order,” says the document, “to attract the
benediction of God upon them and their business.”[4] The prospects of
the Company were thought good, and the governor himself was one of the
shareholders. While the mission was given the most conspicuous place
in the enterprise, its objects were rather secular than spiritual,--to
attach the Sioux to the French interest by the double ties of religion
and trade, and utilize their supposed knowledge to reach the
Pacific.[5]
Father Guignas was made the head of the mission, and Boucher de la
Perrière the military chief. The party left Montreal in June, and,
journeying to the Mississippi by way of Michilimackinac, Green Bay,
Fox River, and the Wisconsin, went up the great river to Lake Pepin,
where the adventurous Nicolas Perrot had built two trading-posts more
than forty years before. Even if his time-worn tenements were still 7
standing, La Perrière had no thought of occupying them. On the north,
or rather west, side of the lake his men found a point of land that
seemed fit for their purpose, disembarked, cut down trees, and made a
square stockade enclosing the necessary buildings. It was near the end
of October before they were all well housed. A large band of Sioux
presently appeared, and set up their teepees hard by. When the
birthday of the governor came, the party celebrated it with a display
of fireworks and vociferous shouts of _Vive le Roi_, _Vive
Charles de Beauharnois_, while the Indians yelped in fright and
amazement at the pyrotechnics, or stood pressing their hands upon
their mouths in silent amazement. The French called their fort Fort
Beauharnois, and invited the aid of Saint Michael the Archangel by
naming the mission in his honor. All went well till April, when the
water rose with the spring floods and filled fort, chapel, and houses
to the depth of nearly three feet, ejecting the whole party, and
forcing them to encamp on higher ground till the deluge subsided.[6]
Worse enemies than the floods soon found them out. These were the
irrepressible Outagamies, who rose against the intruding French and
incited the Sioux to join them. There was no profit for the Company,
and no safety for its agents. The stockholders became discouraged, and
would not support the enterprise. The fort was abandoned, till in 1731
a new arrangement was made, followed by another attempt.[7] For a time 8
a prosperous trade was carried on; but, as commonly happened in such
cases, the adventurers seem to have thought more of utilizing their
monopoly than of fulfilling the terms on which they had received it.
The wild Sioux of the plains, instead of being converted and turned
into Frenchmen, proved such dangerous neighbors that, in 1737,
Legardeur de Saint-Pierre, who then commanded the post, found himself
forced to abandon it.[8] The enterprise had failed in both its aims.
The Western Sea was still a mystery, and the Sioux were not friends,
but enemies. Legardeur de Saint-Pierre recommended that they should be
destroyed,--benevolent advice easy to give, and impossible to
execute.[9]
René Gaultier de Varennes, lieutenant in the regiment of Carignan,
married at Three Rivers, in 1667, the daughter of Pierre Boucher,
governor of that place; the age of the bride, Demoiselle Marie
Boucher, being twelve years, six months, and eighteen days. Varennes
succeeded his father-in-law as governor of Three Rivers, with a salary
of twelve hundred francs, to which he added the profits of a farm of
forty acres; and on these modest resources, reinforced by an illicit
trade in furs, he made shift to sustain the dignity of his office. His 9
wife became the mother of numerous offspring, among whom was Pierre,
born in 1685,--an active and hardy youth, who, like the rest of the
poor but vigorous Canadian _noblesse_, seemed born for the forest
and the fur-trade. When, however, the War of the Spanish Succession
broke out, the young man crossed the sea, obtained the commission of
lieutenant, and was nearly killed at the battle of Malplaquet, where
he was shot through the body, received six sabre-cuts, and was left
for dead on the field. He recovered, and returned to Canada, when,
finding his services slighted, he again took to the woods. He had
assumed the designation of La Vérendrye, and thenceforth his full name
was Pierre Gaultier de Varennes de la Vérendrye.[10]
In 1728, he was in command of a small post on Lake Nipigon, north of
Lake Superior. Here an Indian chief from the river Kaministiguia told
him of a certain great lake which discharged itself by a river flowing
westward. The Indian further declared that he had descended this river
till he reached water that ebbed and flowed, and, terrified by the
strange phenomenon, had turned back, though not till he had heard of a
great salt lake, bordered with many villages. Other Indians confirmed
and improved the story. “These people,” said La Vérendrye to the
Jesuit Degonnor, “are great liars, but now and then they tell the 10
truth.”[11] It seemed to him likely that their stories of a western
river flowing to a western sea were not totally groundless, and that
the true way to the Pacific was not, as had been supposed, through the
country of the Sioux, but farther northward, through that of the
Cristineaux and Assiniboins, or, in other words, through the region
now called Manitoba. In this view he was sustained by his friend
Degonnor, who had just returned from the ill-starred Sioux mission.
La Vérendrye, fired with the zeal of discovery, offered to search for
the Western Sea if the King would give him one hundred men and supply
canoes, arms, and provisions.[12] But, as was usual in such cases, the
King would give nothing; and though the governor, Beauharnois, did all
in his power to promote the enterprise, the burden and the risk were
left to the adventurer himself. La Vérendrye was authorized to find a
way to the Pacific at his own expense, in consideration of a monopoly
of the fur-trade in the regions north and west of Lake Superior. This
vast and remote country was held by tribes who were doubtful friends
of the French, and perpetual enemies of each other. The risks of the
trade were as great as its possible profits, and, to reap these, vast
outlays must first be made: forts must be built, manned, provisioned, 11
and stocked with goods brought through two thousand miles of difficult
and perilous wilderness. There were other dangers, more insidious, and
perhaps greater. The exclusive privileges granted to La Vérendrye
would inevitably rouse the intensest jealousy of the Canadian
merchants, and they would spare no effort to ruin him. Intrigue and
calumny would be busy in his absence. If, as was likely, his patron,
Beauharnois, should be recalled, the new governor might be turned
against him, his privileges might be suddenly revoked, the forts he
had built passed over to his rivals, and all his outlays turned to
their profit, as had happened to La Salle on the recall of his patron,
Frontenac. On the other hand, the country was full of the choicest
furs, which the Indians had hitherto carried to the English at Hudson
Bay, but which the proposed trading-posts would secure to the French.
La Vérendrye’s enemies pretended that he thought of nothing but
beaver-skins, and slighted the discovery which he had bound himself to
undertake; but his conduct proves that he was true to his engagements,
and that ambition to gain honorable distinction in the service of the
King had a large place among the motives that impelled him.
As his own resources were of the smallest, he took a number of
associates on conditions most unfavorable to himself. Among them they
raised money enough to begin the enterprise, and on the eighth of
June, 1731, La Vérendrye and three of his sons, together with his 12
nephew, La Jemeraye, the Jesuit Messager, and a party of Canadians,
set out from Montreal. It was late in August before they reached the
great portage of Lake Superior, which led across the height of land
separating the waters of that lake from those flowing to Lake
Winnipeg. The way was long and difficult. The men, who had perhaps
been tampered with, mutinied, and refused to go farther.[13] Some of
them, with much ado, consented at last to proceed, and, under the lead
of La Jemeraye, made their way by an intricate and broken chain of
lakes and streams to Rainy Lake, where they built a fort and called it
Fort St. Pierre. La Vérendrye was forced to winter with the rest of
the party at the river Kaministiguia, not far from the great portage.
Here months were lost, during which a crew of useless mutineers had to
be fed and paid; and it was not till the next June that he could get
them again into motion towards Lake Winnipeg.
This ominous beginning was followed by a train of disasters. His
associates abandoned him; the merchants on whom he depended for
supplies would not send them, and he found himself, in his own words,
“destitute of everything.” His nephew, La Jemeraye, died. The Jesuit
Auneau, bent on returning to Michilimackinac, set out with La
Vérendrye’s eldest son and a party of twenty Canadians. A few days
later, they were all found on an island in the Lake of the Woods, 13
murdered and mangled by the Sioux.[14] The Assiniboins and
Cristineaux, mortal foes of that fierce people, offered to join the
French and avenge the butchery; but a war with the Sioux would have
ruined La Vérendrye’s plans of discovery, and exposed to torture and
death the French traders in their country. Therefore he restrained
himself and declined the proffered aid, at the risk of incurring the
contempt of those who offered it.
Beauharnois twice appealed to the court to give La Vérendrye some
little aid, urging that he was at the end of his resources, and that a
grant of thirty thousand francs, or six thousand dollars, would enable
him to find a way to the Pacific. All help was refused, but La
Vérendrye was told that he might let out his forts to other traders,
and so raise means to pursue the discovery.
In 1740 he went for the third time to Montreal, where, instead of aid,
he found a lawsuit. “In spite,” he says, “of the derangement of my
affairs, the envy and jealousy of various persons impelled them to
write letters to the court insinuating that I thought of nothing but
making my fortune. If more than forty thousand livres of debt which I
have on my shoulders are an advantage, then I can flatter myself that
I am very rich. In all my misfortunes, I have the consolation of
seeing that M. de Beauharnois enters into my views, recognizes the 14
uprightness of my intentions, and does me justice in spite of
opposition.”[15]
Meanwhile, under all his difficulties, he had explored a vast region
hitherto unknown, diverted a great and lucrative fur-trade from the
English at Hudson Bay, and secured possession of it by six fortified
posts,--Fort St. Pierre, on Rainy Lake; Fort St. Charles, on the Lake
of the Woods; Fort Maurepas, at the mouth of the river Winnipeg; Fort
Bourbon, on the eastern side of Lake Winnipeg; Fort La Reine, on the
Assiniboin; Fort Dauphin, on Lake Manitoba. Besides these he built
another post, called Fort Rouge, on the site of the city of Winnipeg;
and, some time after, another, at the mouth of the river Poskoiac, or
Saskatchewan, neither of which, however, was long occupied. These
various forts were only stockade works flanked with blockhouses; but
the difficulty of building and maintaining them in this remote
wilderness was incalculable.[16]
He had inquired on all sides for the Pacific. The Assiniboins could 15
tell him nothing. Nor could any information be expected from them,
since their relatives and mortal enemies, the Sioux, barred their way
to the West. The Cristineaux were equally ignorant; but they supplied
the place of knowledge by invention, and drew maps, some of which seem
to have been made with no other intention than that of amusing
themselves by imposing on the inquirer. They also declared that some
of their number had gone down a river called White River, or River of
the West, where they found a plant that shed drops like blood, and saw
serpents of prodigious size. They said further that on the lower part
of this river were walled towns, where dwelt white men who had knives,
hatchets, and cloth, but no firearms.[17]
Both Assiniboins and Cristineaux declared that there was a distant
tribe on the Missouri, called Mantannes (Mandans), who knew the way to
the Western Sea, and would guide him to it. Lured by this assurance,
and feeling that he had sufficiently secured his position to enable
him to begin his western exploration, La Vérendrye left Fort La Reine
in October, 1738, with twenty men, and pushed up the river Assiniboin
till its rapids and shallows threatened his bark canoes with
destruction. Then, with a band of Assiniboin Indians who had joined
him, he struck across the prairie for the Mandans, his Indian 16
companions hunting buffalo on the way. They approached the first
Mandan village on the afternoon of the third of December, displaying a
French flag and firing three volleys as a salute. The whole population
poured out to see the marvellous visitors, who were conducted through
the staring crowd to the lodge of the principal chief,--a capacious
structure so thronged with the naked and greasy savages that the
Frenchmen were half smothered. What was worse, they lost the bag that
held all their presents for the Mandans, which was snatched away in
the confusion, and hidden in one of the _caches_, called cellars by
La Vérendrye, of which the place was full. The chief seemed much
discomposed at this mishap, and explained it by saying that there were
many rascals in the village. The loss was serious, since without the
presents nothing could be done. Nor was this all; for in the morning
La Vérendrye missed his interpreter, and was told that he had fallen
in love with an Assiniboin girl and gone off in pursuit of her. The
French were now without any means of communicating with the Mandans,
from whom, however, before the disappearance of the interpreter, they
had already received a variety of questionable information, chiefly
touching white men cased in iron who were said to live on the river
below at the distance of a whole summer’s journey. As they were
impervious to arrows,--so the story ran,--it was necessary to shoot
their horses, after which, being too heavy to run, they were easily
caught. This was probably suggested by the armor of the Spaniards, who 17
had more than once made incursions as far as the lower Missouri; but
the narrators drew on their imagination for various additional
particulars.
The Mandans seem to have much declined in numbers during the century
that followed this visit of La Vérendrye. He says that they had six
villages on or near the Missouri, of which the one seen by him was the
smallest, though he thinks that it contained a hundred and thirty
houses.[18] As each of these large structures held a number of
families, the population must have been considerable. Yet when Prince
Maximilian visited the Mandans in 1833, he found only two villages,
containing jointly two hundred and forty warriors and a total
population of about a thousand souls. Without having seen the
statements of La Vérendrye, he speaks of the population as greatly
reduced by wars and the small-pox,--a disease which a few years later
nearly exterminated the tribe.[19]
La Vérendrye represents the six villages as surrounded with ditches 18
and stockades, flanked by a sort of bastion,--defences which, he says,
had nothing savage in their construction. In later times the
fortifications were of a much ruder kind, though Maximilian represents
them as having pointed salients to serve as bastions. La Vérendrye
mentions some peculiar customs of the Mandans which answer exactly to
those described by more recent observers.
He had intended to winter with the tribe; but the loss of the presents
and the interpreter made it useless to stay, and, leaving two men in
the village to learn the language, he began his return to Fort La
Reine. “I was very ill,” he writes, “but hoped to get better on the
way. The reverse was the case, for it was the depth of winter. It
would be impossible to suffer more than I did. It seemed that nothing
but death could release us from such miseries.” He reached Fort La
Reine on the eleventh of February, 1739.
His iron constitution seems to have been severely shaken; but he had
sons worthy of their father. The two men left among the Mandans
appeared at Fort La Reine in September. They reported that they had
been well treated, and that their hosts had parted from them with
regret. They also declared that at the end of spring several Indian 19
tribes, all well supplied with horses, had come, as was their yearly
custom, to the Mandan villages to barter embroidered buffalo hides and
other skins for corn and beans; that they had encamped, to the number
of two hundred lodges, on the farther side of the Missouri, and that
among them was a band said to have come from a distant country towards
the sunset, where there were white men who lived in houses built of
bricks and stones.
The two Frenchmen crossed over to the camp of these western strangers,
among whom they found a chief who spoke, or professed to speak, the
language of the mysterious white men, which to the two Frenchmen was
unintelligible. Fortunately, he also spoke the language of the
Mandans, of which the Frenchmen had learned a little during their
stay, and hence were able to gather that the white men in question had
beards, and that they prayed to the Master of Life in great houses,
built for the purpose, holding books, the leaves of which were like
husks of Indian corn, singing together and repeating _Jésus, Marie_.
The chief gave many other particulars, which seemed to show that he
had been in contact with Spaniards,--probably those of California; for
he described their houses as standing near the great lake, of which
the water rises and falls and is not fit to drink. He invited the two
Frenchmen to go with him to this strange country, saying that it could
be reached before winter, though a wide circuit must be made, to avoid 20
a fierce and dangerous tribe called Snake Indians (_Gens du
Serpent_).[20]
On hearing this story, La Vérendrye sent his eldest son, Pierre, to
pursue the discovery with two men, ordering him to hire guides among
the Mandans and make his way to the Western Sea. But no guides were to
be found, and in the next summer the young man returned from his
bootless errand.[21]
Undaunted by this failure, Pierre set out again in the next spring,
1742, with his younger brother, the Chevalier de la Vérendrye.
Accompanied only by two Canadians, they left Fort La Reine on the
twenty-ninth of April, and following, no doubt, the route of the
Assiniboin and Mouse River, reached the chief village of the Mandans
in about three weeks.
Here they found themselves the welcome guests of this singularly
interesting tribe, ruined by the small-pox nearly half a century ago,
but preserved to memory by the skilful pencil of the artist Charles
Bodmer, and the brush of the painter George Catlin, both of whom saw
them at a time when they were little changed in habits and manners
since the visit of the brothers La Vérendrye.[22]
Thus, though the report of the two brothers is too concise and brief, 21
we know what they saw when they entered the central area, or public
square, of the village. Around stood the Mandan lodges, looking like
round flattened hillocks of earth, forty or fifty feet wide. On
examination they proved to be framed of strong posts and poles,
covered with a thick matting of intertwined willow-branches, over
which was laid a bed of well-compacted clay or earth two or three feet
thick. This heavy roof was supported by strong interior posts.[23] The
open place which the dwellings enclosed served for games, dances, and
the ghastly religious or magical ceremonies practised by the tribe.
Among the other structures was the sacred “medicine lodge,”
distinguished by three or four tall poles planted before it, each
surmounted by an effigy looking much like a scarecrow, and meant as an
offering to the spirits.
If the two travellers had been less sparing of words, they would
doubtless have told us that as they entered the village square the
flattened earthen domes that surrounded it were thronged with squaws
and children,--for this was always the case on occasions of public 22
interest,--and that they were forced to undergo a merciless series of
feasts in the lodges of the chiefs. Here, seated by the sunken hearth
in the middle, under the large hole in the roof that served both for
window and chimney, they could study at their ease the domestic
economy of their entertainers. Each lodge held a _gens_, or
family connection, whose beds of raw buffalo hide, stretched on poles,
were ranged around the circumference of the building, while by each
stood a post on which hung shields, lances, bows, quivers,
medicine-bags, and masks formed of the skin of a buffalo’s head, with
the horns attached, to be used in the magic buffalo dance.
Every day had its sports to relieve the monotony of savage existence,
the game of the stick and the rolling ring, the archery practice of
boys, horse-racing on the neighboring prairie, and incessant games of
chance; while every evening, in contrast to these gayeties, the long,
dismal wail of women rose from the adjacent cemetery, where the dead
of the village, sewn fast in buffalo hides, lay on scaffolds above the
reach of wolves.
[Illustration: PARTS OF MONTANA AND NORTH DAKOTA,
showing approximately the ROUTE of
CHEVALIER DE LA VÉRENDRYE
in 1742, 1743.]
The Mandans did not know the way to the Pacific, but they told the
brothers that they expected a speedy visit from a tribe or band called
Horse Indians, who could guide them thither. It is impossible to
identify this people with any certainty.[24] The two travellers
waited for them in vain till after midsummer, and then, as the season 23
was too far advanced for longer delay, they hired two Mandans to
conduct them to their customary haunts.
They set out on horseback, their scanty baggage and their stock of
presents being no doubt carried by pack-animals. Their general course
was west-southwest, with the Black Hills at a distance on their left,
and the upper Missouri on their right. The country was a rolling
prairie, well covered for the most part with grass, and watered by
small alkaline streams creeping towards the Missouri with an opaque,
whitish current. Except along the watercourses, there was little or no
wood. “I noticed,” says the Chevalier de la Vérendrye, “earths of
different colors, blue, green, red, or black, white as chalk, or
yellowish like ochre.” This was probably in the “bad lands” of the
Little Missouri, where these colored earths form a conspicuous feature
in the bare and barren bluffs, carved into fantastic shapes by the
storms.[25]
For twenty days the travellers saw no human being, so scanty was the
population of these plains. Game, however, was abundant. Deer sprang
from the tall, reedy grass of the river bottoms; buffalo tramped by 24
in ponderous columns, or dotted the swells of the distant prairie with
their grazing thousands; antelope approached, with the curiosity of
their species, to gaze at the passing horsemen, then fled like the
wind; and as they neared the broken uplands towards the Yellowstone,
they saw troops of elk and flocks of mountain-sheep. Sometimes, for
miles together, the dry plain was studded thick with the earthen
mounds that marked the burrows of the curious marmots, called
prairie-dogs, from their squeaking bark. Wolves, white and gray,
howled about the camp at night, and their cousin, the coyote, seated
in the dusk of evening upright on the grass, with nose turned to the
sky, saluted them with a complication of yelpings, as if a score of
petulant voices were pouring together from the throat of one small
beast.
