Nova Scotia (13 page)

   
Pepperell had 4,300 men under his command and they set off in
ninety ships escorted by a dozen or so privateers. Nasty storms,
terrifyingly rough seas and snow made for a treacherous crossing
for many men who had previously spent little or no time aboard
sailing ships. When they arrived, they found the coast of Cape
Breton blocked with ice. (You may recall that the French had
established Louisbourg to be an ice-free port.) Pepperell decided
to land at Canso and, making the best of a bad situation, drill his
amateur army to prepare for the assault. Because of the ice, French
vessels could not sail out of Louisbourg, so the people inside the
fortress nepver knew of the nearby English presence. While waiting
for the ice to clear in Cape Breton, four British warships under
the control of Commodore Peter Warren arrived to assist in the
attack, even though news of the invahsion had not arrived in
Britain.

Death Goes to the Victor

Louisbourg was not the impenetrable
fort the French had hoped it to be. Bad design and poor materials
had made it vulnerable on the northern and southern flanks. Inside
the weak walls was even weaker morale. Everything was in short
supply, except for booze and bad attitude. Soldiers were rightfully
unhappy in their dark, damp quarters overrun with rats and mice.
There were not even enough mattresses and blankets to go around. By
mid-May of that year, Louisbourg was already on the verge of
starvation, although one might wonder why there was not at least
enough fish to feed them.

   
On May 11 when Pepperell’s troops arrived, Louisbourg was
defended by 560 regular soldiers and 800 not-so-regular militiamen.
The first 100 men sent to the beach to fight the British did little
to halt the invasion and by nightfall 2,000 men of the invading
force were camped on the shoreline of Gabarus Bay. The French
holding down the outlying Royal Battery gave up and fled for the
safety of the main fortress. When the New Engtland invaders checked
out the empty battery, they found weaponry intact and used the big
guns to blast away at Louisbourg itself. Other advantageous attack
points were set up around Louisbourg, although the low, wet ground
made transporting the big weapons difficult. Nonetheless, the siege
of Louisbourg was underway.

   
The Americans pillaged the nearby settlements, finding
prodigious quantities of alcoholic refreshment. As they drank to
the extreme, Pepperell watched with disgust and despair as his army
staggered about on the conquert ed soil. He was disappointed at the
obnoxious behaviour of his countrymen, but he was unable to
effectively sober up his troops. .

   
Nonetheless, each day the walls of Louisbourg
were hammered by artillery. It would only be a matter of time.
Conditions inside the fortress continued to deteriorate. French
ships arrived with reinforcements but they were too late. First
the
Renommé
turned back as soon as it saw the
British warships. Next the
Vigilant
was captured
and all hopes of Louisbourg surviving were dashed.
*

   
The siege would not end without significant American losses,
however. If the island battery emplacement in the harbour could be
captured, then the battle would be won. The British warships could
then come in close enough to finish off the town inside the
fortress. On a night in June, 400 men landed in heavy seas and
indiscreetly made a lot of noise cheering themselves on to victory.
This alerted the French and when the English tried toÿ climb the
ladders they had placed against the walls, they were shot or
stabbed with bayonets. The attack was a disaster and nearly 200 men
died in the ill-planned assault.

   
Plan B for the attackers was to set up another battery
station a half-mile away at Lighthouse Point. It was a daunting
task to haul the heavy artillery up the cliffs and drag it over the
rocky ground, but eventually the deed was done; the Island Battery
was demolished and the British ships could now fire directly on
Louisbourg itself.

   
Holes were pounded through the walls by cannon balls and
nearly every building within the fort was pummelled as well. The
French troops inside, along with anyone who could fight, including
young boys, tried to hold back the invasion but they were overrun.
Forty-nine days after the assault had begun, Pepperell’s ragtag
American army marched into the fort. Pepperell forbade his men to
ransack the town but they grew unruly and did it anywoay – looting
and rioting and taking further advantage of the vast supply of
liquor on hand in the great French fort.

