8^

18Q5

THE CAPTURE OF
LOUISBOURG.
By Rev. George Leon JYct^ker, D.D.
Address delivered May i, 1895.
UST a hundred and fifty years ago, to
day, in the fading light of that afternoon
of May 1st, the last boat-load of a
squadron of thirty-two hundred and fifty men —
some of them lineal ancestors of quite a number of
us sitting here in this comfortable room — scram
bled ashore over the stones and seaweed of
Fresh-Water Cove, in Chapeau Rouge Bay, about
four miles from the fortress of Louisbourg.
(I cannot, of course, permit myself to doubt that
every member of the Society of Colonial Wars
could stand a first-class civil service examination
on every possible fact of Colonial history and
geography. Nevertheless, in order to relieve the
dangerous pressure of so much knowledge in all
our memories, I have thought it just as well to
draw a rough outline of the region we are speak
ing of.) They

2 The Capture of Louisbourg.
They had begun the debarkation in the afternoon
of the day before, April 30, under some small fire
from a scouting party from the fort, having a
couple of their number wounded, but on the other
hand killing six of their assailants and capturing as
many more. To-day they completed their trans
ference to the inhospitable shore, encountering no
further difificulty for the moment, than the plunge
through the tumultuous surf which wet them to the
skin, and the scrabble for footing on the slippery
shingle of the beach. Behind them, at anchor in
the bay, was a motley fleet of sloops and transfers,
eighty or ninety in number, containing the provi
sions of the expedition, 500 barrels of powder, and
the twenty cannon and three mortars which had,
by the wild genius who planned the expedition,
been deemed sufficient for the undertaking. One
hundred men and eight small cannon had been left
behind a few days before at Canso, fifty miles
away, where the miscellaneous fleet had rendez
voused ; and four hundred men with a small
armament had been sent to capture St. Peters, a
settlement intermediate between Canso and
Louisbourg. But here was the great bulk of the expedition,
more or less safe and sound, on the stony and
boggy island of Cape Breton, almost within gun
range

The Capture of Louisbourg. 3
range of the most formidable fortress ever built on
the American continent, as sunset fell down on
them that first day of May, 1745, a hundred and
fifty years ago.
How came they there, and how did they get on
once being arrived ?
As to what brought them to the spot — this was,
perhaps, as conspicuous an instance as the turmoils
of mankind anywhere afford of the disastrous
results of what we frequently hear of, "a woman in
the case." For fifteen years following 1725, a
reasonable degree of peace had prevailed along
the American frontiers. Pioneer settlements on
the Massachusetts and New Hampshire borders
and out along the New York lakes and rivers
thrived and multiplied. The shipping merchants
of the coasts sent out their vessels to Europe or
the West Indies with a tolerable degree of hopeful
ness and mothers in the new inland settlements
laid down at night with a reasonable measure of
confidence that they and their babes would not be
scalped before morning.
But alas ! on the 20th of October, 1 740, died
Charles VI., the emperor of Germany. But what was
there about the death of this estimable Austrian
gentleman, at 55 years of age, of a gall-stone in his
liver, at a remote European town, to affect the
course of New England story? Why,

4 The Capture of Louisbourg.
Why, everything to affect it. The canny old
fellow left a daughter — Maria Theresa by name —
a very presentable young woman by all accounts,
but whose right of succession to the Austrian throne
under former usages of that Hapsburg family were
rather dubious ; succession being generally limited
to the male line. Considering which fact the
emperor, her father, while in the full vigor of his
swashbucklering health had secured the pledge of
most of the crowned heads of Europe, including
George Second of England, but not including, of
course, the king of France, that they would stand
by the girl and see her safely through. But no
sooner was the father dead than several of the par
ties to what was called the "Pragmatic Sanction"
forgot their agreement. Frederick of Prussia pro
ceeded to slice off a province of Austria and annex
it to his own territory. Spain repudiated the
Pragmatic agreement in favor of her sovereign.
George Second stood by his pledges and made the
woman's cause his own, first against Spain, and
later against France. France, always the foe of
England and often of Austria, declared war upon
both ; and the quarrel of the Hapsburg woman on
the Danube became by 1 744 the fight of French
man and Englishman along every water-course and
coast line of Canada and North America. Massachusetts

The Capture of Louisbourg. 5
Massachusetts had at this juncture an enthusiastic,
wide-awake lawyer for governor, William Shirley
by name ; a man of very many creditable abilities
and virtues ; but exceedingly ambitious and pos
sessed with the idea that he was a great military
strategist as well. Stirred up by a sanguine
frontiersman from Damariscotta, Me., one William
Vaughn by name (and by the way, what terrible
fire-eating fellows these Maine statesmen are, both
in ancient and modern times) who told the gov
ernor that the snow often fell so deep about the
Louisbourg fortifications that men could walk
straight across the walls into the town. Governor
Shirley conceived the idea of taking Louisbourg
by surprise. Winter was well along. The great
military stronghold of North America, which had
been twenty-five years in building ; which had been
laid out on the plans of Vauban ; which had cost
thirty million livres, equal, perhaps, to as many
dollars now ; which was garrisoned by about
seventeen hundred regular troops ; whose walls
were supplied with ninety heavy cannon and with
many swivels and mortars ; whose defences were
supported by two outlying battery forts, mounting
each thirty heavy guns, was to be captured, so
Vaughn and Shirley planned, while the garrison
was asleep. Shirley communicated his plan to the
General