On the eleventh of August, after a march of about three weeks, the
brothers reached a hill, or group of hills, apparently west of the
Little Missouri, and perhaps a part of the Powder River Range. It was
here that they hoped to find the Horse Indians, but nobody was to be
seen. Arming themselves with patience, they built a hut, made fires to
attract by the smoke any Indians roaming near, and went every day to
the tops of the hills to reconnoitre. At length, on the fourteenth of
September, they descried a spire of smoke on the distant prairie.
One of their Mandan guides had left them and gone back to his village.
The other, with one of the Frenchmen, went towards the smoke, and 25
found a camp of Indians, whom the journal calls Les Beaux Hommes, and
who were probably Crows, or Apsaroka, a tribe remarkable for stature
and symmetry, who long claimed that region as their own. They treated
the visitors well, and sent for the other Frenchmen to come to their
lodges, where they were received with great rejoicing. The remaining
Mandan, however, became frightened,--for the Beaux Hommes were enemies
of his tribe,--and he soon followed his companion on his solitary
march homeward.
The brothers remained twenty-one days in the camp of the Beaux Hommes,
much perplexed for want of an interpreter. The tribes of the plains
have in common a system of signs by which they communicate with each
other, and it is likely that the brothers had learned it from the
Sioux or Assiniboins, with whom they had been in familiar intercourse.
By this or some other means they made their hosts understand that they
wished to find the Horse Indians; and the Beaux Hommes, being soothed
by presents, offered some of their young men as guides. They set out
on the ninth of October, following a south-southwest course.[26]
In two days they met a band of Indians, called by them the Little 26
Foxes, and on the fifteenth and seventeenth two villages of another
unrecognizable horde, named Pioya. From La Vérendrye’s time to our
own, this name “villages” has always been given to the encampments of
the wandering people of the plains. All these nomadic communities
joined them, and they moved together southward, till they reached at
last the lodges of the long-sought Horse Indians. They found them in
the extremity of distress and terror. Their camp resounded with howls
and wailings; and not without cause, for the Snakes, or Shoshones,--a
formidable people living farther westward,--had lately destroyed most
of their tribe. The Snakes were the terror of that country. The
brothers were told that the year before they had destroyed seventeen
villages, killing the warriors and old women, and carrying off the
young women and children as slaves.
None of the Horse Indians had ever seen the Pacific; but they knew a
people called Gens de l’Arc, or Bow Indians, who, as they said, had
traded not far from it. To the Bow Indians, therefore, the brothers
resolved to go, and by dint of gifts and promises they persuaded their
hosts to show them the way. After marching southwestward for several
days, they saw the distant prairie covered with the pointed
buffalo-skin lodges of a great Indian camp. It was that of the Bow
Indians, who may have been one of the bands of the western Sioux,--the
predominant race in this region. Few or none of them could ever have 27
seen a white man, and we may imagine their amazement at the arrival of
the strangers, who, followed by staring crowds, were conducted to the
lodge of the chief. “Thus far,” says La Vérendrye, “we had been well
received in all the villages we had passed; but this was nothing
compared with the courteous manners of the great chief of the Bow
Indians, who, unlike the others, was not self-interested in the least,
and who took excellent care of everything belonging to us.”
The first inquiry of the travellers was for the Pacific; but neither
the chief nor his tribesmen knew anything of it, except what they had
heard from Snake prisoners taken in war. The Frenchmen were surprised
at the extent of the camp, which consisted of many separate bands. The
chief explained that they had been summoned from far and near for a
grand war-party against that common foe of all,--the Snakes.[27] In
fact, the camp resounded with war-songs and war-dances. “Come with
us,” said their host; “we are going towards the mountains, where you
can see the great water that you are looking for.”
At length the camp broke up. The squaws took down the lodges, and the
march began over prairies dreary and brown with the withering touch 28
of autumn. The spectacle was such as men still young have seen in
these western lands, but which no man will see again. The vast plain
swarmed with the moving multitude. The tribes of the Missouri and the
Yellowstone had by this time abundance of horses, the best of which
were used for war and hunting, and the others as beasts of burden.
These last were equipped in a peculiar manner. Several of the long
poles used to frame the teepees, or lodges, were secured by one end to
each side of a rude saddle, while the other end trailed on the ground.
Crossbars lashed to the poles just behind the horse kept them three or
four feet apart, and formed a firm support, on which was laid,
compactly folded, the buffalo-skin covering of the lodge. On this,
again, sat a mother with her young family, sometimes stowed for safety
in a large open willow basket, with the occasional addition of some
domestic pet,--such as a tame raven, a puppy, or even a small
bear-cub. Other horses were laden in the same manner with wooden
bowls, stone hammers, and other utensils, along with stores of dried
buffalo-meat packed in cases of rawhide whitened and painted. Many of
the innumerable dogs--whose manners and appearance strongly suggested
their relatives the wolves, to whom, however, they bore a mortal
grudge--were equipped in a similar way, with shorter poles and lighter
loads. Bands of naked boys, noisy and restless, roamed the prairie,
practising their bows and arrows on any small animal they might find. 29
Gay young squaws--adorned on each cheek with a spot of ochre or red
clay, and arrayed in tunics of fringed buckskin embroidered with
porcupine quills--were mounted on ponies, astride like men; while lean
and tattered hags--the drudges of the tribe, unkempt and
hideous--scolded the lagging horses, or screeched at the disorderly
dogs, with voices not unlike the yell of the great horned owl. Most of
the warriors were on horseback, armed with round white shields of
bull-hide, feathered lances, war-clubs, bows, and quivers filled with
stone-headed arrows; while a few of the elders, wrapped in robes of
buffalo-hide, stalked along in groups with a stately air, chatting,
laughing, and exchanging unseemly jokes.[28]
“We continued our march,” says La Vérendrye, “sometimes
south-southwest, and now and then northwest; our numbers constantly
increasing by villages of different tribes which joined us.” The
variations of their course were probably due to the difficulties of
the country, which grew more rugged as they advanced, with broken
hills, tracts of dingy green sage-bushes, and bright, swift streams,
edged with cottonwood and willow, hurrying northward to join the
Yellowstone. At length, on the first of January, 1743, they saw what
was probably the Bighorn Range of the Rocky Mountains, a hundred and 30
twenty miles east of the Yellowstone Park.
A council of all the allied bands was now called, and the Frenchmen
were asked to take part in it. The questions discussed were how to
dispose of the women and children, and how to attack the enemy. Having
settled their plans, the chiefs begged their white friends not to
abandon them; and the younger of the two, the Chevalier, consented to
join the warriors, and aid them with advice, though not with arms.
The tribes of the western plains rarely go on war-parties in winter,
and this great expedition must have been the result of unusual
exasperation. The object was to surprise the Snakes in the security of
their winter camp, and strike a deadly blow, which would have been
impossible in summer.
On the eighth of January the whole body stopped to encamp, choosing,
no doubt, after the invariable winter custom of western Indians, a
place sheltered from wind, and supplied with water and fuel. Here the
squaws and children were to remain, while most of the warriors
advanced against the enemy. By pegging the lower edge of the
lodge-skin to the ground, and piling a ridge of stones and earth upon
it to keep out the air, fastening with wooden skewers the flap of hide
that covered the entrance, and keeping a constant fire, they could
pass a winter endurable to Indians, though smoke, filth, vermin, bad
air, the crowd, and the total absence of privacy, would make it a 31
purgatory to any civilized white man.
The Chevalier left his brother to watch over the baggage of the party,
which was stored in the lodge of the great chief, while he himself,
with his two Canadians, joined the advancing warriors. They were on
horseback, marching with a certain order, and sending watchmen to
reconnoitre the country from the tops of the hills.[29] Their
movements were so slow that it was twelve days before they reached the
foot of the mountains, which, says La Vérendrye, “are for the most
part well wooded, and seem very high.”[30] He longed to climb their
great snow-encumbered peaks, fancying that he might then see the
Pacific, and never dreaming that more than eight hundred miles of
mountains and forests still lay between him and his goal.
Through the whole of the present century the villages of the Snakes
were at a considerable distance west of the Bighorn Range, and some of
them were even on the upper waters of the Pacific slope. It is likely
that they were so in 1743, in which case the war-party would not have
only reached the Bighorn Mountains, but have pushed farther on to
within sight of the great Wind River Range. Be this as it may, their
scouts reached the chief winter camp of the Snakes, and found it 32
abandoned, with lodges still standing, and many household possessions
left behind. The enemy had discovered their approach, and fled.
Instead of encouraging the allies, this news filled them with terror,
for they feared that the Snake warriors might make a circuit to the
rear, and fall upon the camp where they had left their women and
children. The great chief spent all his eloquence in vain, nobody
would listen to him; and with characteristic fickleness they gave over
the enterprise, and retreated in a panic. “Our advance was made in
good order; but not so our retreat,” says the Chevalier’s journal.
“Everybody fled his own way. Our horses, though good, were very tired,
and got little to eat.” The Chevalier was one day riding with his
friend, the great chief, when, looking behind him, he missed his two
French attendants. Hastening back in alarm, he found them far in the
rear, quietly feeding their horses under the shelter of a clump of
trees. He had scarcely joined them when he saw a party of fifteen
hostile Indians stealthily creeping forward, covered by their
bull-hide shields. He and his men let them approach, and then gave
them a few shots; on which they immediately ran off, firearms being to
them an astounding novelty.
The three Frenchmen now tried to rejoin the great chief and his band,
but the task was not easy. The prairie, bare of snow and hard as
flint, showed no trace of foot or hoof; and it was by rare good
fortune that they succeeded, on the second day, not in overtaking
the chief, but in reaching the camp where the women and children had 33
been left. They found them all in safety; the Snakes had not attacked
them, and the panic of the warriors was needless. It was the ninth of
February. They were scarcely housed when a blizzard set in, and on the
night of the tenth the plains were buried in snow. The great chief had
not appeared. With such of his warriors as he could persuade to follow
him, he had made a wide circuit to find the trail of the lost
Frenchmen, but, to his great distress, had completely failed. It was
not till five days after the arrival of the Chevalier and his men that
the chief reached the camp, “more dead than alive,” in the words of
the journal. All his hardships were forgotten when he found his white
friends safe, for he had given them up for lost. “His sorrow turned to
joy, and he could not give us attention and caresses enough.”
The camp broke up, and the allied bands dispersed. The great chief and
his followers moved slowly through the snowdrifts towards the
east-southeast, accompanied by the Frenchmen. Thus they kept on till
the first of March, when the two brothers, learning that they were
approaching the winter village of a people called Gens de la Petite
Cerise, or Choke-Cherry Indians, sent one of their men, with a guide,
to visit them. The man returned in ten days, bringing a message from
the Choke-Cherry Indians, inviting the Frenchmen to their lodges.
The great chief of the Bow Indians, who seems to have regarded his 34
young friends with mingled affection, respect, and wonder, was grieved
at the thought of losing them, but took comfort when they promised to
visit him again, provided that he would make his abode near a certain
river which they pointed out. To this he readily agreed, and then,
with mutual regret, they parted.[31] The Frenchmen repaired to the
village of the Choke-Cherry Indians, who, like the Bow Indians, were
probably a band of Sioux.[32] Hard by their lodges, which stood near
the Missouri, the brothers buried a plate of lead graven with the
royal arms, and raised a pile of stones in honor of the governor of
Canada. They remained at this place till April; then, mounting their
horses again, followed the Missouri upward to the village of the
Mandans, which they reached on the eighteenth of May. After spending a
week here, they joined a party of Assiniboins, journeyed with them
towards Fort La Reine, and reached it on the second of July,--to the
great relief of their father, who was waiting in suspense, having 35
heard nothing of them for more than a year.
Sixty-two years later, when the vast western regions then called
Louisiana had just been ceded to the United States, Captains Lewis and
Clark left the Mandan villages with thirty-two men, traced the
Missouri to the mountains, penetrated the wastes beyond, and made
their way to the Pacific. The first stages of that remarkable
exploration were anticipated by the brothers La Vérendrye. They did
not find the Pacific, but they discovered the Rocky Mountains, or at
least the part of them to which the name properly belongs; for the
southern continuation of the great range had long been known to the
Spaniards. Their bold adventure was achieved, not at the charge of a
government, but at their own cost and that of their father,--not with
a band of well-equipped men, but with only two followers.
The fur-trading privilege which was to have been their compensation
had proved their ruin. They were still pursued without ceasing by the
jealousy of rival traders and the ire of disappointed partners. “Here
in Canada more than anywhere else,” the Chevalier wrote, some years
after his return, “envy is the passion _à la mode_, and there is
no escaping it.”[33] It was the story of La Salle repeated.
Beauharnois, however, still stood by them, encouraged and defended
them, and wrote in their favor to the colonial minister.[34] It was 36
doubtless through his efforts that the elder La Vérendrye was at last
promoted to a captaincy in the colony troops. Beauharnois was
succeeded in the government by the sagacious and able Galissonière,
and he too befriended the explorers. “It seems to me,” he wrote to the
minister, “that what you have been told touching the Sieur de la
Vérendrye, to the effect that he has been more busy with his own
interests than in making discoveries, is totally false, and, moreover,
that any officers employed in such work will always be compelled to
give some of their attention to trade, so long as the King allows them
no other means of subsistence. These discoveries are very costly, and
more fatiguing and dangerous than open war.”[35] Two years later, the
elder La Vérendrye received the cross of the Order of St. Louis,--an
honor much prized in Canada, but which he did not long enjoy; for he
died at Montreal in the following December, when on the point of again
setting out for the West.
His intrepid sons survived, and they were not idle. One of them, the
Chevalier, had before discovered the river Saskatchewan, and ascended
it as far as the forks.[36] His intention was to follow it to the
mountains, build a fort there, and thence push westward in another
search for the Pacific; but a disastrous event ruined all his hopes. 37
La Galissonière returned to France, and the Marquis de la Jonquière
succeeded him, with the notorious François Bigot as intendant. Both
were greedy of money,--the one to hoard, and the other to dissipate
it. Clearly there was money to be got from the fur-trade of Manitoba,
for La Vérendrye had made every preparation and incurred every
expense. It seemed that nothing remained but to reap where he had
sown. His commission to find the Pacific, with the privileges
connected with it, was refused to his sons, and conferred on a
stranger. La Jonquière wrote to the minister: “I have charged M. de
Saint-Pierre with this business. He knows these countries better than
any officer in all the colony.”[37] On the contrary, he had never seen
them. It is difficult not to believe that La Jonquière, Bigot, and
Saint-Pierre were partners in a speculation of which all three were to
share the profits.
The elder La Vérendrye, not long before his death, had sent a large
quantity of goods to his trading-forts. The brothers begged leave to
return thither and save their property from destruction. They declared
themselves happy to serve under the orders of Saint-Pierre, and asked
for the use of only a single fort of all those which their father had
built at his own cost. The answer was a flat refusal. In short, they
were shamefully robbed. The Chevalier writes: “M. le Marquis de la
Jonquière, being pushed hard, and as I thought even touched, by my
representations, told me at last that M. de Saint-Pierre wanted nothing 38
to do with me or my brothers.” “I am a ruined man,” he continues. “I
am more than two thousand livres in debt, and am still only a second
ensign. My elder brother’s grade is no better than mine. My younger
brother is only a cadet. This is the fruit of all that my father, my
brothers, and I have done. My other brother, whom the Sioux murdered
some years ago, was not the most unfortunate among us. We must lose
all that has cost us so much, unless M. de Saint-Pierre should take
juster views, and prevail on the Marquis de la Jonquière to share
them. To be thus shut out from the West is to be most cruelly robbed
of a sort of inheritance which we had all the pains of acquiring, and
of which others will get all the profit.”[38]
His elder brother writes in a similar strain: “We spent our youth and
our property in building up establishments so advantageous to Canada;
and, after all, we were doomed to see a stranger gather the fruit we
had taken such pains to plant.” And he complains that their goods left
in the trading-posts were wasted, their provisions consumed, and the
men in their pay used to do the work of others.[39]
They got no redress. Saint-Pierre, backed by the governor and the
intendant, remained master of the position. The brothers sold a small
piece of land, their last remaining property, to appease their most 39
pressing creditors.[40]
Saint-Pierre set out for Manitoba on the fifth of June, 1750. Though
he had lived more or less in the woods for thirty-six years, and
though La Jonquière had told the minister that he knew the countries
to which he was bound better than anybody else, it is clear from his
own journal that he was now visiting them for the first time. They did
not please him. “I was told,” he says, “that the way would grow harder
and more dangerous as we advanced, and I found, in fact, that one must
risk life and property every moment.” Finding himself and his men
likely to starve, he sent some of them, under an ensign named
Niverville, to the Saskatchewan. They could not reach it, and nearly
perished on the way. “I myself was no more fortunate,” says
Saint-Pierre. “Food was so scarce that I sent some of my people into
the woods among the Indians,--which did not save me from a fast so
rigorous that it deranged my health and put it out of my power to do
anything towards accomplishing my mission. Even if I had had strength
enough, the war that broke out among the Indians would have made it
impossible to proceed.”
Niverville, after a winter of misery, tried to fulfil an order which 40
he had received from his commander. When the Indians guided the two
brothers La Vérendrye to the Rocky Mountains, the course they took
tended so far southward that the Chevalier greatly feared it might
lead to Spanish settlements; and he gave it as his opinion that the
next attempt to find the Pacific should be made farther towards the
north. Saint-Pierre had agreed with him, and had directed Niverville
to build a fort on the Saskatchewan, three hundred leagues above its
mouth. Therefore, at the end of May, 1751, Niverville sent ten men in
two canoes on this errand, and they ascended the Saskatchewan to what
Saint-Pierre calls the “Rock Mountain.” Here they built a small
stockade fort and called it Fort La Jonquière. Niverville was to have
followed them; but he fell ill, and lay helpless at the mouth of the
river in such a condition that he could not even write to his
commander.
Saint-Pierre set out in person from Fort La Reine for Fort La
Jonquière, over ice and snow, for it was late in November. Two
Frenchmen from Niverville met him on the way, and reported that the
Assiniboins had slaughtered an entire band of friendly Indians on whom
Saint-Pierre had relied to guide him. On hearing this he gave up the
enterprise, and returned to Fort La Reine. Here the Indians told him
idle stories about white men and a fort in some remote place towards
the west; but, he observes, “nobody could reach it without encountering
an infinity of tribes more savage than it is possible to imagine.”
He spent most of the winter at Fort La Reine. Here, towards the end of 41
February, 1752, he had with him only five men, having sent out the
rest in search of food. Suddenly, as he sat in his chamber, he saw the
fort full of armed Assiniboins, extremely noisy and insolent. He tried
in vain to quiet them, and they presently broke into the guard-house
and seized the arms. A massacre would have followed, had not
Saint-Pierre, who was far from wanting courage, resorted to an
expedient which has more than once proved effective on such occasions.
He knocked out the heads of two barrels of gunpowder, snatched a
firebrand, and told the yelping crowd that he would blow up them and
himself together. At this they all rushed in fright out of the gate,
while Saint-Pierre ran after them, and bolted it fast. There was great
anxiety for the hunters, but they all came back in the evening,
without having met the enemy. The men, however, were so terrified by
the adventure that Saint-Pierre was compelled to abandon the fort,
after recommending it to the care of another band of Assiniboins, who
had professed great friendship. Four days after he was gone they
burned it to the ground.