   
For weeks, the French flags were left to fly over the fort,
luring more than twenty French ships to port. One vessel was filled
with gold and silver – several million dollars’ worth, hidden under
a façcade of cocoa bags. Feeling on the generous side, Commodore
Warren gave each of his sailors a reward of about a thousand
dollars of the new-found wealth. The citizens and soldiers of
Louisbourg who had survived were put on eleven transport ships and
sent back to France on July 4.

   
The American men wanted desperately to go home to their
families, their farms and their livelihood. They had to stay on,
however, until a permanent garrison of “professional” soldiers
arrived and took control. There  was a near mutiny over this
and Governor Shirley back in Massachusetts agreed to raise the
salaries of the soldiers and begged them to hang on through the
winter. Conditions were insufferable in the war-ravaged fort. The
Americans drank so much of the captured French rum that many died
from the alcohol, as well as from the unsanitary conditions. By
spring, nearly a thousand had perished. Eight to fourteen soldiers
were dying each day. More died that winter than in the battles
leading up to the victory. Fear of French attack also gnawed at the
morale of the gloomy troop of victors. If the French had simply
turned over the squalid town along with the ple antiful supply of
booze, they could have avoided the siege altogether and eventually
returned to recapture the place once the Americans fell prey to the
rum and disease.

Scurvy, Smallpox and Squalid
Quarters

The French were predictably hurting
from the loss of Louisbourg and a plan was drawn up in France to
send sixty-five warships under the command of Duc D’Anville to
Chebucto Bay (Halifax Harbour), where he would link up with
friendly Mi’kmaq to help fight against the British. Once the news
got out about the humiliation at Louisbourg, it was hoped that a
general uprising of Acadians could be incited. The plan was
obviously being developed in a vacuum without knowledge of the true
state of Acadian attitudes. In fact, the entire venture was
ill-conceived and disastrous. A grandiose expedition for
recapturing Acadia, restoring the French in Louisbourg and going on
to attack Boston and New England was being mounted by a leader with
little experience in a campaign of this size. Worst of all, the sea
and disease would conspire to be D’Anville’s greatest
enemies.

   
On the trip across the Atlantic in 1746, storms separated the
ships and made for a rough passage. Along with the plague of
scurvy, fevers broke out from smallpox in the squalid quarters and
many men died before ever having a chance to reach Nova Scotia and
inflict revenge on the English. Not far from Sable Island,
D’Anville and his ships ran into a ferocious storm that they were
not at all prepared for. Most probably it was a tropical storm
pushing up the Gulf Stream from the south. Some vessels went to the
bottom to join the graveyard of Sable Island wreckage. Others were
damaged by high winds and monster waves. At least one ship got hit
by a bolt ogf lightning. Afterwards, several ships’ captains lost
their bearings in fog and remained cut off from the main
flotilla.

   
It was a very unhappy and unlucky venture all
around. On September 10 of that year, D’Anville’s own ship,
the
Northumberland
, made
it to Chebucto Harbour, expecting to meet up with other French
ships as well as some of his own that he had lost track of. There
was one transport ship waiting for him and some allies – Mi’kmaq
men who lived along Chebucto Bay – arrived in their canoes. The
unlucky D’Anville, plagued by bad timing and bad luck, learned that
other French ships had arrived to meet him but had given up because
of the delays and returned to France.

   
D’Anville went ashore near Birch Cove along Bedford Basin,
with a lot of sick men dying from diseases. As some of the rest of
his fleet arrived, D’Anville discovered they too were manned by
sailors and soldiers who were dying and they carried a cargo of
those who had not survived the crossing. D’Anville himself died
near the end of the month. A new commander, Vice-Admiral
D’Estournel, had the sad duty of trying to pull things back
together with his own five ships and the survivors of D’Anville’s
troops. Apparently he saw two options: either return to France or
attack Annapolis Royal. He personally favoured returning to France
and cutting losses all around, but there was stiff opposition to
the idea while enthusiasm for revenge against the British still ran
high. So he put it to a vote. And lost. The loss must have been
seen as overwhelming damage to his honour, as he committed suicide
by impaling himself on a sword.