He soon came to the conclusion that farther discovery was impossible,
because the English of Hudson Bay had stirred up the western tribes to
oppose it. Therefore he set out for the settlements, and, reaching
Quebec in the autumn of 1753, placed the journal of his futile 42
enterprise in the hands of Duquesne, the new governor.[41]
Canada was approaching her last agony. In the death-struggle of the
Seven Years’ War there was no time for schemes of western discovery.
The brothers La Vérendrye sank into poverty and neglect. A little
before the war broke out, we find the eldest at the obscure Acadian
post of Beauséjour, where he wrote to the colonial minister a
statement of his services, which appears to have received no
attention. After the fall of Canada, the Chevalier de la Vérendrye, he
whose eyes first beheld the snowy peaks of the Rocky Mountains,
perished in the wreck of the ship “Auguste,” on the coast of Cape
Breton, in November, 1761.[42]
[1] _Mémoire fait et arresté par le Conseil de Marine, 3
Février, 1717; Mémoire du Roy, 26 Juin, 1717._
[2] _Charlevoix au Comte de Morville, 1 Avril, 1723._
[3] The valuable journal of Charlevoix’s western travels,
written in the form of letters, was published in connection
with his _Histoire de la Nouvelle France_. After his visit
to the Lakes, he went to New Orleans, intending to return in
the spring and continue his inquiries for the Western Sea;
but being unable to do this, he went back to France at the
end of 1722. The official report of his mission is contained
in a letter to the Comte de Toulouse, 20 January, 1723.
[4] _Traité de la Compagnie des Sioux, 6 Juin, 1727._
[5] On this scheme, _Vaudreuil et Bégon au Ministre, 4
Octobre, 1723_; _Longueuil et Bégon au Ministre, 31 Octobre,
1725_; _Beauharnois et Dupuy au Ministre, 25 Septembre,
1727_.
[6] _Guignas à Beauharnois, 28 Mai, 1728._
[7] _Beauharnois et Hocquart au Ministre, 25 Octobre, 1729;
Idem, 12 Octobre, 1731._
[8] _Relation du Sieur de Saint-Pierre, 14 Octobre, 1737._
[9] “Cet officier [Saint-Pierre] a ajouté qu’il seroit
avantageux de détruire cette nation.”--_Mémoire de
Beauharnois_, 1738.
[10] M. Benjamin Sulte has traced out the family history of
the Varennes in the parish registers of Three Rivers and
other trustworthy sources. See _Revue Canadienne_, x. 781,
849, 935.
[11] _Relation du Père Degonnor, Jésuite, Missionnaire des
Sioux, adressée à M. le Marquis de Beauharnois._
[12] _Relation de Degonnor; Beauharnois au Ministre,
1 Octobre, 1731._
[13] _Mémoire du Sieur de la Vérendrye du Sujet des
Établissements pour parvenir à la Découverte de la Mer de
l’Ouest_, in Margry, vi. 585.
[14] _Beauharnois au Ministre, 14 Octobre, 1736_;
_Relation du Massacre au Lac des Bois, en Juin, 1736_;
_Journal de la Vérendrye, joint à la lettre de M. de
Beauharnois du--Octobre, 1737_.
[15] _Mémoire du Sieur de la Vérendrye au Sujet des
Établissements pour parvenir à la Découverte de la Mer de
l’Ouest._
[16] _Mémoire en abrégé de la Carte qui représente les
Établissements faits par le Sieur de la Vérendrye et ses
Enfants_ (Margry, vi. 616); _Carte des Nouvelles Découvertes
dans l’Ouest du Canada dressée sur les Mémoires du M^r. de la
Vérendrye et donnée au Dépôt de la Marine par M. de la
Galissonnière_, 1750; Bellin, _Remarques sur la Carte de
l’Amérique_, 1755; Bougainville, _Mémoire sur l’État de la
Nouvelle France_, 1757.
Most of La Vérendrye’s forts were standing during the Seven
Years’ War, and were known collectively as _Postes de la
Mer de l’Ouest_.
[17] _Journal de la Vérendrye joint à la Lettre de
M. de Beauharnois du--Octobre, 1737._
[18] _Journal de La Vérendrye, 1738, 1739._ This journal,
which is ill-written and sometimes obscure, is printed in
Brymner, _Report on Canadian Archives_, 1889.
[19] Le Prince Maximilien de Wied-Neuwied, _Voyage dans
l’Intérieur de l’Amérique du Nord_, ii. 371, 372 (Paris,
1843). When Captains Lewis and Clark visited the Mandans in
1804, they found them in two villages, with about three
hundred and fifty warriors. They report that, about forty
years before, they lived in nine villages, the ruins of
which the explorers saw about eighty miles below the two
villages then occupied by the tribe. The Mandans had moved
up the river in consequence of the persecutions of the Sioux
and the small-pox, which had made great havoc among them.
_Expedition of Lewis and Clark_, i. 129 (ed. Philadelphia,
1814). These nine villages seem to have been above
Cannon-ball River, a tributary of the Missouri.
[20] _Journal du Sieur de la Vérendrye_, 1740, in Archives
de la Marine.
[21] _Mémoire du Sieur de la Vérendrye, joint à sa lettre
du 31 Octobre, 1744._
[22] Prince Maximilian spent the winter of 1832-33 near the
Mandan villages. His artist, with the instinct of genius,
seized the characteristics of the wild life before him, and
rendered them with admirable vigor and truth. Catlin spent a
considerable time among the Mandans soon after the visit of
Prince Maximilian, and had unusual opportunities of studying
them. He was an indifferent painter, a shallow observer, and
a garrulous and windy writer; yet his enthusiastic industry
is beyond praise, and his pictures are invaluable as
faithful reflections of aspects of Indian life which are
gone forever.
Beauharnois calls the Mandans _Blancs Barbus_, and says that
they have been hitherto unknown. _Beauharnois au Ministre,
14 Août, 1739._ The name Mantannes, or Mandans, is that
given them by the Assiniboins.
[23] The Minnetarees and other tribes of the Missouri built
their lodges in a similar way.
[24] The Cheyennes have a tradition that they were the first
tribe of this region to have horses. This may perhaps
justify a conjecture that the northern division of this
brave and warlike people were the Horse Indians of La
Vérendrye; though an Indian tradition, unless backed by
well-established facts, can never be accepted as substantial
evidence.
[25] A similar phenomenon occurs farther west on the face of
the perpendicular bluffs that, in one place, border the
valley of the river Rosebud.
[26] _Journal du Voyage fait par le Chevalier de la Vérendrye
en 1742._ The copy before me is from the original in the
Dépôt des Cartes de la Marine. A duplicate, in the Archives
des Affaires Étrangères, is printed by Margry. It gives the
above date as November 9 instead of October 9. The context
shows the latter to be correct.
[27] The enmity between the Sioux and the Snakes lasted
to our own time. When the writer lived among the western
Sioux, one of their chiefs organized a war-party against the
Snakes, and numerous bands came to join the expedition from
a distance in some cases of three hundred miles. Quarrels
broke out among them, and the scheme was ruined.
[28] The above descriptive particulars are drawn from
repeated observation of similar scenes at a time when the
primitive condition of these tribes was essentially
unchanged, though with the difference that the concourse of
savages counted by hundreds, and not by thousands.
[29] At least this was done by a band of Sioux with whom the
writer once traversed a part of the country ranged by these
same Snakes, who had lately destroyed an entire Sioux
village.
[30] The Bighorn Range, below the snow line, is in the main
well timbered with pine, fir, oak, and juniper.
[31] The only two tribes of this region who were a match for
the Snakes were the Sioux and the Blackfeet. It is clear
that the Bow Indians could not have been Blackfeet, as in
that case, after the war-party broke up, they would have
moved northward towards their own country, instead of
east-southeast into the country of their enemies. Hence I
incline to think the Bow Indians a band of Sioux, or
Dakota,--a people then, as since, predominant in that
country.
The banks of the Missouri, in the part which La Vérendrye
would have reached in following an east-southeast course,
were occupied by numerous bands or sub-tribes of Sioux, such
as the Minneconjou, Yankton, Oncpapa, Brulé, and others,
friends and relatives of the Bow Indians, supposing these to
have been Sioux.
[32] The Sioux, Cheyennes, and other prairie tribes use the
small astringent wild cherry for food. The squaws pound it,
stones and all, and then dry it for winter use.
[33] _Le Chevalier de la Vérendrye au Ministre, 30 Septembre,
1750._
[34] _La Vérendrye père au Ministre, 1 Novembre, 1746_, in
Margry, vi. 611.
[35] _La Galissonière au Ministre, 23 Octobre, 1747._
[36] _Mémoire en abrégé des Établissements et Découvertes
faits par le Sieur de la Vérendrye et ses Enfants._
[37] _La Jonquière au Ministre, 27 Février, 1750._
[38] _Le Chevalier de la Vérendrye au Ministre, 30 Septembre,
1750._
[39] _Mémoire des Services de Pierre Gautier de la Vérendrye
l’aisné, présenté à Mg^r. Rouillé, ministre et secrétaire
d’État._
[40] Legardeur de Saint-Pierre, in spite of his treatment of
the La Vérendrye brothers, had merit as an officer. It was
he who received Washington at Fort Le Bœuf in 1754. He was
killed in 1755, at the battle of Lake George. See “Montcalm
and Wolfe,” i. 315.
[41] _Journal sommaire du Voyage de Jacques Legardeur de
Saint-Pierre, chargé de là Découverte de la Mer de
l’Ouest_ (British Museum).
[42] The above narrative rests mainly on contemporary documents,
official in character, of which the originals are preserved
in the archives of the French Government. These papers have
recently been printed by M. Pierre Margry, late custodian of
the Archives of the Marine and Colonies at Paris, in the
sixth volume of his _Découvertes et Établissements des
Français dans l’Amérique Septentrionale_,--a documentary
collection of great value, published at the expense of the
American Government. It was M. Margry who first drew
attention to the achievements of the family of La Vérendrye,
by an article in the _Moniteur_ in 1852. I owe to his
kindness the opportunity of using the above-mentioned
documents in advance of publication. I obtained copies from
duplicate originals of some of the principal among them from
the Dépôt des Cartes de la Marine, in 1872. These answer
closely, with rare and trivial variations, to the same
documents as printed from other sources by M. Margry. Some
additional papers preserved in the Archives of the Marine
and Colonies have also been used.
My friends, Hon. William C. Endicott, then Secretary of War,
and Captain John G. Bourke, Third Cavalry, U. S. A., kindly
placed in my hands a valuable collection of Government maps
and surveys of the country between the Missouri and the
Rocky Mountains visited by the brothers La Vérendrye; and I
have received from Captain Bourke, and also from Mr. E. A.
Snow, formerly of the Third Cavalry, much information
concerning the same region, repeatedly traversed by them in
peace and war.
43
CHAPTER XVII. 44
1700-1750.
THE CHAIN OF POSTS.
OPPOSING CLAIMS.--ATTITUDE OF THE RIVAL NATIONS.--AMERICA A FRENCH
CONTINENT.--ENGLAND A USURPER.--FRENCH DEMANDS.--MAGNANIMOUS
PROPOSALS.--WARLIKE PREPARATION.--NIAGARA.--OSWEGO.--CROWN
POINT.--THE PASSES OF THE WEST SECURED.
We have seen that the contest between France and England in America
divided itself, after the Peace of Utrecht, into three parts,--the
Acadian contest; the contest for northern New England; and last,
though greatest, the contest for the West. Nothing is more striking
than the difference, or rather contrast, in the conduct and methods of
the rival claimants to this wild but magnificent domain. Each was
strong in its own qualities, and utterly wanting in the qualities that
marked its opponent.
On maps of British America in the earlier part of the eighteenth
century, one sees the eastern shore, from Maine to Georgia, garnished
with ten or twelve colored patches, very different in shape and size,
and defined, more or less distinctly, by dividing-lines which, in some
cases, are prolonged westward till they touch the Mississippi, or 45
even cross it and stretch indefinitely towards the Pacific. These
patches are the British provinces, and the westward prolongation of
their boundary lines represents their several claims to vast interior
tracts, founded on ancient grants, but not made good by occupation, or
vindicated by any exertion of power.
These English communities took little thought of the region beyond the
Alleghanies. Each lived a life of its own, shut within its own limits,
not dreaming of a future collective greatness to which the possession
of the West would be a necessary condition. No conscious community of
aims and interests held them together, nor was there any authority
capable of uniting their forces and turning them to a common object.
Some of the servants of the Crown had urged the necessity of joining
them all under a strong central government, as the only means of
making them loyal subjects and arresting the encroachments of France;
but the scheme was plainly impracticable. Each province remained in
jealous isolation, busied with its own work, growing in strength, in
the capacity of self-rule and the spirit of independence, and
stubbornly resisting all exercise of authority from without. If the
English-speaking populations flowed westward, it was in obedience to
natural laws, for the King did not aid the movement, the royal
governors had no authority to do so, and the colonial assemblies were
too much engrossed with immediate local interests. The power of these
colonies was that of a rising flood slowly invading and conquering, 46
by the unconscious force of its own growing volume, unless means be
found to hold it back by dams and embankments within appointed limits.
In the French colonies all was different. Here the representatives of
the Crown were men bred in an atmosphere of broad ambition and
masterful and far-reaching enterprise. Achievement was demanded of
them. They recognized the greatness of the prize, studied the strong
and weak points of their rivals, and with a cautious forecast and a
daring energy set themselves to the task of defeating them.
If the English colonies were comparatively strong in numbers, their
numbers could not be brought into action; while if the French forces
were small, they were vigorously commanded, and always ready at a
word. It was union confronting division, energy confronting apathy,
military centralization opposed to industrial democracy; and, for a
time, the advantage was all on one side.
The demands of the French were sufficiently comprehensive. They
repented of their enforced concessions at the Treaty of Utrecht, and
in spite of that compact, maintained that, with a few local and
trivial exceptions, the whole North American continent, except Mexico,
was theirs of right; while their opponents seemed neither to
understand the situation, nor see the greatness of the stakes at
issue.
In 1720 Father Bobé, priest of the Congregation of Missions, drew up 47
a paper in which he sets forth the claims of France with much
distinctness, beginning with the declaration that “England has usurped
from France nearly everything that she possesses in America,” and
adding that the plenipotentiaries at Utrecht did not know what they
were about when they made such concessions to the enemy; that, among
other blunders, they gave Port Royal to England when it belonged to
France, who should “insist vigorously” on its being given back to her.
He maintains that the voyages of Verrazzano and Ribaut made France
owner of the whole continent, from Florida northward; that England was
an interloper in planting colonies along the Atlantic coast, and will
admit as much if she is honest, since all that country is certainly a
part of New France. In this modest assumption of the point at issue,
he ignores John Cabot and his son Sebastian, who discovered North
America more than twenty-five years before the voyage of Verrazzano,
and more than sixty years before that of Ribaut.
When the English, proceeds Father Bobé, have restored Port Royal to
us, which they are bound to do, though we ceded it by the treaty, a
French governor should be at once set over it, with a commission to
command as far as Cape Cod, which would include Boston. We should also
fortify ourselves, “in a way to stop the English, who have long tried
to seize on French America, of which they know the importance, and of
which,” he observes with much candor, “they would make a better use 48
than the French do.[43]... The Atlantic coast, as far as Florida, was
usurped from the French, to whom it belonged then, and to whom it
belongs now.” England, as he thinks, is bound in honor to give back
these countries to their true owner; and it is also the part of wisdom
to do so, since by grasping at too much, one often loses all. But
France, out of her love of peace, will cede to England the countries
along the Atlantic, from the Kennebec in New France to the Jordan[44]
in Carolina, on condition that England will restore to her all that
she gave up by the Treaty of Utrecht. When this is done, France,
always generous, will consent to accept as boundary a line drawn from
the mouth of the Kennebec, passing thence midway between Schenectady
and Lake Champlain and along the ridge of the Alleghanies to the river
Jordan, the country between this line and the sea to belong to
England, and the rest of the continent to France.
If England does not accept this generous offer, she is to be told that
the King will give to the Compagnie des Indes (Law’s Mississippi
Company) full authority to occupy “all the countries which the English
have usurped from France;” and, pursues Father Bobé, “it is certain 49
that the fear of having to do with so powerful a company will bring
the English to our terms.” The company that was thus to strike the
British heart with terror was the same which all the tonics and
stimulants of the government could not save from predestined ruin.
But, concludes this ingenious writer, whether England accepts our
offers or not, France ought not only to take a high tone (_parler
avec hauteur_), but also to fortify diligently, and make good her
right by force of arms.[45]
Three years later we have another document, this time of an official
character, and still more radical in its demands. It admits that Port
Royal and a part of the Nova Scotian peninsula, under the name of
Acadia, were ceded to England by the treaty, and consents that she
shall keep them, but requires her to restore the part of New France
that she has wrongfully seized,--namely, the whole Atlantic coast from
the Kennebec to Florida; since France never gave England this country,
which is hers by the discovery of Verrazzano in 1524. Here, again, the
voyages of the Cabots, in 1497 and 1498, are completely ignored.
“It will be seen,” pursues this curious document, “that our kings have
always preserved sovereignty over the countries between the thirtieth
and the fiftieth degrees of north latitude. A time will come when 50
they will be in a position to assert their rights, and then it will be
seen that the dominions of a king of France cannot be usurped with
impunity. What we demand now is that the English make immediate
restitution.” No doubt, the paper goes on to say, they will pretend to
have prescriptive rights, because they have settled the country and
built towns and cities in it; but this plea is of no avail, because
all that country is a part of New France, and because England
rightfully owns nothing in America except what we, the French, gave
her by the Treaty of Utrecht, which is merely Port Royal and Acadia.
She is bound in honor to give back all the vast countries she has
usurped; but, continues the paper, “the King loves the English nation
too much, and wishes too much to do her kindness, and is too generous
to exact such a restitution. Therefore, provided that England will
give us back Port Royal, Acadia, and everything else that France gave
her by the Treaty of Utrecht, the King will forego his rights, and
grant to England the whole Atlantic coast from the thirty-second
degree of latitude to the Kennebec, to the extent inland of twenty
French leagues [about fifty miles], on condition that she will
solemnly bind herself never to overstep these limits or encroach in
the least on French ground.”
Thus, through the beneficence of France, England, provided that she
renounced all pretension to the rest of the continent, would become
the rightful owner of an attenuated strip of land reaching southward 51
from the Kennebec along the Atlantic seaboard. The document containing
this magnanimous proposal was preserved in the Château St. Louis at
Quebec till the middle of the eighteenth century, when, the boundary
dispute having reached a crisis, and commissioners of the two powers
having been appointed to settle it, a certified copy of the paper was
sent to France for their instruction.[46]
Father Bobé had advised that France should not trust solely to the
justice of her claims, but should back right with might, and build
forts on the Niagara, the Ohio, the Tennessee, and the Alabama, as
well as at other commanding points, to shut out the English from the
West. Of these positions, Niagara was the most important, for the
possession of it would close the access to the Upper Lakes, and stop
the western tribes on their way to trade at Albany. The Five Nations
and the governor of New York were jealous of the French designs,
which, however, were likely enough to succeed, through the prevailing
apathy and divisions in the British colonies. “If those not
immediately concerned,” writes a member of the New York council, “only
stand gazing on while the wolff is murthering other parts of the
flock, it will come to every one’s turn at last.” The warning was well
founded, but it was not heeded. Again: “It is the policy of the French
to attack one colony at a time, and the others are so besotted as to
sit still.”[47]
For gaining the consent of the Five Nations to the building of a 52
French fort at Niagara, Vaudreuil trusted chiefly to his agent among
the Senecas, the bold, skilful, and indefatigable Joncaire, who was
naturalized among that tribe, the strongest of the confederacy.
Governor Hunter of New York sent Peter Schuyler and Philip Livingston
to counteract his influence. The Five Nations, who, conscious of
declining power, seemed ready at this time to be all things to all
men, declared that they would prevent the French from building at
Niagara, which, as they said, would “shut them up as in a prison.”[48]
Not long before, however, they had sent a deputation to Montreal to
say that the English made objection to Joncaire’s presence among them,
but that they were masters of their land, and hoped that the French
agent would come as often as he pleased; and they begged that the new
King of France would take them under his protection.[49] Accordingly,
Vaudreuil sent them a present, with a message to the effect that they
might plunder such English traders as should come among them.[50]
Yet so jealous were the Iroquois of a French fort at Niagara that they
sent three Seneca chiefs to see what was going on there. The chiefs
found a few Frenchmen in a small blockhouse, or loopholed storehouse,
which they had just built near Lewiston Heights. The three 53
Senecas requested them to demolish it and go away, which the Frenchmen
refused to do; on which the Senecas asked the English envoys, Schuyler
and Livingston, to induce the governor of New York to destroy the
obnoxious building. In short, the Five Nations wavered incessantly
between their two European neighbors, and changed their minds every
day. The skill and perseverance of the French emissaries so far
prevailed at last that the Senecas consented to the building of a fort
at the mouth of the Niagara, where Denonville had built one in 1687;
and thus that important pass was made tolerably secure.
Meanwhile the English of New York, or rather Burnet, their governor,
were not idle. Burnet was on ill terms with his assembly, which
grudged him all help in serving the province whose interests it was
supposed to represent. Burnet’s plan was to build a fortified
trading-house at Oswego, on Lake Ontario, in the belief that the
western Indians, who greatly preferred English goods and English
prices, would pass Niagara and bring their furs to the new post. He
got leave from the Five Nations to execute his plan, bought canoes,
hired men, and built a loopholed house of stone on the site of the
present city of Oswego. As the Assembly would give no money, Burnet
furnished it himself; and though the object was one of the greatest
importance to the province, he was never fully repaid.[51] A small
garrison for the new post was drawn from the four independent companies 54
maintained in the province at the charge of the Crown.
The establishment of Oswego greatly alarmed and incensed the French,
and a council of war at Quebec resolved to send two thousand men
against it; but Vaudreuil’s successor, the Marquis de Beauharnois,
learning that the court was not prepared to provoke a war, contented
himself with sending a summons to the commanding officer to abandon
and demolish the place within a fortnight.[52] To this no attention
was given; and as Burnet had foreseen, Oswego became the great centre
of Indian trade, while Niagara, in spite of its more favorable
position, was comparatively slighted by the western tribes. The chief
danger rose from the obstinate prejudice of the Assembly, which, in
its disputes with the Royal Governor, would give him neither men nor
money to defend the new post.
The Canadian authorities, who saw in Oswego an intrusion on their
domain and a constant injury and menace, could not attack it without
bringing on a war, and therefore tried to persuade the Five Nations to
destroy it,--an attempt which completely failed.[53] They then
established a trading-post at Toronto, in the vain hope of stopping 55
the northern tribes on their way to the more profitable English
market, and they built two armed vessels at Fort Frontenac to control
the navigation of Lake Ontario.
_Marquis Charles de Beauharnois._
From the painting by Tournières, in the Musée de Grenoble.
A HALF CENTURY OF CONFLICT, II., 54.
[Illustration: _Copyright, 1897, by Little, Brown & C^o.
Goupil & C^o. Paris_]
Meanwhile, in another quarter the French made an advance far more
threatening to the English colonies than Oswego was to their own. They
had already built a stone fort at Chambly, which covered Montreal from
any English attack by way of Lake Champlain. As that lake was the
great highway between the rival colonies, the importance of gaining
full mastery of it was evident. It was rumored in Canada that the
English meant to seize and fortify the place called Scalp Point
(_Pointe à la Chevelure_) by the French, and Crown Point by the
English, where the lake suddenly contracts to the proportions of a
river, so that a few cannon would stop the passage.
As early as 1726 the French made an attempt to establish themselves on
the east side of the lake opposite Crown Point, but were deterred by
the opposition of Massachusetts. This eastern shore was, however,
claimed not only by Massachusetts, but by her neighbor, New Hampshire,
with whom she presently fell into a dispute about the ownership, and,
as a writer of the time observes, “while they were quarrelling for the
bone, the French ran away with it.”[54]
At length, in 1731, the French took post on the western side of the
lake, and began to intrench themselves at Crown Point, which was 56
within the bounds claimed by New York; but that province, being then
engrossed, not only by her chronic dispute with her governor, but by a
quarrel with her next neighbor, New Jersey, slighted the danger from
the common enemy, and left the French to work their will. It was
Saint-Luc de la Corne, Lieutenant du Roy at Montreal, who pointed out
the necessity of fortifying this place,[55] in order to anticipate the
English, who, as he imagined, were about to do so,--a danger which was
probably not imminent, since the English colonies, as a whole, could
not and would not unite for such a purpose, while the individual
provinces were too much absorbed in their own internal affairs and
their own jealousies and disputes to make the attempt. La Corne’s
suggestion found favor at court, and the governor of Canada was
ordered to occupy Crown Point. The Sieur de la Fresnière was sent
thither with troops and workmen, and a fort was built, and named Fort
Frédéric. It contained a massive stone tower, mounted with cannon to
command the lake, which is here but a musket-shot wide. Thus was
established an advanced post of France,--a constant menace to New York
and New England, both of which denounced it as an outrageous
encroachment on British territory, but could not unite to rid
themselves of it.[56]
While making this bold push against their neighbors of the South, the 57
French did not forget the West; and towards the middle of the century
they had occupied points controlling all the chief waterways between
Canada and Louisiana. Niagara held the passage from Lake Ontario to
Lake Erie. Detroit closed the entrance to Lake Huron, and
Michilimackinac guarded the point where Lake Huron is joined by Lakes
Michigan and Superior; while the fort called La Baye, at the head of
Green Bay, stopped the way to the Mississippi by Marquette’s old route
of Fox River and the Wisconsin. Another route to the Mississippi was
controlled by a post on the Maumee to watch the carrying-place between
that river and the Wabash, and by another on the Wabash where
Vincennes now stands. La Salle’s route, by way of the Kankakee and the
Illinois, was barred by a fort on the St. Joseph; and even if, in
spite of these obstructions, an enemy should reach the Mississippi by
any of its northern affluents, the cannon of Fort Chartres would
prevent him from descending it.
These various western forts, except Fort Chartres and Fort Niagara,
which were afterwards rebuilt, the one in stone and the other in
earth, were stockades of no strength against cannon. Slight as they
were, their establishment was costly; and as the King, to whom Canada
was a yearly loss, grudged every franc spent upon it, means were
contrived to make them self-supporting. Each of them was a station of
the fur-trade, and the position of most of them had been determined 58
more or less with a view to that traffic. Hence they had no slight
commercial value. In some of them the Crown itself carried on trade
through agents who usually secured a lion’s share of the profits.
Others were farmed out to merchants at a fixed sum. In others, again,
the commanding officer was permitted to trade on condition of
maintaining the post, paying the soldiers, and supporting a
missionary; while in one case, at least, he was subjected to similar
obligations, though not permitted to trade himself, but only to sell
trading licenses to merchants. These methods of keeping up forts and
garrisons were of course open to prodigious abuses, and roused endless
jealousies and rivalries.
France had now occupied the valley of the Mississippi, and joined with
loose and uncertain links her two colonies of Canada and Louisiana.
But the strength of her hold on these regions of unkempt savagery bore
no proportion to the vastness of her claims or the growing power of
the rivals who were soon to contest them.[57]
[43] “De manière qu’on puisse arrêter les Anglois, qui depuis
longtems tachent de s’emparer de l’Amérique françoise, dont
ils conoissent l’importance et dont ils feroient un
meillieur usage que celuy qui les françois en font.”
[44] On the river Jordan, so named by Vasquez de Ayllon, see
“Pioneers of France in the New World,” 11, 39, _note_. It was
probably the broad river of South Carolina.
[45] _Second Mémoire concernant les Limites des Colonies
présenté en 1720 par Bobé, prêtre de la Congrégation de la
Mission_ (Archives Nationales).
[46] _Demandes de la France_, 1723 (Archives des Affaires
Étrangères).
[47] _Colonel Heathcote to Governor Hunter, 8 July, 1715.
Ibid, to Townshend, 12 July, 1715._
[48] _Journal of Schuyler and Livingston, 1720._
[49] _Vaudreuil au Conseil de Marine, 24 Octobre, 1717._
[50] _Vaudreuil et Bégon au Conseil de Marine, 26 Octobre, 1719._
[51] “I am ashamed to confess that he built the fort at his
private expense, and that a balance of above £56 remains due
to his estate to this very day.”--Smith, _History of New York_,
267 (ed. 1814).
[52] _Mémoire de Dupuy, 1728._ Dupuy was intendant of Canada.
The King approved the conduct of Beauharnois in not using
force. _Dépêche du Roy, 14 Mai, 1728._
[53] When urged by the younger Longueuil to drive off
the English from Oswego, the Indians replied, “Drive them
off thyself” (_“Chassez-les toi-même”_). _Longueuil fils au
Ministre, 19 Octobre, 1728._
[54] Mitchell, _Contest in America_, 22.
[55] _La Corne au Ministre, 15 Octobre, 1730._
[56] On the establishment of Crown Point, _Beauharnois et
Hocquart au Roy, 10 Octobre, 1731_; _Beauharnois et Hocquart
au Ministre, 14 Novembre, 1731_.
[57] On the claim of France that all North America, except
the Spanish colonies of Mexico and Florida, belonged to her,
see Appendix A.
CHAPTER XVIII. 59
1744, 1745.
A MAD SCHEME.
WAR OF THE AUSTRIAN SUCCESSION.--THE FRENCH SEIZE CANSEAU
AND ATTACK ANNAPOLIS.--PLAN OF REPRISAL.--WILLIAM
VAUGHAN.--GOVERNOR SHIRLEY: HE ADVISES AN ATTACK ON
LOUISBOURG.--THE ASSEMBLY REFUSES, BUT AT LAST
CONSENTS.--PREPARATION.--WILLIAM PEPPERRELL.--GEORGE
WHITEFIELD.--PARSON MOODY.--THE SOLDIERS.--THE PROVINCIAL
NAVY.--COMMODORE WARREN.--SHIRLEY AS AN AMATEUR SOLDIER.--THE
FLEET SAILS.
The Peace of Utrecht left unsettled the perilous questions of boundary
between the rival powers in North America, and they grew more perilous
every day. Yet the quarrel was not yet quite ripe; and though the
French governor, Vaudreuil, and perhaps also his successor,
Beauharnois, seemed willing to precipitate it, the courts of London
and Versailles still hesitated to appeal to the sword. Now, as before,
it was a European, and not an American, quarrel that was to set the
world on fire. The War of the Austrian Succession broke out in 1744.
When Frederic of Prussia seized Silesia and began that bloody
conflict, it meant that packs of howling savages would again spread
fire and carnage along the New England border.
News of the declaration of war reached Louisbourg some weeks before it 60
reached Boston, and the French military governor, Duquesnel, thought
he saw an opportunity to strike an unexpected blow for the profit of
France and his own great honor.
One of the French inhabitants of Louisbourg has left us a short sketch
of Duquesnel, whom he calls “capricious, of an uncertain temper,
inclined to drink, and when in his cups neither reasonable or
civil.”[58] He adds that the governor had offended nearly every
officer in the garrison, and denounces him as the “chief cause of our
disasters.” When Duquesnel heard of the declaration of war, his first
thought was to strike some blow before the English were warned. The
fishing-station of Canseau was a tempting prize, being a near and an
inconvenient neighbor, at the southern end of the Strait of Canseau,
which separates the Acadian peninsula from the island of Cape Breton,
or Isle Royale, of which Louisbourg was the place of strength. Nothing
was easier than to seize Canseau, which had no defence but a wooden
redoubt built by the fishermen, and occupied by about eighty
Englishmen thinking no danger. Early in May, Duquesnel sent Captain
Duvivier against it, with six hundred, or, as the English say, nine
hundred soldiers and sailors, escorted by two small armed vessels. The
English surrendered, on condition of being sent to Boston, and the 61
miserable hamlet, with its wooden citadel, was burned to the ground.
Thus far successful, the governor addressed himself to the capture of
Annapolis,--which meant the capture of all Acadia. Duvivier was again
appointed to the command. His heart was in the work, for he was a
descendant of La Tour, feudal claimant of Acadia in the preceding
century. Four officers and ninety regular troops were given him,[59]
and from three to four hundred Micmac and Malicite Indians joined him
on the way. The Micmacs, under command, it is said, of their
missionary, Le Loutre, had already tried to surprise the English fort,
but had only succeeded in killing two unarmed stragglers in the
adjacent garden.[60]
Annapolis, from the neglect and indifference of the British ministry,
was still in such a state of dilapidation that its sandy ramparts were
crumbling into the ditches, and the cows of the garrison walked over
them at their pleasure. It was held by about a hundred effective men
under Major Mascarene, a French Protestant whose family had been
driven into exile by the persecutions that followed the revocation of
the Edict of Nantes. Shirley, governor of Massachusetts, sent him a
small reinforcement of militia; but as most of these came without
arms, and as Mascarene had few or none to give them, they proved of 62
doubtful value.
Duvivier and his followers, white and red, appeared before the fort in
August, made their camp behind the ridge of a hill that overlooked it,
and marched towards the rampart; but being met by a discharge of
cannon-shot, they gave up all thoughts of an immediate assault, began
a fusillade under cover of darkness, and kept the garrison on the
alert all night.
Duvivier had looked for help from the Acadians of the neighboring
village, who were French in blood, faith, and inclination. They would
not join him openly, fearing the consequences if his attack should
fail; but they did what they could without committing themselves, and
made a hundred and fifty scaling-ladders for the besiegers. Duvivier
now returned to his first plan of an assault, which, if made with
vigor, could hardly have failed. Before attempting it, he sent
Mascarene a flag of truce to tell him that he hourly expected two
powerful armed ships from Louisbourg, besides a reinforcement of two
hundred and fifty regulars, with cannon, mortars, and other enginery
of war. At the same time he proposed favorable terms of capitulation,
not to take effect till the French war-ships should have appeared.
Mascarene refused all terms, saying that when he saw the French ships,
he would consider what to do, and meanwhile would defend himself as he
could.
The expected ships were the “Ardent” and the “Caribou,” then at
Louisbourg. A French writer says that when Duquesnel directed their 63
captains to Hail for Annapolis and aid in its capture, they refused,
saying that they had no orders from the court.[61] Duvivier protracted
the parley with Mascarene, and waited in vain for the promised succor.
At length the truce was broken off, and the garrison, who had profited
by it to get rest and sleep, greeted the renewal of hostilities with
three cheers.
Now followed three weeks of desultory attacks; but there was no
assault, though Duvivier had boasted that he had the means of making a
successful one. He waited for the ships which did not come, and kept
the Acadians at work in making ladders and fire-arrows. At length,
instead of aid from Louisbourg, two small vessels appeared from
Boston, bringing Mascarene a reinforcement of fifty Indian rangers.
This discouraged the besiegers, and towards the end of September they
suddenly decamped and vanished. “The expedition was a failure,” writes
the _Habitant de Louisbourg_, “though one might have bet
everything on its success, so small was the force that the enemy had
to resist us.”
This writer thinks that the seizure of Canseau and the attack of
Annapolis were sources of dire calamity to the French. “Perhaps,” he
says, “the English would have let us alone if we had not first
insulted them. It was the interest of the people of New England to
live at peace with us, and they would no doubt have done so, if we had
not taken it into our heads to waken them from their security. They 64
expected that both parties would merely stand on the defensive,
without taking part in this cruel war that has set Europe in a blaze.”
Whatever might otherwise have been the disposition of the
“Bastonnais,” or New England people, the attacks on Canseau and
Annapolis alarmed and exasperated them, and engendered in some heated
brains a project of wild audacity. This was no less than the capture
of Louisbourg, reputed the strongest fortress, French or British, in
North America, with the possible exception of Quebec, which owed its
chief strength to nature, and not to art.
Louisbourg was a standing menace to all the northern British colonies.
It was the only French naval station on the continent, and was such a
haunt of privateers that it was called the American Dunkirk. It
commanded the chief entrance of Canada, and threatened to ruin the
fisheries, which were nearly as vital to New England as was the
fur-trade to New France. The French government had spent twenty-five
years in fortifying it, and the cost of its powerful defences--constructed
after the system of Vauban--was reckoned at thirty million livres.
This was the fortress which William Vaughan of Damariscotta advised
Governor Shirley to attack with fifteen hundred raw New England
militia.[62] Vaughan was born at Portsmouth in 1703, and graduated at 65
Harvard College nineteen years later. His father, also a graduate of
Harvard, was for a time lieutenant-governor of New Hampshire. Soon
after leaving college, the younger Vaughan--a youth of restless and
impetuous activity--established a fishing-station on the island of
Matinicus, off the coast of Maine, and afterwards became the owner of
most of the land on both sides of the little river Damariscotta, where
he built a garrison-house, or wooden fort, established a considerable
settlement, and carried on an extensive trade in fish and timber. He
passed for a man of ability and force, but was accused of a headstrong
rashness, a self-confidence that hesitated at nothing, and a
harebrained contempt of every obstacle in his way. Once, having fitted
out a number of small vessels at Portsmouth for his fishing at
Matinicus, he named a time for sailing. It was a gusty and boisterous
March day, the sea was rough, and old sailors told him that such craft
could not carry sail. Vaughan would not listen, but went on board and
ordered his men to follow. One vessel was wrecked at the mouth of the
river; the rest, after severe buffeting, came safe, with their owner,
to Matinicus.
Being interested in the fisheries, Vaughan was doubly hostile to 66
Louisbourg,--their worst enemy. He found a willing listener in the
governor, William Shirley. Shirley was an English barrister who had
come to Massachusetts in 1731 to practise his profession and seek his
fortune. After filling various offices with credit, he was made
governor of the province in 1741, and had discharged his duties with
both tact and talent. He was able, sanguine, and a sincere well-wisher
to the province, though gnawed by an insatiable hunger for
distinction. He thought himself a born strategist, and was possessed
by a propensity for contriving military operations, which finally cost
him dear. Vaughan, who knew something of Louisbourg, told him that in
winter the snow-drifts were often banked so high against the rampart
that it could be mounted readily, if the assailants could but time
their arrival at the right moment. This was not easy, as that rocky
and tempestuous coast was often made inaccessible by fogs and surf;
Shirley therefore preferred a plan of his own contriving. But nothing
could be done without first persuading his Assembly to consent.
On the ninth of January the General Court of Massachusetts--a
convention of grave city merchants and solemn rustics from the country
villages--was astonished by a message from the governor to the effect
that he had a communication to make, so critical that he wished the
whole body to swear secrecy. The request was novel, but being then on
good terms with Shirley, the representatives consented, and took the 67
oath. Then, to their amazement, the governor invited them to undertake
forthwith the reduction of Louisbourg. The idea of an attack on that
redoubtable fortress was not new. Since the autumn, proposals had been
heard to petition the British ministry to make the attempt, under a
promise that the colonies would give their best aid. But that
Massachusetts should venture it alone, or with such doubtful help as
her neighbors might give, at her own charge and risk, though already
insolvent, without the approval or consent of the ministry, and
without experienced officers or trained soldiers, was a startling
suggestion to the sober-minded legislators of the General Court. They
listened, however, with respect to the governor’s reasons, and
appointed a committee of the two houses to consider them. The
committee deliberated for several days, and then made a report adverse
to the plan, as was also the vote of the Court.