   
The unhappy duties of leadership now fell to a man named La
Jonquière, who had been appointed as the governor of what was left
of New France. He sent out word to the Acadian farmers of Minas
Basin that the French soldiers were desperately in need of food and
supplies. Local Mi’kmaq people had remained loyal to their French
friends and helped out as best they could. Tragically, the Mi’kmaq
were given the clothing of dead soldiers and, as a result, disease
spread into their own communities, devastating the
population.

   
Six thousand in all had left France to try to recapture
Louisbourg and reassert a French presence in this part of the
world. When the remainder of the fleet sailed out of Chebucto
Harbour on October 13, only 600 were left alive and of that number
at least 250 were extremely ill. Two shiploads of men doggedly
persevered on to the Annapolis Basin with high hopes of restoring
dignity by capturing Annapolis Royal. Unfortunately, they saw that
it was substantially defended by the British and finally accepting
the notion that discretion is the better part of valour, the
commander gave the word to return to France.

   
A second group of French soldiers under
Jean-Baptiste-Nicolas-Roch de Ramezay sailed to the Minas Basin to
try and muster support from the Acadians to attack Fort Anne, but
most Acadians just wanted to be left alone and stay out of the way
of warring empires.

   
With more French military showing up in Nova Scotia, Paul
Mascarene figured it was time to go on the offensive again with
support from Massachusetts troops. In January of 1747, the French
attacked American forces near Grand Pré and caused a setback for
them that was only short-lived because William Shirley sent up more
troops. By the spring of that year, de Ramezay was ready to admit
that the French didn’t stand a chance. He and his men said farewell
to Nova Scotia.

   
Command of Fortress Louisbourg was delivered to Peregrine
Hopson in September of 1747. He controlled what was left of the
fortress for just a year, until decisions an ocean away would take
the problem of Louisbourg off his hands. The 1748 Treaty of
Aix-la-Chapelle gave Louisbourg back to France. It was as simple as
the swipe of the pen. New Englanders were furious over this
decision and it’s easy to see why.

   
Warriors from both sides must have wondered at the cruel
irony that led to the loss of so many lives – all for what? England
and France, for the time being, simply seemed to be tired of
fighting. So England was willing to take one step back. Maybe the
loss of one single fort was no catastrophe after all. What had
happened on the ground and at sea as the military men struggled for
victory, died from bullets, booze and disease, sank to despair
because of their personal losses and their distance from their
families, the lousy conditions and the lack of food – all this had
very little to do with the decision-making of monarchs and
bureaucrats who had never set foot upon North American
shores.

   
And so Louisbourg was back with the French under the control
of a new governor, Charles Desherbiers.

Treaties Made To Be
Broken

But the story was not over.
Treaties after all are made to be broken. When William Pitt became
prime minister of England in 1756, he felt that it was worth
heating up the war with France to secure America for the English.
Louisbourg would just have to be captured again in order to have
naval access from the sea for an assault on Quebec. Admiral Edward
Boscawen and Colonel Jeffrey Amherst would be the military masters
of the endeavours and there would be at least 14,000 men at their
disposal.

   
Louisbourg, back in French control, had actually flourished
between 1750 and 1755 – mostly because of illegal trade with New
England. New Englanders were royally mad at the British for
returning Louisbourg where so much New England blood had been shed.
But now that it was back with France, it was illegal business as
usual, and merchants on both sides saw the profit in it. If
European powers had stayed out of it, quite probably, a wonderfuul
trade alliance would have sprung up to weld together Boston and
Louisbourg as sister cities. But it was not to be that
simple.