Meanwhile, in spite of the oath, the secret had escaped. It is said
that a country member, more pious than discreet, prayed so loud and
fervently, at his lodgings, for light to guide him on the momentous
question, that his words were overheard, and the mystery of the closed
doors was revealed. The news flew through the town, and soon spread
through all the province.
After his defeat in the Assembly, Shirley returned, vexed and
disappointed, to his house in Roxbury. A few days later, James Gibson,
a Boston merchant, says that he saw him “walking slowly down King 68
Street, with his head bowed down, as if in a deep study.” “He entered
my counting-room,” pursues the merchant, “and abruptly said, ‘Gibson,
do you feel like giving up the expedition to Louisbourg?’” Gibson
replied that he wished the House would reconsider their vote. “You are
the very man I want!” exclaimed the governor.[63] They then drew up a
petition for reconsideration, which Gibson signed, promising to get
also the signatures of merchants, not only of Boston, but of Salem,
Marblehead, and other towns along the coast. In this he was completely
successful, as all New England merchants looked on Louisbourg as an
arch-enemy.
The petition was presented, and the question came again before the
Assembly. There had been much intercourse between Boston and
Louisbourg, which had largely depended on New England for
provisions.[64] The captured militiamen of Canseau, who, after some
delay, had been sent to Boston, according to the terms of surrender,
had used their opportunities to the utmost, and could give Shirley
much information concerning the fortress. It was reported that the
garrison was mutinous, and that provisions were fallen short, so that
the place could not hold out without supplies from France. These,
however, could be cut off only by blockading the harbor with a
stronger naval force than all the colonies together could supply. 69
The Assembly had before reached the reasonable conclusion that the
capture of Louisbourg was beyond the strength of Massachusetts, and
that the only course was to ask the help of the mother-country.[65]
The reports of mutiny, it was urged, could not be depended on; raw
militia in the open field were no match for disciplined troops behind
ramparts; the expense would be enormous, and the credit of the
province, already sunk low, would collapse under it; we should fail,
and instead of sympathy, get nothing but ridicule. Such were the
arguments of the opposition, to which there was little to answer,
except that if Massachusetts waited for help from England, Louisbourg
would be reinforced and the golden opportunity lost. The impetuous and
irrepressible Vaughan put forth all his energy; the plan was carried
by a single vote. And even this result was said to be due to the
accident of a member in opposition falling and breaking a leg as he
was hastening to the House.
The die was cast, and now doubt and hesitation vanished. All alike set
themselves to push on the work. Shirley wrote to all the colonies, as
far south as Pennsylvania, to ask for co-operation. All excused
themselves except Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island, and
the whole burden fell on the four New England colonies. These, and
Massachusetts above all, blazed with pious zeal; for as the enterprise
was directed against Roman Catholics, it was supposed in a peculiar 70
manner to commend itself to Heaven. There were prayers without ceasing
in churches and families, and all was ardor, energy, and confidence;
while the other colonies looked on with distrust, dashed with
derision. When Benjamin Franklin, in Philadelphia, heard what was
afoot, he wrote to his brother in Boston, “Fortified towns are hard
nuts to crack, and your teeth are not accustomed to it; but some seem
to think that forts are as easy taken as snuff.”[66] It has been said
of Franklin that while he represented some of the New England
qualities, he had no part in that enthusiasm of which our own time saw
a crowning example when the cannon opened at Fort Sumter, and which
pushes to its end without reckoning chances, counting costs, or
heeding the scoffs of ill-wishers.
The prevailing hope and faith were, it is true, born largely of
ignorance, aided by the contagious zeal of those who first broached
the project; for as usual in such cases, a few individuals supplied
the initiate force of the enterprise. Vaughan the indefatigable rode
express to Portsmouth with a letter from Shirley to Benning Wentworth,
governor of New Hampshire. That pompous and self-important personage
admired the Massachusetts governor, who far surpassed him in talents
and acquirements, and who at the same time knew how to soothe his
vanity. Wentworth was ready to do his part, but his province had no 71
money, and the King had ordered him to permit the issue of no more
paper currency. The same prohibition had been laid upon Shirley; but
he, with sagacious forecast, had persuaded his masters to relent so
far as to permit the issue of £50,000 in what were called bills of
credit to meet any pressing exigency of war. He told this to
Wentworth, and succeeded in convincing him that his province might
stretch her credit like Massachusetts, in case of similar military
need. New Hampshire was thus enabled to raise a regiment of five
hundred men out of her scanty population, with the condition that a
hundred and fifty of them should be paid and fed by Massachusetts.[67]
Shirley was less fortunate in Rhode Island. The governor of that
little colony called Massachusetts “our avowed enemy, always trying to
defame us.”[68] There was a grudge between the neighbors, due partly
to notorious ill-treatment by the Massachusetts Puritans of Roger
Williams, founder of Rhode Island, and partly to one of those boundary
disputes which often produced ill-blood among the colonies. The
representatives of Rhode Island, forgetting past differences, voted to
raise a hundred and fifty men for the expedition, till, learning that
the project was neither ordered nor approved by the Home Government, 72
they prudently reconsidered their action. They voted, however, that
the colony sloop “Tartar,” carrying fourteen cannon and twelve
swivels, should be equipped and manned for the service, and that the
governor should be instructed to find and commission a captain and a
lieutenant to command her.[69]
Connecticut promised five hundred and sixteen men and officers, on
condition that Roger Wolcott, their commander, should have the second
rank in the expedition. Shirley accordingly commissioned him as
major-general. As Massachusetts was to supply above three thousand
men, or more than three quarters of the whole force, she had a natural
right to name a commander-in-chief.
It was not easy to choose one. The colony had been at peace for twenty
years, and except some grizzled Indian fighters of the last war, and
some survivors of the Carthagena expedition, nobody had seen service.
Few knew well what a fortress was, and nobody knew how to attack one.
Courage, energy, good sense, and popularity were the best qualities to
be hoped for in the leader. Popularity was indispensable, for the
soldiers were all to be volunteers, and they would not enlist under a
commander whom they did not like. Shirley’s choice was William
Pepperrell, a merchant of Kittery. Knowing that Benning Wentworth
thought himself the man for the place, he made an effort to placate
him, and wrote that he would gladly have given him the chief command, 73
but for his gouty legs. Wentworth took fire at the suggestion, forgot
his gout, and declared himself ready to serve his country and assume
the burden of command. The position was awkward, and Shirley was
forced to reply, “On communicating your offer to two or three
gentlemen in whose judgment I most confide, I found them clearly of
opinion that any alteration of the present command would be attended
with great risk, both with respect to our Assembly and the soldiers
being entirely disgusted.”[70]
The painter Smibert has left us a portrait of Pepperrell,--a good
bourgeois face, not without dignity, though with no suggestion of the
soldier. His spacious house at Kittery Point still stands, sound and
firm, though curtailed in some of its proportions. Not far distant is
another noted relic of colonial times, the not less spacious mansion
built by the disappointed Wentworth at Little Harbor. I write these
lines at a window of this curious old house, and before me spreads the
scene familiar to Pepperrell from childhood. Here the river Piscataqua
widens to join the sea, holding in its gaping mouth the large island
of Newcastle, with attendant groups of islets and island rocks,
battered with the rack of ages, studded with dwarf savins, or half
clad with patches of whortleberry bushes, sumach, and the shining
wax-myrtle, green in summer, red with the touch of October. The flood 74
tide pours strong and full around them, only to ebb away and lay bare
a desolation of rocks and stones buried in a shock of brown drenched
seaweed, broad tracts of glistening mud, sand-banks black with
mussel-beds, and half-submerged meadows of eel-grass, with myriads of
minute shell-fish clinging to its long lank tresses. Beyond all these
lies the main, or northern channel, more than deep enough, even when
the tide is out, to float a line-of-battle-ship. On its farther bank
stands the old house of the Pepperrells, wearing even now an air of
dingy respectability. Looking through its small, quaint window-panes,
one could see across the water the rude dwellings of fishermen along
the shore of Newcastle, and the neglected earthwork called Fort
William and Mary, that feebly guarded the river’s mouth. In front, the
Piscataqua, curving southward, widened to meet the Atlantic between
rocky headlands and foaming reefs, and in dim distance the Isles of
Shoals seemed floating on the pale gray sea.
Behind the Pepperrell house was a garden, probably more useful than
ornamental, and at the foot of it were the owner’s wharves, with
storehouses for salt-fish, naval stores, and imported goods for the
country trade.
Pepperrell was the son of a Welshman[71] who migrated in early life 75
to the Isles of Shoals, and thence to Kittery, where, by trade,
ship-building, and the fisheries, he made a fortune, most of which he
left to his son William. The young Pepperrell learned what little was
taught at the village school, supplemented by a private tutor, whose
instructions, however, did not perfect him in English grammar. In the
eyes of his self-made father, education was valuable only so far as it
could make a successful trader; and on this point he had reason to be
satisfied, as his son passed for many years as the chief merchant in
New England. He dealt in ships, timber, naval stores, fish, and
miscellaneous goods brought from England; and he also greatly
prospered by successful land purchases, becoming owner of the greater
part of the growing towns of Saco and Scarborough. When scarcely
twenty-one, he was made justice of the peace, on which he ordered from
London what his biographer calls a law library, consisting of a law
dictionary, Danvers’ “Abridgment of the Common Law,” the “Complete
Solicitor,” and several other books. In law as in war, his best
qualities were good sense and good-will. About the time when he was
made a justice, he was commissioned captain of militia, then major,
then lieutenant-colonel, and at last colonel, commanding all the
militia of Maine. The town of Kittery chose him to represent her in
the General Court, Maine being then a part of Massachusetts. Finally,
he was made a member of the Governor’s Council,--a post which he held
for thirty-two years, during eighteen of which he was president of 76
the board.
These civil dignities served him as educators better than tutor or
village school; for they brought him into close contact with the chief
men of the province; and in the Massachusetts of that time, so
different from our own, the best education and breeding were found in
the official class. At once a provincial magnate and the great man of
a small rustic village, his manners are said to have answered to both
positions,--certainly they were such as to make him popular. But
whatever he became as a man, he learned nothing to fit him to command
an army and lay siege to Louisbourg. Perhaps he felt this, and
thought, with the governor of Rhode Island, that “the attempt to
reduce that prodigiously strong town was too much for New England,
which had not one officer of experience, nor even an engineer.”[72]
Moreover, he was unwilling to leave his wife, children, and business.
He was of a religious turn of mind, and partial to the clergy, who, on
their part, held him in high favor. One of them, the famous preacher,
George Whitefield, was a guest at his house when he heard that Shirley
had appointed him to command the expedition against Louisbourg.
Whitefield had been the leading spirit in the recent religious
fermentation called the Great Awakening, which, though it produced
bitter quarrels among the ministers, besides other undesirable results, 77
was imagined by many to make for righteousness. So thought the Rev.
Thomas Prince, who mourned over the subsiding delirium of his flock as
a sign of backsliding. “The heavenly shower was over,” he sadly
exclaims; “from fighting the devil they must turn to fighting the
French.” Pepperrell, always inclined to the clergy, and now in great
perplexity and doubt, asked his guest Whitefield whether or not he had
better accept the command. Whitefield gave him cold comfort, told him
that the enterprise was not very promising, and that if he undertook
it, he must do so “with a single eye,” prepared for obloquy if he
failed, and envy if he succeeded.[73]
Henry Sherburn, commissary of the New Hampshire regiment, begged
Whitefield to furnish a motto for the flag. The preacher, who, zealot
as he was, seemed unwilling to mix himself with so madcap a business,
hesitated at first, but at length consented, and suggested the words,
_Nil desperandum Christo duce_, which, being adopted, gave the
enterprise the air of a crusade. It had, in fact, something of the
character of one. The cause was imagined to be the cause of Heaven,
crowned with celestial benediction. It had the fervent support of the
ministers, not only by prayers and sermons, but, in one case, by
counsels wholly temporal. A certain pastor, much esteemed for
benevolence, proposed to Pepperrell, who had at last accepted the
command, a plan, unknown to Vauban, for confounding the devices of 78
the enemy. He advised that two trustworthy persons should cautiously
walk together along the front of the French ramparts under cover of
night, one of them carrying a mallet, with which he was to hammer the
ground at short intervals. The French sentinels, it seems to have been
supposed, on hearing this mysterious thumping, would be so bewildered
as to give no alarm. While one of the two partners was thus employed,
the other was to lay his ear to the ground, which, as the adviser
thought, would return a hollow sound if the artful foe had dug a mine
under it; and whenever such secret danger was detected, a mark was to
be set on the spot, to warn off the soldiers.[74]
Equally zealous, after another fashion, was the Rev. Samuel Moody,
popularly known as Father Moody, or Parson Moody, minister of York and
senior chaplain of the expedition. Though about seventy years old, he
was amazingly tough and sturdy. He still lives in the traditions of
York as the spiritual despot of the settlement and the uncompromising
guardian of its manners and doctrine, predominating over it like a
rough little village pope. The comparison would have kindled his
burning wrath, for he abhorred the Holy Father as an embodied
Antichrist. Many are the stories told of him by the descendants of
those who lived under his rod, and sometimes felt its weight; for he
was known to have corrected offending parishioners with his cane.[75] 79
When some one of his flock, nettled by his strictures from the pulpit,
walked in dudgeon towards the church door, Moody would shout after
him, “Come back, you graceless sinner, come back!” or if any ventured
to the alehouse of a Saturday night, the strenuous pastor would go in
after them, collar them, drag them out, and send them home with
rousing admonition.[76] Few dared gainsay him, by reason both of his
irritable temper and of the thick-skinned insensibility that encased
him like armor of proof. And while his pachydermatous nature made him
invulnerable as a rhinoceros, he had at the same time a rough and
ready humor that supplied keen weapons for the warfare of words and
made him a formidable antagonist. This commended him to the rude
borderers, who also relished the sulphurous theology of their
spiritual dictator, just as they liked the raw and fiery liquors that
would have scorched more susceptible stomachs. What they did not like
was the pitiless length of his prayers, which sometimes kept them
afoot above two hours shivering in the polar cold of the unheated
meeting-house, and which were followed by sermons of equal endurance;
for the old man’s lungs were of brass, and his nerves of hammered
iron. Some of the sufferers ventured to remonstrate; but this only
exasperated him, till one parishioner, more worldly wise than the rest, 80
accompanied his modest petition for mercy with the gift of a barrel of
cider, after which the parson’s ministrations were perceptibly less
exhausting than before. He had an irrepressible conscience and a
highly aggressive sense of duty, which made him an intolerable meddler
in the affairs of other people, and which, joined to an underlying
kindness of heart, made him so indiscreet in his charities that his
wife and children were often driven to vain protest against the
excesses of his almsgiving. The old Puritan fanaticism was rampant in
him; and when he sailed for Louisbourg, he took with him an axe,
intended, as he said, to hew down the altars of Antichrist and
demolish his idols.[77]
Shirley’s choice of a commander was perhaps the best that could have
been made; for Pepperrell joined to an unusual popularity as little
military incompetency as anybody else who could be had. Popularity, we
have seen, was indispensable, and even company officers were appointed
with an eye to it. Many of these were well-known men in rustic
neighborhoods, who had raised companies in the hope of being
commissioned to command them. Others were militia officers recruiting
under orders of the governor. Thus, John Storer, major in the Maine
militia, raised in a single day, it is said, a company of sixty-one, 81
the eldest being sixty years old, and the youngest sixteen.[78] They
formed about a quarter of the fencible population of the town of
Wells, one of the most exposed places on the border. Volunteers
offered themselves readily everywhere; though the pay was meagre,
especially in Maine and Massachusetts, where in the new provincial
currency it was twenty-five shillings a month,--then equal to fourteen
shillings sterling, or less than sixpence a day,[79] the soldier
furnishing his own clothing and bringing his own gun. A full third of
the Massachusetts contingent, or more than a thousand men, are
reported to have come from the hardy population of Maine, whose entire
fighting force, as shown by the muster-rolls, was then but 2,855.[80]
Perhaps there was not one officer among them whose experience of war
extended beyond a drill on muster day and the sham fight that closed
the performance, when it generally happened that the rustic warriors
were treated with rum at the charge of their captain, to put them in
good humor, and so induce them to obey the word of command.
As the three provinces contributing soldiers recognized no common
authority nearer than the King, Pepperrell received three several
commissions as lieutenant-general,--one from the governor of 82
Massachusetts, and the others from the governors of Connecticut and
New Hampshire; while Wolcott, commander of the Connecticut forces, was
commissioned as major-general by both the governor of his own province
and that of Massachusetts. When the levies were complete, it was found
that Massachusetts had contributed about 3,300 men, Connecticut 516,
and New Hampshire 304 in her own pay, besides 150 paid by her
wealthier neighbor.[81] Rhode Island had lost faith and disbanded her
150 men; but afterwards raised them again, though too late to take
part in the siege.
Each of the four New England colonies had a little navy of its own,
consisting of from one to three or four small armed vessels; and as
privateering--which was sometimes a euphemism for piracy where
Frenchmen and Spaniards were concerned--was a favorite occupation, it
was possible to extemporize an additional force in case of need. For a
naval commander, Shirley chose Captain Edward Tyng, who had signalized
himself in the past summer by capturing a French privateer of greater
strength than his own. Shirley authorized him to buy for the province
the best ship he could find, equip her for fighting, and take command
of her. Tyng soon found a brig to his mind, on the stocks nearly ready
for launching. She was rapidly fitted for her new destination, 83
converted into a frigate, mounted with 24 guns, and named the
“Massachusetts.” The rest of the naval force consisted of the ship
“Cæsar,” of 20 guns; a vessel called the “Shirley,” commanded by
Captain Rous, and also carrying 20 guns; another, of the kind called a
“snow,” carrying 16 guns; one sloop of 12 guns, and two of 8 guns
each; the “Boston Packet,” of 16 guns; two sloops from Connecticut of
16 guns each; a privateer hired in Rhode Island, of 20 guns; the
government sloop “Tartar,” of the same colony, carrying 14 carriage
guns and 12 swivels; and, finally, the sloop of 14 guns which formed
the navy of New Hampshire.[82]
It was said, with apparent reason, that one or two heavy French
ships-of-war--and a number of such was expected in the spring--would
outmatch the whole colonial squadron, and, after mastering it, would
hold all the transports at mercy; so that the troops on shore, having
no means of return and no hope of succor, would be forced to surrender
or starve. The danger was real and serious, and Shirley felt the
necessity of help from a few British ships-of-war. Commodore Peter
Warren was then with a small squadron at Antigua. Shirley sent an
express boat to him with a letter stating the situation and asking his
aid. Warren, who had married an American woman and who owned large
tracts of land on the Mohawk, was known to be a warm friend to the 84
provinces. It is clear that he would gladly have complied with
Shirley’s request; but when he laid the question before a council of
officers, they were of one mind that without orders from the Admiralty
he would not be justified in supporting an attempt made without the
approval of the King.[83] He therefore saw no choice but to decline.
Shirley, fearing that his refusal would be too discouraging, kept it
secret from all but Pepperrell and General Wolcott, or, as others say,
Brigadier Waldo. He had written to the Duke of Newcastle in the
preceding autumn that Acadia and the fisheries were in great danger,
and that ships-of-war were needed for their protection. On this, the
duke had written to Warren, ordering him to sail for Boston and
concert measures with Shirley “for the annoyance of the enemy, and his
Majesty’s service in North America.”[84] Newcastle’s letter reached
Warren only two or three days after he had sent back his refusal of
Shirley’s request. Thinking himself now sufficiently authorized to
give the desired aid, he made all sail for Boston with his three
ships, the “Superbe,” “Mermaid,” and “Launceston.” On the way he met a
schooner from Boston, and learned from its officers that the
expedition had already sailed; on which, detaining the master as a
pilot, he changed his course and made directly for Canseau,--the place
of rendezvous of the expedition,--and at the same time sent orders by 85
the schooner that any king’s ships that might arrive at Boston should
immediately join him.
Within seven weeks after Shirley issued his proclamation for
volunteers, the preparations were all made, and the unique armament
was afloat. Transports, such as they were, could be had in abundance;
for the harbors of Salem and Marblehead were full of fishing-vessels
thrown out of employment by the war. These were hired and insured by
the province for the security of the owners. There was a great dearth
of cannon. The few that could be had were too light, the heaviest
being of twenty-two-pound calibre. New York lent ten eighteen-pounders
to the expedition. But the adventurers looked to the French for their
chief supply. A detached work near Louisbourg, called the Grand, or
Royal, Battery, was known to be armed with thirty heavy pieces; and
these it was proposed to capture and turn against the town,--which, as
Hutchinson remarks, was “like selling the skin of the bear before
catching him.”
It was clear that the expedition must run for luck against risks of
all kinds. Those whose hopes were highest, based them on a belief in
the special and direct interposition of Providence; others were
sanguine through ignorance and provincial self-conceit. As soon as the
troops were embarked, Shirley wrote to the ministers of what was going
on, telling them that, accidents apart, four thousand New England men
would land on Cape Breton in April, and that, even should they fail to 86
capture Louisbourg, he would answer for it that they would lay the
town in ruins, retake Canseau, do other good service to his Majesty,
and then come safe home.[85] On receiving this communication, the
government resolved to aid the enterprise if there should yet be time,
and accordingly ordered several ships-of-war to sail for Louisbourg.
The sarcastic Dr. Douglas, then living at Boston, writes that the
expedition had a lawyer for contriver, a merchant for general, and
farmers, fishermen, and mechanics for soldiers. In fact, it had
something of the character of broad farce, to which Shirley himself,
with all his ability and general good sense, was a chief contributor.
He wrote to the Duke of Newcastle that though the officers had no
experience and the men no discipline, he would take care to provide
against these defects,--meaning that he would give exact directions
how to take Louisbourg. Accordingly, he drew up copious instructions
to that effect. These seem to have undergone a process of evolution,
for several distinct drafts of them are preserved.[86] The complete 87
and final one is among the Pepperrell Papers, copied entire in the
neat, commercial hand of the general himself.[87] It seems to assume
that Providence would work a continued miracle, and on every occasion
supply the expedition with weather precisely suited to its wants. “It
is thought,” says this singular document, “that Louisbourg may be
surprised if they [the French] have no advice of your coming. To
effect it you must time your arrival about nine of the clock in the
evening, taking care that the fleet be far enough in the offing to
prevent their being seen from the town in the daytime.” He then goes
on to prescribe how the troops are to land, after dark, at a place
called Flat Point Cove, in four divisions, three of which are to march
to the back of certain hills a mile and a half west of the town, where
two of the three “are to halt and keep a profound silence;” the third
continuing its march “under cover of the said hills,” till it comes
opposite the Grand Battery, which it will attack at a concerted
signal; while one of the two divisions behind the hills assaults the
west gate, and the other moves up to support the attack.
While this is going on, the soldiers of the fourth division are to 88
march with all speed along the shore till they come to a certain part
of the town wall, which they are to scale; then proceed “as fast as
can be” to the citadel and “secure the windows of the governor’s
apartments.” After this follow page after page of complicated details
which must have stricken the general with stupefaction. The rocks,
surf, fogs, and gales of that tempestuous coast are all left out of
the account; and so, too, is the nature of the country, which consists
of deep marshes, rocky hills, and hollows choked with evergreen
thickets. Yet a series of complex and mutually dependent operations,
involving long marches through this rugged and pathless region, was to
be accomplished, in the darkness of one April night, by raw soldiers
who knew nothing of the country. This rare specimen of amateur
soldiering is redeemed in some measure by a postscript in which the
governor sets free the hands of the general, thus: “Notwithstanding
the instructions you have received from me, I must leave you to act,
upon unforeseen emergencies, according to your best discretion.”
On the twenty-fourth of March, the fleet, consisting of about ninety
transports, escorted by the provincial cruisers, sailed from Nantasket
Roads, followed by prayers and benedictions, and also by toasts drunk
with cheers, in bumpers of rum punch.[88]
[58] _Lettre d’un Habitant de Louisbourg contenant une Relation
exacte et circonstanciée de la Prise de l’Isle Royale par les
Anglois._
[59] _Lettre d’un Habitant de Louisbourg._
[60] _Mascarene to the Besiegers, 3 July, 1744._ Duquesnel had
written to all the missionaries “d’engager les sauvages à faire
quelque coup important sur le fort” (Annapolis). _Duquesnel à
Beauharnois, 1 Juin, 1744._
[61] _Lettre d’un Habitant de Louisbourg._
[62] Smollett says that the proposal came from Robert Auchmuty,
judge of admiralty in Massachusetts. Hutchinson, Douglas,
Belknap, and other well-informed writers ascribe the scheme
to Vaughan, while Pepperrell says that it originated with
Colonel John Bradstreet. In the Public Record Office there
is a letter from Bradstreet, written in 1753, but without
address, in which he declares that he not only planned the
siege, but “was the Principal Person in conducting
it,”--assertions which may pass for what they are worth,
Bradstreet being much given to self-assertion.
[63] Gibson, _Journal of the Siege of Louisbourg_.
[64] _Lettre d’un Habitant de Louisbourg._
[65] _Report of Council, 12 January, 1745._
[66] Sparks, _Works of Franklin_, vii. 16.
[67] Correspondence of Shirley and Wentworth, in _Belknap
Papers. Provincial Papers of New Hampshire_, v.
[68] _Governor Wanton to the Agent of Rhode Island,
20 December, 1745_, in _Colony Records of Rhode Island_, v.
[69] _Colony Records of Rhode Island_, v. (_February, 1745_).
[70] _Shirley to Wentworth, 16 February, 1745._
[71] “A native of Ravistock Parish, in Wales.” Parsons,
_Life of Pepperrell_. Mrs. Adelaide Cilley Waldron, a
descendant of Pepperrell, assures me, however, that his
father, the emigrant, came, not from Wales, but from
Devonshire.
[72] _Governor Wanton to the Agent of Rhode Island
in London, 20 December, 1745._
[73] Parsons, _Life of Pepperrell_, 51.
[74] Belknap, _Hist. New Hampshire_, ii. 208.
[75] Tradition told me at York by Mr. N. Marshall.
[76] Lecture of Ralph Waldo Emerson, quoted by Cabot, _Memoir
of Emerson_, i. 10.
[77] Moody found sympathizers in his iconoclastic zeal.
Deacon John Gray of Biddeford wrote to Pepperrell: “Oh that
I could be with you and dear Parson Moody in that church [at
Louisbourg] to destroy the images there set up, and hear the
true Gospel of our Lord and Saviour there preached!”
[78] Bourne, _Hist. of Wells and Kennebunk_, 371.
[79] Gibson, _Journal; Records of Rhode Island_, v. Governor
Wanton of that province says, with complacency, that the pay
of Rhode Island was twice that of Massachusetts.
[80] Parsons, _Life of Pepperrell_, 54.
[81] Of the Massachusetts contingent, three hundred men were
raised and maintained at the charge of the merchant James
Gibson.
[82] The list is given by Williamson, ii. 227.
[83] _Memoirs of the Principal Transactions of the Last War_, 44.
[84] _Ibid._, 46. _Letters of Shirley_ (Public Record Office).
[85] _Shirley to Newcastle, 24 March, 1745._ The ministry was
not wholly unprepared for this announcement, as Shirley had
before reported to it the vote of his Assembly consenting to
the expedition. _Shirley to Newcastle, 1 February,
1745._
[86] The first draft of Shirley’s instructions for taking
Louisbourg is in the large manuscript volume entitled _Siege
of Louisbourg_, in the library of the Massachusetts
Historical Society. The document is called _Mem^o for the
attaching of Louisbourg this Spring by Surprise_. After
giving minute instructions for every movement, it goes on to
say that, as the surprise may possibly fail, it will be
necessary to send two small mortars and twelve cannon
carrying nine-pound balls, “so as to bombard them and
endeavour to make Breaches in their walls and then to Storm
them.” Shirley was soon to discover the absurdity of trying
to breach the walls of Louisbourg with nine-pounders.
[87] It is printed in the first volume of the _Collections of
the Massachusetts Historical Society_. Shirley was so well
pleased with it that he sent it to the Duke of Newcastle
enclosed in his letter of 1 February, 1745 (Public Record
Office).
[88] The following letter from John Payne of Boston to Colonel
prevailing religious feeling, illustrates the ardor of the 89
New England people towards their rash adventure:--
BOSTON, Apr. 24, 1745.
Sir,--I hope this will find you at Louisbourg with a Bowl
of Punch a Pipe and a P--k of C--ds in your hand and
whatever else you desire (I had forgot to mention a Pretty
French Madammoselle). We are very Impatiently expecting to
hear from you, your Friend Luke has lost several Beaver
Hatts already concerning the Expedition, he is so very
zealous about it that he has turned Poor Boutier out of
his House for saying he believed you would not Take the
Place.----Damn his Blood says Luke, let him be an
Englishman or a Frenchman and not pretend to be an
Englishman when he is a Frenchman in his Heart. If
drinking to your success would Take Cape Briton, you must
be in Possession of it now, for it’s a standing Toast. I
think the least thing you Military Gent^n can do is to
send us some arrack when you take ye Place to celebrate
your Victory and not to force us to do it in Rum Punch or
Luke’s bad wine or sour cyder.
To Collonell Robert Hale
at (or near) Louisbourg.
I am indebted for a copy of this curious letter to Robert
Hale Bancroft, Esq., a descendant of Colonel Hale.
CHAPTER XIX. 90
1745.
LOUISBOURG BESIEGED.
SETH POMEROY.--THE VOYAGE.--CANSEAU.--UNEXPECTED SUCCORS.--DELAYS.--
LOUISBOURG.--THE LANDING.--THE GRAND BATTERY TAKEN.--FRENCH
CANNON TURNED ON THE TOWN.--WEAKNESS OF DUCHAMBON.--SUFFERINGS
OF THE BESIEGERS: THEIR HARDIHOOD; THEIR IRREGULAR PROCEEDINGS.--
JOSEPH SHERBURN.--AMATEUR GUNNERY.--CAMP FROLICS.--SECTARIAN
ZEAL.--PERPLEXITIES OF PEPPERRELL.
On board one of the transports was Seth Pomeroy, gunsmith at
Northampton, and now major of Willard’s Massachusetts regiment. He had
a turn for soldiering, and fought, ten years later, in the battle of
Lake George. Again, twenty years later still, when Northampton was
astir with rumors of war from Boston, he borrowed a neighbor’s horse,
rode a hundred miles, reached Cambridge on the morning of the battle
of Bunker Hill, left his borrowed horse out of the way of harm, walked
over Charlestown Neck, then swept by the fire of the ships-of-war, and
reached the scene of action as the British were forming for the
attack. When Israel Putnam, his comrade in the last war, saw from the
rebel breastwork the old man striding, gun in hand, up the hill, he
shouted, “By God, Pomeroy, you here! A cannon-shot would waken you out 91
of your grave!”
But Pomeroy, with other landsmen, crowded in the small and malodorous
fishing-vessels that were made to serve as transports, was now in the
gripe of the most unheroic of maladies. “A terrible northeast storm”
had fallen upon them, and, he says, “we lay rolling in the seas, with
our sails furled, among prodigious waves.” “Sick, day and night,”
writes the miserable gunsmith, “so bad that I have not words to set it
forth.”[89] The gale increased and the fleet was scattered, there
being, as a Massachusetts private soldier writes in his diary, “a very
fierse Storm of Snow, som Rain and very Dangerous weather to be so
nigh ye Shore as we was; but we escaped the Rocks, and that was
all.”[90]
On Friday, April 5, Pomeroy’s vessel entered the harbor of Canseau,
about fifty miles from Louisbourg. Here was the English
fishing-hamlet, the seizure of which by the French had first provoked
the expedition. The place now quietly changed hands again. Sixty-eight
of the transports lay here at anchor, and the rest came dropping in
from day to day, sorely buffeted, but all safe. On Sunday there was a
great concourse to hear Parson Moody preach an open-air sermon from
the text, “Thy people shall be willing in the day of thy power,” 92
concerning which occasion the soldier diarist observes,--“Several
sorts of Busnesses was Going on, Som a Exercising, Som a Hearing
Preaching.” The attention of Parson Moody’s listeners was, in fact,
distracted by shouts of command and the awkward drill of squads of
homespun soldiers on the adjacent pasture.
Captain Ammi Cutter, with two companies, was ordered to remain at
Canseau and defend it from farther vicissitudes; to which end a
blockhouse was also built, and mounted with eight small cannon. Some
of the armed vessels had been set to cruise off Louisbourg, which they
did to good purpose, and presently brought in six French prizes, with
supplies for the fortress. On the other hand, they brought the ominous
news that Louisbourg and the adjoining bay were so blocked with ice
that landing was impossible. This was a serious misfortune, involving
long delay, and perhaps ruin to the expedition, as the expected
ships-of-war might arrive meanwhile from France. Indeed, they had
already begun to appear. On Thursday, the eighteenth, heavy
cannonading was heard far out at sea, and again on Friday “the
cannon,” says Pomeroy, “fired at a great rate till about 2 of the
clock.” It was the provincial cruisers attacking a French frigate, the
“Renommée,” of thirty-six guns. As their united force was too much for
her, she kept up a running fight, outsailed them, and escaped after a
chase of more than thirty hours, being, as Pomeroy quaintly observes, 93
“a smart ship.” She carried despatches to the governor of Louisbourg,
and being unable to deliver them, sailed back for France to report
what she had seen.
On Monday, the twenty-second, a clear, cold, windy day, a large ship,
under British colors, sailed into the harbor, and proved to be the
frigate “Eltham,” escort to the annual mast fleet from New England. On
orders from Commander Warren she had left her charge in waiting, and
sailed for Canseau to join the expedition, bringing the unexpected and
welcome news that Warren himself would soon follow. On the next day,
to the delight of all, he appeared in the ship “Superbe,” of sixty
guns, accompanied by the “Launceston” and the “Mermaid,” of forty guns
each. Here was force enough to oppose any ships likely to come to the
aid of Louisbourg; and Warren, after communicating with Pepperrell,
sailed to blockade the port, along with the provincial cruisers,
which, by order of Shirley, were placed under his command.
The transports lay at Canseau nearly three weeks, waiting for the ice
to break up. The time was passed in drilling the raw soldiers and
forming them into divisions of four and six hundred each, according to
the directions of Shirley. At length, on Friday, the twenty-seventh,
they heard that Gabarus Bay was free from ice, and on the morning of
the twenty-ninth, with the first fair wind, they sailed out of Canseau
harbor, expecting to reach Louisbourg at nine in the evening, as 94
prescribed in the governor’s receipt for taking Louisbourg “while the
enemy were asleep.”[91] But a lull in the wind defeated this plan; and
after sailing all day, they found themselves becalmed towards night.
It was not till the next morning that they could see the town,--no
very imposing spectacle, for the buildings, with a few exceptions,
were small, and the massive ramparts that belted them round rose to no
conspicuous height.
[Illustration: SIEGE OF LOUISBOURG
1745.
References:
_A. Landing of New England Men._
_B. Camp of Burr’s Regiment._
_C. ” ” Pepperrell’s ” ”_
_D. ” ” Willard’s ” ”_
_E. ” ” Moulton’s ” ”_
_F. ” ” Moore’s ” ”_
_G. First or, Green Hill Battery._
_H. Second Battery._
_I. Third Battery._
_J. Fourth, or Advanced Battery._
_K. Fifth, or Titcomb’s Battery._
_L. Lighthouse Battery._
_M. Island Battery (French)._
_N. Grand, or Royal Battery (French)._
_O. Burying Ground._
_P. King’s Bastion, or Citadel._
_Q. Barachois._
_R. West Gate._
_S. South Gate._
_T. Maurepas Gate._]
Louisbourg stood on a tongue of land which lay between its harbor and
the sea, and the end of which was prolonged eastward by reefs and
shoals that partly barred the entrance to the port, leaving a
navigable passage not half a mile wide. This passage was commanded by
a powerful, battery called the “Island Battery,” being upon a small
rocky island at the west side of the channel, and was also secured by
another detached work called the “Grand,” or “Royal Battery,” which
stood on the shore of the harbor, opposite the entrance, and more than
a mile from the town. Thus a hostile squadron trying to force its way
in would receive a flank fire from the one battery, and a front fire
from the other. The strongest line of defence of the fortress was
drawn across the base of the tongue of land from the harbor on one
side to the sea on the other,--a distance of about twelve hundred
yards. The ditch was eighty feet wide and from thirty to thirty-six
feet deep; and the rampart, of earth faced with masonry, was about
sixty feet thick. The glacis sloped down to a vast marsh, which formed 95
one of the best defences of the place. The fortress, without counting
its outworks, had embrasures for one hundred and forty-eight cannon;
but the number in position was much less, and is variously stated.
Pomeroy says that at the end of the siege a little above ninety were
found, with “a great number of swivels;” others say seventy-six.[92]
In the Grand and Island batteries there were sixty heavy pieces more.
Against this formidable armament the assailants had brought
thirty-four cannon and mortars, of much inferior weight, to be used in
bombarding the fortress, should they chance to fail of carrying it by
surprise, “while the enemy were asleep.”[93] Apparently they
distrusted the efficacy of their siege-train, though it was far
stronger than Shirley had at first thought sufficient; for they
brought with them good store of balls of forty-two pounds, to be used
in French cannon of that calibre which they expected to capture, their
own largest pieces being but twenty-two-pounders.
According to the _Habitant de Louisbourg_, the garrison consisted
of five hundred and sixty regular troops, of whom several companies
were Swiss, besides some thirteen or fourteen hundred militia,
inhabitants partly of the town, and partly of neighboring settlements.[94] 96
The regulars were in bad condition. About the preceding Christmas they
had broken into mutiny, being discontented with their rations and
exasperated with getting no extra pay for work on the fortifications.
The affair was so serious that though order was restored, some of the
officers lost all confidence in the soldiers; and this distrust proved
most unfortunate during the siege. The governor, Chevalier Duchambon,
successor of Duquesnel, who had died in the autumn, was not a man to
grapple with a crisis, being deficient in decision of character, if
not in capacity.
He expected an attack. “We were informed of the preparations from the
first,” says the _Habitant de Louisbourg_. Some Indians, who had
been to Boston, carried to Canada the news of what was going on there;
but it was not believed, and excited no alarm.[95] It was not so at
Louisbourg, where, says the French writer just quoted, “we lost
precious moments in useless deliberations and resolutions no sooner
made than broken. Nothing to the purpose was done, so that we were as
much taken by surprise as if the enemy had pounced upon us unawares.”
It was about the twenty-fifth of March[96] when the garrison first saw 97
the provincial cruisers hovering off the mouth of the harbor. They
continued to do so at intervals till daybreak of the thirtieth of
April, when the whole fleet of transports appeared standing towards
Flat Point, which projects into Gabarus Bay, three miles west of the
town.[97] On this, Duchambon sent Morpain, captain of a privateer, or
“corsair,” to oppose the landing. He had with him eighty men, and was
to be joined by forty more, already on the watch near the supposed
point of disembarkation.[98] At the same time cannon were fired and
alarm bells rung in Louisbourg, to call in the militia of the
neighborhood.
Pepperrell managed the critical work of landing with creditable skill.
The rocks and the surf were more dangerous than the enemy. Several
boats, filled with men, rowed towards Flat Point; but on a signal from
the flagship “Shirley,” rowed back again, Morpain flattering himself
that his appearance had frightened them off. Being joined by several
other boats, the united party, a hundred men in all, pulled for
another landing-place called Fresh-water Cove, or Anse de la
Cormorandière, two miles farther up Gabarus Bay. Morpain and his party
ran to meet them; but the boats were first in the race, and as soon 98
as the New England men got ashore, they rushed upon the French, killed
six of them, captured as many more, including an officer named
Boularderie, and put the rest to flight, with the loss, on their own
side, of two men slightly wounded.[99] Further resistance to the
landing was impossible, for a swarm of boats pushed against the rough
and stony beach, the men dashing through the surf, till before night
about two thousand were on shore.[100] The rest, or about two thousand
more, landed at their leisure on the next day.
On the second of May Vaughan led four hundred men to the hills near
the town, and saluted it with three cheers,--somewhat to the
discomposure of the French, though they described the unwelcome
visitors as a disorderly crowd. Vaughan’s next proceeding pleased them
still less. He marched behind the hills, in rear of the Grand Battery,
to the northeast arm of the harbor, where there were extensive
magazines of naval stores. These his men set on fire, and the pitch,
tar, and other combustibles made a prodigious smoke. He was returning,
in the morning, with a small party of followers behind the hills, when
coming opposite the Grand Battery, and observing it from the ridge, he
saw neither flag on the flagstaff, nor smoke from the barrack 99
chimneys. One of his party was a Cape Cod Indian. Vaughan bribed him
with a flask of brandy which he had in his pocket,--though, as the
clerical historian takes pains to assure us, he never used it
himself,--and the Indian, pretending to be drunk, or, as some say,
mad, staggered towards the battery to reconnoitre.[101] All was quiet.
He clambered in at an embrasure, and found the place empty. The rest
of the party followed, and one of them, William Tufts, of Medford, a
boy of eighteen, climbed the flagstaff, holding in his teeth his red
coat, which he made fast at the top, as a substitute for the British
flag,--a proceeding that drew upon him a volley of unsuccessful
cannon-shot from the town batteries.[102]
Vaughan then sent this hasty note to Pepperrell: “May it please your
Honour to be informed that by the grace of God and the courage of 13
men, I entered the Royal Battery about 9 o’clock, and am waiting for a
reinforcement and a flag.” Soon after, four boats, filled with men,
approached from the town to reoccupy the battery,--no doubt in order
to save the munitions and stores, and complete the destruction of the
cannon. Vaughan and his thirteen men, standing on the open beach,
under the fire of the town and the Island Battery, plied the boats with
musketry, and kept them from landing, till Lieutenant-Colonel 100
Bradstreet appeared with a reinforcement, on which the French pulled
back to Louisbourg.[103]
The English supposed that the French in the battery, when the clouds
of smoke drifted over them from the burning storehouses, thought that
they were to be attacked in force, and abandoned their post in a
panic. This was not the case. “A detachment of the enemy,” writes the
_Habitant de Louisbourg_, “advanced to the neighborhood of the
Royal Battery.” This was Vaughan’s four hundred on their way to burn
the storehouses. “At once we were all seized with fright,” pursues
this candid writer, “and on the instant it was proposed to abandon
this magnificent battery, which would have been our best defence, if
one had known how to use it. Various councils were held, in a
tumultuous way. It would be hard to tell the reasons for such a
strange proceeding. Not one shot had yet been fired at the battery,
which the enemy could not take, except by making regular approaches,
as if against the town itself, and by besieging it, so to speak, in
form. Some persons remonstrated, but in vain; and so a battery of
thirty cannon, which had cost the King immense sums, was abandoned
before it was attacked.”
Duchambon says that soon after the English landed, he got a letter 101
from Thierry, the captain in command of the Royal Battery, advising
that the cannon should be spiked and the works blown up. It was then,
according to the governor, that the council was called, and a
unanimous vote passed to follow Thierry’s advice, on the ground that
the defences of the battery were in bad condition, and that the four
hundred men posted there could not stand against three or four
thousand.[104] The engineer, Verrier, opposed the blowing up of the
works, and they were therefore left untouched. Thierry and his
garrison came off in boats, after spiking the cannon in a hasty way,
without stopping to knock off the trunnions or burn the carriages.
They threw their loose gunpowder into the well, but left behind a good
number of cannon cartridges, two hundred and eighty large bombshells,
and other ordinance stores, invaluable both to the enemy and to
themselves. Brigadier Waldo was sent to occupy the battery with his
regiment, and Major Seth Pomeroy, the gunsmith, with twenty
soldier-mechanics, was set at drilling out the spiked touch-holes of
the cannon. There were twenty-eight forty-two-pounders, and two
eighteen-pounders.[105] Several were ready for use the next morning, 102
and immediately opened on the town,--which, writes a soldier in his
diary, “damaged the houses and made the women cry.” “The enemy,” says
the _Habitant de Louisbourg_, “saluted us with our own cannon,
and made a terrific fire, smashing everything within range.”
The English occupation of the Grand Battery may be called the decisive
event of the siege. There seems no doubt that the French could have
averted the disaster long enough to make it of little help to the
invaders. The water-front of the battery was impregnable. The rear
defences consisted of a loopholed wall of masonry, with a ditch ten
feet deep and twelve feet wide, and also a covered way and glacis,
which General Wolcott describes as unfinished. In this he mistook.
They were not unfinished, but had been partly demolished, with a view
to reconstruction. The rear wall was flanked by two towers, which,
says Duchambon, were demolished; but General Wolcott declares that
swivels were still mounted on them,[106] and he adds that “two hundred
men might hold the battery against five thousand without cannon.” The
English landed their cannon near Flat Point; and before they could be
turned against the Grand Battery, they must be dragged four miles over
hills and rocks, through spongy marshes and jungles of matted 103
evergreens. This would have required a week or more. The alternative
was an escalade, in which the undisciplined assailants would no doubt
have met a bloody rebuff. Thus this Grand Battery, which, says
Wolcott, “is in fact a fort,” might at least have been held long
enough to save the munitions and stores, and effectually disable the
cannon, which supplied the English with the only artillery they had,
competent to the work before them. The hasty abandonment of this
important post was not Duchambon’s only blunder, but it was the worst
of them all.
On the night after their landing, the New England men slept in the
woods, wet or dry, with or without blankets, as the case might be, and
in the morning set themselves to encamping with as much order as they
were capable of. A brook ran down from the hills and entered the sea
two miles or more from the town. The ground on each side, though
rough, was high and dry, and here most of the regiments made their
quarters,--Willard’s, Moulton’s, and Moore’s on the east side, and
Burr’s and Pepperrell’s on the west. Those on the east, in some cases,
saw fit to extend themselves towards Louisbourg as far as the edge of
the intervening marsh, but were soon forced back to a safer position
by the cannon-balls of the fortress, which came bowling amongst them.
This marsh was that green, flat sponge of mud and moss that stretched
from this point to the glacis of Louisbourg.
There was great want of tents, for material to make them was scarce 104
in New England. Old sails were often used instead, being stretched
over poles,--perhaps after the fashion of a Sioux teepee. When these
could not be had, the men built huts of sods, with roofs of
spruce-boughs overlapping like a thatch; for at that early season,
bark would not peel from the trees. The landing of guns, munitions,
and stores was a formidable task, consuming many days and destroying
many boats, as happened again when Amherst landed his cannon at this
same place. Large flat boats, brought from Boston, were used for the
purpose, and the loads were carried ashore on the heads of the men,
wading through ice-cold surf to the waist, after which, having no
change of clothing, they slept on the ground through the chill and
foggy nights, reckless of future rheumatisms.[107]
A worse task was before them. The cannon were to be dragged over the
marsh to Green Hill, a spur of the line of rough heights that half
encircled the town and harbor. Here the first battery was to be
planted; and from this point other guns were to be dragged onward to
more advanced stations,--a distance in all of more than two miles,
thought by the French to be impassable. So, in fact, it seemed; for
at the first attempt, the wheels of the cannon sank to the hubs in mud 105
and moss, then the carriage, and finally the piece itself slowly
disappeared. Lieutenant-Colonel Meserve, of the New Hampshire
regiment, a ship-builder by trade, presently overcame the difficulty.
By his direction sledges of timber were made, sixteen feet long and
five feet wide; a cannon was placed on each of these, and it was then
dragged over the marsh by a team of two hundred men, harnessed with
rope-traces and breast-straps, and wading to the knees. Horses or oxen
would have foundered in the mire. The way had often to be changed, as
the mossy surface was soon churned into a hopeless slough along the
line of march. The work could be done only at night or in thick fog,
the men being completely exposed to the cannon of the town. Thirteen
years after, when General Amherst besieged Louisbourg again, he
dragged his cannon to the same hill over the same marsh; but having at
his command, instead of four thousand militiamen, eleven thousand
British regulars, with all appliances and means to boot, he made a
road, with prodigious labor, through the mire, and protected it from
the French shot by an epaulement, or lateral earthwork.[108]
Pepperrell writes in ardent words of the cheerfulness of his men
“under almost incredible hardships.” Shoes and clothing failed, till
many were in tatters and many barefooted;[109] yet they toiled on with
unconquerable spirit, and within four days had planted a battery of 106
six guns on Green Hill, which was about a mile from the King’s Bastion
of Louisbourg. In another week they had dragged four twenty-two-pound
cannon and ten coehorns--gravely called “cowhorns” by the bucolic
Pomeroy--six or seven hundred yards farther, and planted them within
easy range of the citadel. Two of the cannon burst, and were replaced
by four more and a large mortar, which burst in its turn, and Shirley
was begged to send another. Meanwhile a battery, chiefly of coehorns,
had been planted on a hillock four hundred and forty yards from the
West Gate, where it greatly annoyed the French; and on the next night
an advanced battery was placed just opposite the same gate, and
scarcely two hundred and fifty yards from it. This West Gate, the
principal gate of Louisbourg, opened upon the tract of high, firm
ground that lay on the left of the besiegers, between the marsh and
the harbor, an arm of which here extended westward beyond the town,
into what was called the Barachois, a salt pond formed by a projecting
spit of sand. On the side of the Barachois farthest from the town was
a hillock on which stood the house of an _habitant_ named
Martissan. Here, on the twentieth of May, a fifth battery was planted,
consisting of two of the French forty-two-pounders taken in the Grand
Battery, to which three others were afterwards added. Each of these
heavy pieces was dragged to its destination by a team of three hundred
men over rough and rocky ground swept by the French artillery. This 107
fifth battery, called the Northwest, or Titcomb’s, proved most
destructive to the fortress.[110]
All these operations were accomplished with the utmost ardor and
energy, but with a scorn of rule and precedent that astonished and
bewildered the French. The raw New England men went their own way,
laughed at trenches and zigzags, and persisted in trusting their lives
to the night and the fog. Several writers say that the English
engineer Bastide tried to teach them discretion; but this could hardly
be, for Bastide, whose station was Annapolis, did not reach Louisbourg
till the fifth of June, when the batteries were finished, and the
siege was nearly ended. A recent French writer makes the curious
assertion that it was one of the ministers, or army chaplains, who
took upon him the vain task of instruction in the art of war on this
occasion.[111]
This ignorant and self-satisfied recklessness might have cost the
besiegers dear if the French, instead of being perplexed and startled
at the novelty of their proceedings, had taken advantage of it; but
Duchambon and some of his officers, remembering the mutiny of the past
winter, feared to make sorties, lest the soldiers might desert or take
part with the enemy. The danger of this appears to have been small. 108
Warren speaks with wonder in his letters of the rarity of desertions,
of which there appear to have been but three during the siege,--one
being that of a half-idiot, from whom no information could be got. A
bolder commander would not have stood idle while his own cannon were
planted by the enemy to batter down his walls; and whatever the risks
of a sortie, the risks of not making one were greater. “Both troops
and militia eagerly demanded it, and I believe it would have
succeeded,” writes the intendant, Bigot.[112] The attempt was actually
made more than once in a half-hearted way,--notably on the eighth of
May, when the French attacked the most advanced battery, and were
repulsed, with little loss on either side.
The _Habitant de Louisbourg_ says: “The enemy did not attack us
with any regularity, and made no intrenchments to cover themselves.”
This last is not exact. Not being wholly demented, they made
intrenchments, such as they were,--at least, at the advanced
battery;[113] as they would otherwise have been swept out of
existence, being under the concentred fire of several French
batteries, two of which were within the range of a musket-shot.
[Illustration: LOUISBOURG.
1745
From a Plan of R. GRIDLEY
Reference:
_A. Dauphin’s Bastion and West Gate._
_B. King’s Bastion, or Citadel._
_C. Queen’s Bastion._
_D. Princess’s Bastion and South Gate._
_E. Maurepas Bastion and East Gate._
_1111. Glacis._
_222. Ditch._]
The scarcity of good gunners was one of the chief difficulties of the
besiegers. As privateering, and piracy also, against Frenchmen and
Spaniards was a favorite pursuit in New England, there were men in 109
Pepperrell’s army who knew how to handle cannon; but their number was
insufficient, and the general sent a note to Warren, begging that he
would lend him a few experienced gunners to teach their trade to the
raw hands at the batteries. Three or four were sent, and they found
apt pupils.
Pepperrell placed the advanced battery in charge of Captain
Joseph[114] Sherburn, telling him to enlist as many gunners as he
could. On the next day Sherburn reported that he had found six, one of
whom seems to have been sent by Warren. With these and a number of raw
men he repaired to his perilous station, where “I found,” he says, “a
very poor intrenchment. Our best shelter from the French fire, which
was very hot, was hogsheads filled with earth.” He and his men made
the West Gate their chief mark; but before they could get a fair sight
of it, they were forced to shoot down the fish-flakes, or stages for
drying cod, that obstructed the view. Some of their party were soon
killed,--Captain Pierce by a cannon-ball, Thomas Ash by a “bumb,” and
others by musketry. In the night they improved their defences, and
mounted on them three more guns, one of eighteen-pound calibre, and
the others of forty-two,--French pieces dragged from the Grand
Battery, a mile and three quarters round the Barachois.
The cannon could be loaded only under a constant fire of musketry, 110
which the enemy briskly returned. The French practice was excellent. A
soldier who in bravado mounted the rampart and stood there for a
moment was shot dead with five bullets. The men on both sides called
to each other in scraps of bad French or broken English; while the
French drank ironical healths to the New England men, and gave them
bantering invitations to breakfast.
Sherburn continues his diary. “Sunday morning. Began our fire with as
much fury as possible, and the French returned it as warmly from the
Citidale [citadel], West Gate, and North East Battery with Cannon,
Mortars, and continual showers of musket balls; but by 11 o’clock we
had beat them all from their guns.” He goes on to say that at noon his
men were forced to stop firing from want of powder, that he went with
his gunners to get some, and that while they were gone, somebody, said
to be Mr. Vaughan, brought a supply, on which the men loaded the
forty-two pounders in a bungling way, and fired them. One was
dismounted, and the other burst; a barrel and a half-barrel of powder
blew up, killed two men, and injured two more. Again: “Wednesday. Hot
fire on both sides, till the French were beat from all their guns. May
29th went to 2 Gun [Titcomb’s] Battery to give the gunners some
directions; then returned to my own station, where I spent the rest of
the day with pleasure, seeing our Shott Tumble down their walls and
Flagg Staff.”
The following is the intendant Bigot’s account of the effect of the 111
New England fire: “The enemy established their batteries to such
effect that they soon destroyed the greater part of the town, broke
the right flank of the King’s Bastion, ruined the Dauphin Battery with
its spur, and made a breach at the Porte Dauphine [West Gate], the
neighboring wall, and the sort of redan adjacent.”[115] Duchambon says
in addition that the cannon of the right flank of the King’s Bastion
could not be served, by reason of the continual fire of the enemy,
which broke the embrasures to pieces; that when he had them repaired,
they were broken to pieces (_démantibulés_) again,--and nobody
could keep his ground behind the wall of the quay, which was shot
through and through and completely riddled.[116] The town was ploughed
with cannon-balls, the streets were raked from end to end, nearly all
the houses damaged, and the people driven for refuge into the stifling
casemates. The results were creditable to novices in gunnery.
The repeated accidents from the bursting of cannon were no doubt
largely due to unskilful loading and the practice of double-shotting,
to which the over-zealous artillerists are said to have often
resorted.[117]
It is said, in proof of the orderly conduct of the men, that not one 112
of them was punished during all the siege; but this shows the mild and
conciliating character of the general quite as much as any peculiar
merit of the soldiers. The state of things in and about the camp was
compared by the caustic Dr. Douglas to “a Cambridge Commencement,”
which academic festival was then attended by much rough frolic and
boisterous horseplay among the disorderly crowds, white and black,
bond and free, who swarmed among the booths on Cambridge Common. The
careful and scrupulous Belknap, who knew many who took part in the
siege, says: “Those who were on the spot have frequently, in my
hearing, laughed at the recital of their own irregularities, and
expressed their admiration when they reflected on the almost
miraculous preservation of the army from destruction.” While the
cannon bellowed in the front, frolic and confusion reigned at the
camp, where the men raced, wrestled, pitched quoits, fired at
marks,--though there was no ammunition to spare,--and ran after the
French cannon-balls, which were carried to the batteries, to be
returned to those who sent them. Nor were calmer recreations wanting.
“Some of our men went a fishing, about 2 miles off,” writes Lieutenant
Benjamin Cleaves in his diary: “caught 6 Troutts.” And, on the same
day, “Our men went to catch Lobsters: caught 30.” In view of this
truant disposition, it is not surprising that the besiegers now and 113
then lost their scalps at the hands of prowling Indians who infested
the neighborhood. Yet through all these gambols ran an undertow of
enthusiasm, born in brains still fevered from the “Great Awakening.”
The New England soldier, a growth of sectarian hotbeds, fancied that
he was doing the work of God. The army was Israel, and the French were
Canaanitish idolaters. Red-hot Calvinism, acting through generations,
had modified the transplanted Englishman; and the descendant of the
Puritans was never so well pleased as when teaching their duty to
other people, whether by pen, voice, or bombshells. The ragged
artillerymen, battering the walls of papistical Louisbourg, flattered
themselves with the notion that they were champions of gospel truth.
Barefoot and tattered, they toiled on with indomitable pluck and
cheerfulness, doing the work which oxen could not do, with no comfort
but their daily dram of New England rum, as they plodded through the
marsh and over rocks, dragging the ponderous guns through fog and
darkness. Their spirit could not save them from the effects of
excessive fatigue and exposure. They were ravaged with diarrhœa and
fever, till fifteen hundred men were at one time on the sick-list, and
at another, Pepperrell reported that of the four thousand only about
twenty-one hundred were fit for duty.[118] Nearly all at last
recovered, for the weather was unusually good; yet the number fit for 114
service was absurdly small. Pepperrell begged for reinforcements, but
got none till the siege was ended.
It was not his nature to rule with a stiff hand,--and this, perhaps,
was fortunate. Order and discipline, the sinews of an army, were out
of the question; and it remained to do as well as might be without
them, keep men and officers in good-humor, and avoid all that could
dash their ardor. For this, at least, the merchant-general was well
fitted. His popularity had helped to raise the army, and perhaps it
helped now to make it efficient. His position was no bed of roses.
Worries, small and great, pursued him without end. He made friends of
his officers, kept a bountiful table at his tent, and labored to
soothe their disputes and jealousies, and satisfy their complaints. So
generous were his contributions to the common cause that according to
a British officer who speaks highly of his services, he gave to it, in
one form or another, £10,000 out of his own pocket.[119]
His letter-books reveal a swarm of petty annoyances, which may have
tried his strength and patience as much as more serious cares. The
soldiers complained that they were left without clothing, shoes, or
rum; and when he implored the Committee of War to send them, Osborne,
the chairman, replied with explanations why it could not be done.
Letters came from wives and fathers entreating that husbands and sons 115
who had gone to the war should be sent back. At the end of the siege a
captain “humble begs leave for to go home,” because he lives in a very
dangerous country, and his wife and children are “in a declining way”
without him. Then two entire companies raised on the frontier offered
the same petition on similar grounds. Sometimes Pepperrell was beset
with prayers for favors and promotion; sometimes with complaints from
one corps or another that an undue share of work had been imposed on
it. One Morris, of Cambridge, writes a moving petition that his slave
“Cuffee,” who had joined the army, should be restored to him, his
lawful master. One John Alford sends the general a number of copies of
the Rev. Mr. Prentice’s late sermon, for distribution, assuring him
that “it will please your whole army of volunteers, as he has shown
them the way to gain by their gallantry the hearts and affections of
the Ladys.” The end of the siege brought countless letters of
congratulation, which, whether lay or clerical, never failed to remind
him, in set phrases, that he was but an instrument in the hands of
Providence.
One of his most persistent correspondents was his son-in-law,
Nathaniel Sparhawk, a thrifty merchant, with a constant eye to
business, who generally began his long-winded epistles with a bulletin
concerning the health of “Mother Pepperrell,” and rarely ended them
without charging his father-in-law with some commission, such as buying 116
for him the cargo of a French prize, if he could get it cheap. Or
thus: “If you would procure for me a hogshead of the best Clarett, and
a hogshead of the best white wine, at a reasonable rate, it would be
very grateful to me.” After pestering him with a few other
commissions, he tells him that “Andrew and Bettsy [children of
Pepperrell] send their proper compliments,” and signs himself, with
the starched flourish of provincial breeding, “With all possible
Respect, Honoured Sir, Your Obedient Son and Servant.”[120] Pepperrell
was much annoyed by the conduct of the masters of the transports, of
whom he wrote: “The unaccountable irregular behaviour of these fellows
is the greatest fatigue I meet with;” but it may be doubted whether
his son-in-law did not prove an equally efficient persecutor.
[89] Diary of Major Seth Pomeroy. I owe the copy before
me to the kindness of his descendant, Theodore Pomeroy, Esq.
[90] Diary of a Massachusetts soldier in Captain Richardson’s
company (Papers of Dr. Belknap).
[91] The words quoted are used by General Wolcott in his
journal.
[92] Brown, _Cape Breton_, 183. Parsons, _Life of
Pepperrell_, 103. An anonymous letter, dated Louisbourg, 4
July, 1745, says that eighty-five cannon and six mortars
have been found in the town.
[93] _Memoirs of the Principal Transactions of the Last
War_, 40.
[94] “On fit venir cinq ou six cens Miliciens aux Habitans
des environs; ce que, avec ceux de la Ville, pouvoit former
treize à quatorze cens hommes.”--_Lettre d’un Habitant de
Louisbourg_. This writer says that three or four hundred
more might have been had from Niganiche and its neighborhood,
if they had been summoned in time. The number of militia
just after the siege is set by English reports at 1,310.
Parsons, 103.
[95] _Shirley to Newcastle, 17 June, 1745_, citing letters
captured on board a ship from Quebec.
[96] 14 March, old style.
[97] Gabarus Bay, sometimes called “Chapeau Rouge” Bay, is a
spacious outer harbor, immediately adjoining Louisbourg.
[98] _Bigot au Ministre, 1 Août, 1745._
[99] _Pepperrell to Shirley, 12 May, 1745._ _Shirley
to Newcastle, 28 October, 1745._ _Journal of the Siege_,
attested by Pepperrell and four other chief officers
(London, 1746).
[100] Bigot says six thousand, or two thousand more than the
whole New England force, which was constantly overestimated
by the French.
[101] Belknap, ii.
[102] John Langdon Sibley, in _N. E. Hist. and Gen.
Register_, xxv. 377. The _Boston Gazette_ of 3 June, 1771,
has a notice of Tufts’ recent death, with an exaggerated
account of his exploit, and an appeal for aid to his
destitute family.
[103] Vaughan’s party seems to have consisted in all of
sixteen men, three of whom took no part in this affair.
[104] _Duchambon au Ministre, 2 Septembre, 1745._ This is
the governor’s official report. “Four hundred men,” is
perhaps a copyist’s error, the actual number in the battery
being not above two hundred.
[105] _Waldo to Shirley, 12 May, 1745._ Some of the French
writers say twenty-eight thirty-six pounders, while all the
English call them forty-twos,--which they must have been, as
the forty-two-pound shot brought from Boston fitted them.
Mr. Theodore Roosevelt draws my attention to the fact that
cannon were differently rated in the French and English
navies of the seventeenth century, and that a French
thirty-six carried a ball as large as an English forty-two,
or even a little larger.
[106] _Journal of Major-General Wolcott._
[107] The author of _The Importance and Advantage of Cape
Breton_ says: “When the hardships they were exposed to come to
be considered, the behaviour of these men will hardly gain
credit. They went ashore wet, had no [dry] clothes to cover
them, were exposed in this condition to cold, foggy nights,
and yet cheerfully underwent these difficulties for the sake
of executing a project they had voluntarily undertaken.”
[108] See “Montcalm and Wolfe,” chap. xix.
[109] _Pepperrell to Newcastle, 28 June, 1745._
[110] _Journal of the Siege_, appended to Shirley’s report
to Newcastle; _Duchambon au Ministre, 2 Septembre, 1745_;
_Lettre d’un Habitant_; Pomeroy, etc.
[111] Ferland, _Cours d’Histoire du Canada_, ii. 477.
“L’ennemi ne nous attaquoit point dans les formes, et ne
pratiquoit point aucun retranchement pour se couvrir.”--
_Habitant de Louisbourg._
[112] _Bigot au Ministre, 1 Août, 1745._
[113] _Diary of Joseph Sherburn, Captain at the Advanced
Battery._
[114] He signs his name Jos. Sherburn; but in a list of
the officers of the New Hampshire Regiment it appears in
full as Joseph.
[115] _Bigot au Ministre, 1 Août, 1745._
[116] _Duchambon au Ministre, 2 Septembre, 1745._
[117] “Another forty-two pound gun burst at the Grand
Battery. All the guns are in danger of going the same way,
by double-shotting them, unless under better regulation than
at present.”--_Waldo to Pepperrell, 20 May, 1745._
Waldo had written four days before: “Captain Hale, of my
regiment, is dangerously hurt by the bursting of another
gun. He was our mainstay for gunnery since Captain Rhodes’s
misfortune” (also caused by the bursting of a cannon).
_Waldo to Pepperrell, 16 May, 1745._
[118] _Pepperrell to Warren, 28 May, 1745._
[119] _Letter from an Officer of Marines_ appended to
_A particular Account of the Taking of Cape Breton_
(London, 1745).
[120] _Sparhawk to Pepperrell,--June, 1745._ This is
but one of many letters from Sparhawk.
CHAPTER XX. 117
1745.
LOUISBOURG TAKEN.
A RASH RESOLUTION.--THE ISLAND BATTERY.--THE VOLUNTEERS.--THE
ATTACK.--THE REPULSE.--CAPTURE OF THE “VIGILANT.”--A
SORTIE.--SKIRMISHES.--DESPONDENCY OF THE FRENCH.--ENGLISH CAMP
THREATENED.--PEPPERRELL AND WARREN.--WARREN’S PLAN.--PREPARATION
FOR A GENERAL ATTACK.--FLAG OF TRUCE.--CAPITULATION.--STATE OF THE
FORTRESS.--PARSON MOODY.--SOLDIERS DISSATISFIED.--DISORDERS.--ARMY
AND NAVY.--REJOICINGS.--ENGLAND REPAYS PROVINCIAL OUTLAYS.
Frequent councils of war were held in solemn form at headquarters. On
the seventh of May a summons to surrender was sent to Duchambon, who
replied that he would answer with his cannon. Two days after, we find
in the record of the council the following startling entry: “Advised
unanimously that the Town of Louisbourg be attacked by storm this
Night.” Vaughan was a member of the board, and perhaps his impetuous
rashness had turned the heads of his colleagues. To storm the fortress
at that time would have been a desperate attempt for the best-trained
and best-led troops. There was as yet no breach in the walls, nor the
beginning of one; and the French were so confident in the strength of
their fortifications that they boasted that women alone could defend 118
them. Nine in ten of the men had no bayonets,[121] many had no shoes,
and it is said that the scaling-ladders they had brought from Boston
were ten feet too short.[122] Perhaps it was unfortunate for the
French that the army was more prudent than its leaders; and another
council being called on the same day, it was “Advised, That, inasmuch
as there appears a great Dissatisfaction in many of the officers and
Soldiers at the designed attack of the Town by Storm this Night, the
said Attack be deferred for the present.”[123]
Another plan was adopted, hardly less critical, though it found favor
with the army. This was the assault of the Island Battery, which
closed the entrance of the harbor to the British squadron, and kept it
open to ships from France. Nobody knew precisely how to find the two
landing-places of this formidable work, which were narrow gaps between
rocks lashed with almost constant surf; but Vaughan would see no
difficulties, and wrote to Pepperrell that if he would give him the
command and leave him to manage the attack in his own way, he would
engage to send the French flag to headquarters within forty-eight
hours.[124] On the next day he seems to have thought the command
assured to him, and writes from the Grand Battery that the carpenters
are at work mending whale-boats and making paddles, asking at the same 119
time for plenty of pistols and one hundred hand-grenades, with men who
know how to use them.[125] The weather proved bad, and the attempt was
deferred. This happened several times, till Warren grew impatient, and
offered to support the attack with two hundred sailors.
At length, on the twenty-third, the volunteers for the perilous
enterprise mustered at the Grand Battery, whence the boats were to set
out. Brigadier Waldo, who still commanded there, saw them with concern
and anxiety, as they came dropping in, in small squads, without
officers, noisy, disorderly, and, in some cases, more or less drunk.
“I doubt,” he told the general, “whether straggling fellows, three,
four, or seven out of a company, ought to go on such a service.”[126]
A bright moon and northern lights again put off the attack. The
volunteers remained at the Grand Battery, waiting for better luck.
“They seem to be impatient for action,” writes Waldo. “If there were a
more regular appearance, it would give me greater sattysfaction.”[127]
On the twenty-sixth their wish for action was fully gratified. The
night was still and dark, and the boats put out from the battery
towards twelve o’clock, with about three hundred men on board.[128]
These were to be joined by a hundred or a hundred and fifty more from 120
Gorham’s regiment, then stationed at Lighthouse Point. The commander
was not Vaughan, but one Brooks,--the choice of the men themselves, as
were also his subordinates.[129] They moved slowly, the boats being
propelled, not by oars, but by paddles, which, if skilfully used,
would make no noise. The wind presently rose; and when they found a
landing-place, the surf was lashing the rocks with even more than
usual fury. There was room for but three boats at once between the
breakers on each hand. They pushed in, and the men scrambled ashore
with what speed they might.
The Island Battery was a strong work, walled in on all sides,
garrisoned by a hundred and eighty men, and armed with thirty cannon,
seven swivels, and two mortars.[130] It was now a little after
midnight. Captain d’Aillebout, the commandant, was on the watch,
pacing the battery platform; but he seems to have seen nothing unusual
till about a hundred and fifty men had got on shore, when they had
the folly to announce their presence by three cheers. Then, in the 121
words of General Wolcott, the battery “blazed with cannon, swivels,
and small-arms.” The crowd of boats, dimly visible through the
darkness, as they lay just off the landing, waiting their turn to go
in, were at once the target for volleys of grape-shot, langrage-shot,
and musket-balls, of which the men on shore had also their share.
These succeeded, however, in planting twelve scaling-ladders against
the wall.[131] It is said that some of them climbed into the place,
and the improbable story is told that Brooks, their commander, was
hauling down the French flag when a Swiss grenadier cut him down with
a cutlass.[132] Many of the boats were shattered or sunk, while those
in the rear, seeing the state of things, appear to have sheered off.
The affair was soon reduced to an exchange of shots between the
garrison and the men who had landed, and who, standing on the open
ground without the walls, were not wholly invisible, while the French,
behind their ramparts, were completely hidden. “The fire of the
English,” says Bigot, “was extremely obstinate, but without effect, as
they could not see to take aim.” They kept it up till daybreak, or
about two hours and a half; and then, seeing themselves at the mercy
of the French, surrendered to the number of one hundred and nineteen, 122
including the wounded, three or more of whom died almost immediately.
By the most trustworthy accounts the English loss in killed, drowned,
and captured was one hundred and eighty-nine; or, in the words of
Pepperrell, “nearly half our party.”[133] Disorder, precipitation, and
weak leadership ruined what hopes the attempt ever had.
As this was the only French success during the siege, Duchambon makes
the most of it. He reports that the battery was attacked by a thousand
men, supported by eight hundred more, who were afraid to show
themselves; and, farther, that there were thirty-five boats, all of
which were destroyed or sunk,[134]--though he afterwards says that two
of them got away with thirty men, being all that were left of the
thousand. Bigot, more moderate, puts the number of assailants at five
hundred, of whom he says that all perished, except the one hundred and
nineteen who were captured.[135]
At daybreak Louisbourg rang with shouts of triumph. It was plain that
a disorderly militia could not capture the Island Battery. Yet
captured or silenced it must be; and orders were given to plant a
battery against it at Lighthouse Point, on the eastern side of the 123
harbor’s mouth, at the distance of a short half-mile. The neighboring
shore was rocky and almost inaccessible. Cannon and mortars were
carried in boats to the nearest landing-place, hauled up a steep
cliff, and dragged a mile and a quarter to the chosen spot, where they
were planted under the orders of Colonel Gridley, who thirty years
after directed the earthworks on Bunker Hill. The new battery soon
opened fire with deadly effect.
The French, much encouraged by their late success, were plunged again
into despondency by a disaster which had happened a week before the
affair of the Island Battery, but did not come to their knowledge till
some time after. On the nineteenth of May a fierce cannonade was heard
from the harbor, and a large French ship-of-war was seen hotly engaged
with several vessels of the squadron. She was the “Vigilant,” carrying
64 guns and 560 men, and commanded by the Marquis de la Maisonfort.
She had come from France with munitions and stores, when on
approaching Louisbourg she met one of the English cruisers,--some say
the “Mermaid,” of 40 guns, and others the “Shirley,” of 20. Being no
match for her, the British or provincial frigate kept up a running
fight and led her towards the English fleet. The “Vigilant” soon found
herself beset by several other vessels, and after a gallant resistance
and the loss of eighty men, struck her colors. Nothing could be more
timely for the New England army, whose ammunition and provisions had 124
sunk perilously low. The French prize now supplied their needs, and
drew from the _Habitant de Louisbourg_ the mournful comment, “We
were victims devoted to appease the wrath of Heaven, which turned our
own arms into weapons for our enemies.”
Nor was this the last time when the defenders of Louisbourg supplied
the instruments of their own destruction; for ten cannon were
presently unearthed at low tide from the flats near the careening
wharf in the northeast arm of the harbor, where they had been hidden
by the French some time before. Most of them proved sound; and being
mounted at Lighthouse Point, they were turned against their late
owners at the Island Battery.
When Gorham’s regiment first took post at Lighthouse Point, Duchambon
thought the movement so threatening that he forgot his former doubts,
and ordered a sortie against it, under the Sieur de Beaubassin.
Beaubassin landed, with a hundred men, at a place called Lorembec, and
advanced to surprise the English detachment; but was discovered by an
outpost of forty men, who attacked and routed his party.[136] Being
then joined by eighty Indians, Beaubassin had several other skirmishes
with English scouting-parties, till, pushed by superior numbers, and
their leader severely wounded, his men regained Louisbourg by sea,
escaping with difficulty from the guard-boats of the squadron. The 125
Sieur de la Vallière, with a considerable party of men, tried to burn
Pepperrell’s storehouses, near Flat Point Cove; but ten or twelve of
his followers were captured, and nearly all the rest wounded. Various
other petty encounters took place between English scouting-parties and
roving bands of French and Indians, always ending, according to
Pepperrell, in the discomfiture of the latter. To this, however, there
was at least one exception. Twenty English were waylaid and surrounded
near Petit Lorembec by forty or fifty Indians, accompanied by two or
three Frenchmen. Most of the English were shot down, several escaped,
and the rest surrendered on promise of life; upon which the Indians,
in cold blood, shot or speared some of them, and atrociously tortured
others.
This suggested to Warren a device which had two objects,--to prevent
such outrages in future, and to make known to the French that the ship
“Vigilant,” the mainstay of their hopes, was in English hands. The
treatment of the captives was told to the Marquis de la Maisonfort,
late captain of the “Vigilant,” now a prisoner on board the ship he
had commanded, and he was requested to lay the facts before Duchambon.
This he did with great readiness, in a letter containing these words:
“It is well that you should be informed that the captains and officers
of this squadron treat us, not as their prisoners, but as their good
friends, and take particular pains that my officers and crew should
want for nothing; therefore it seems to me just to treat them in 126
like manner, and to punish those who do otherwise and offer any insult
to the prisoners who may fall into your hands.”
Captain M’Donald, of the marines, carried this letter to Duchambon
under a flag-of-truce. Though familiar with the French language, he
spoke to the governor through an interpreter, so that the French
officers present, who hitherto had only known that a large ship had
been taken, expressed to each other without reserve their
discouragement and dismay when they learned that the prize was no
other than the “Vigilant.” Duchambon replied to La Maisonfort’s letter
that the Indians alone were answerable for the cruelties in question,
and that he would forbid such conduct for the future.[137]
The besiegers were now threatened by a new danger. We have seen that
in the last summer the Sieur Duvivier had attacked Annapolis.
Undaunted by ill-luck, he had gone to France to beg for help to attack
it again; two thousand men were promised him, and in anticipation of
their arrival the governor of Canada sent a body of French and
Indians, under the noted partisan Marin, to meet and co-operate with
them. Marin was ordered to wait at Les Mines till he heard of the
arrival of the troops from France; but he grew impatient, and resolved
to attack Annapolis without them. Accordingly, he laid siege to it
with the six or seven hundred whites and Indians of his party, aided 127
by the so-called Acadian neutrals. Mascarene, the governor, kept them
at bay till the twenty-fourth of May, when, to his surprise, they all
disappeared. Duchambon had sent them an order to make all haste to the
aid of Louisbourg. As the report of this reached the besiegers,
multiplying Marin’s force fourfold, they expected to be attacked by
numbers more than equal to those of their own effective men. This
wrought a wholesome reform. Order was established in the camp, which
was now fenced with palisades and watched by sentinels and
scouting-parties.
Another tribulation fell upon the general. Shirley had enjoined it
upon him to keep in perfect harmony with the naval commander, and the
injunction was in accord with Pepperrell’s conciliating temper. Warren
was no less earnest than he for the success of the enterprise, lent
him ammunition in time of need, and offered every aid in his power,
while Pepperrell in letters to Shirley and Newcastle praised his
colleague without stint. But in habits and character the two men
differed widely. Warren was in the prime of life, and the ardor of
youth still burned in him. He was impatient at the slow movement of
the siege. Prisoners told him of a squadron expected from Brest, of
which the “Vigilant” was the forerunner; and he feared that even if it
could not defeat him, it might elude the blockade, and with the help
of the continual fogs, get into Louisbourg in spite of him, thus
making its capture impossible. Therefore he called a council of his 128
captains on board his flagship, the “Superbe,” and proposed a plan for
taking the place without further delay. On the same day he laid it
before Pepperrell. It was to the effect that all the King’s ships and
provincial cruisers should enter the harbor, after taking on board
si
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