6 The Capture of Louisbourg.
General Court of Massachusetts on January 9, 1 745,
first exacting an oath of secrecy about the com
munication he was about to make. The General
Court sat down on the scheme. But Shirley
persisted. He got up petitions for a reversal of the
unfavorable decision. He did get it reversed by
a single vote, a vote which would have been neu
tralized, however, if a certain deputy had not
broken his leg in hastening to the House to record
his dissent. But once having secured his majority
for the enterprise Shirley kept his couriers flying
on his errands of incitement and solicitation. New
York and Pennsylvania declined co-operation.
None of the colonies south of Connecticut showed
interest in the scheme, save that Governor Clinton
lent ten eighteen-pounders after it became clear
that Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Hamp
shire were bound to go ahead.
Massachusetts did nobly, raising and equipping
3,300 men. New Hampshire raised four hundred
and fifty-four, of whom, however, a hundred and
fifty were to be paid by Massachusetts. Connec
ticut contributed five hundred and sixteen to the
enterprise. As the preparations went forward
enthusiasm grew. Something of religious zeal
mingled with patriotic loyalty. Were not the
Louisbourgites Roman Catholics as well as French men?

7^1? Capture of Louisbourg. 7
men ? Parson Moody of York, Maine, who went
chaplain to the Massachusetts contingent, carried
his private axe with him to hew down the images
in the papistic church at Louisbourg. William
Pepperell, a generous-hearted merchant of Kittery,
who had been selected by Governor Shirley as
commander-in-chief of the enterprise, solicited the
advice and co-operation of the celebrated evangel
ist George Whitefield, then on his second visit to
New England, and who had been offered a chap
laincy to the troops. Whitefield declined the
chaplaincy ; rather discouraged Pepperell about the
undertaking ; but, being entreated, gave a motto
for the flag, " Nil desperandum Christo duce,''
suggesting at once a certain religious quality and
the quixotic character of the crusade.
Here in Connecticut a special session of the
assembly was held from the 26th to the 29th of
February, at which it was voted to co-operate with
the Shirley enterprise. In pursuance of this resolve,
Lieutenant-Governor Roger Wolcott of Windsor
was appointed major-general, second in command
under Pepperell, and received Governor Shirley's
commission, as well as Governor Law's. Andrew
Burr of Fairfield was designated as colonel ; Simon
Lothrop of Norwich lieutenant-colonel ; Israel
Newton of Colchester as major. Captains' com
missions

8 The Capture of Lotdsbourg.
missions were issued to Elaezer Goodrich of
Wethersfield, David Wooster of New Haven,
Stephen Lee of New London, Daniel Chapman of
Ridgefield, William Whiting of Norwich, Robert
Denison of Stonington, Andrew Ward of Guilford
and James Church of Hartford. The Rev. Elisha
Williams of Wethersfield, retired from the rector
ship of Yale College, was designated as chaplain
to the Connecticut troops, and Dr. Normand
Morison of Hartford surgeon-in-chief.
The colony sloop Defence, built at Middletown
three years before, was put in order, and placed
under command of John Prentiss of New London.
Transports were hired ; soldiers enlisted under
offer of eight pounds in old tenor bills a month,
with certain increased allowances when they
furnished their own guns, cartridge boxes and
blankets ; and promise of " equal share in all the
plunder with the souldiers of the neighboring gov
ernments." The Massachusetts contingent got away from
Nantasket for the port of Canso, where the whole
expedition were to rendezvous, on the 27th of
March. Connecticut's followed from New London
Sunday, April 14. Good Governor Wolcott wrote
a hurried letter back to his wife, dated the loth, in
which he says : " Dear heart, excuse my hurry
which

The Capture of Louisbourg. 9
which has engrossed my whole time since here,
and engrosses every day. But my heart is the
same toward you as before, and hope to have a
time to pour it out into your bosom, recounting the
Toils and dangers I have born, or meet you in
endless happiness when our conversation will be
upon a better subject and more pleasing. Farewell,
sweet heart. Give my love to my family and
friends." On their way to their rendezvous at Canso the
commanders of the flotilla had leisure to study their
instructions for the campaign, carefully drawn up
by Lawyer Shirley. It is safe to say a more extra
ordinary document was never compiled for the
directory of a military enterprise. Too long by far
to quote, its general quality is well enough indi
cated in a letter written by Shirley to Governor
Benning Wentworth of New Hampshire, a few
sentences of which it may be worth while to recall:
'' The success of our enterprise," Shirley says, "will
entirely depend on the execution the first night
after the arrival of our forces. For this purpose it
is necessary that the whole fleet should make
Chapeau Rouge Point just at the shutting in of
day, when they cannot easily be discovered . . .
so as to have all the men landed before midnight ;
the landing of whom it is computed by Captain Durell

lo The Capture of Louisbourg.
Durell and Mr. Bastide will take up three hours at
least. After which the forming of the four several
corps to be employed in the scaling the walls of
Louisbourg, near the east gate fronting the sea,
and the west gate fronting the harbor, to cover the
retreat of the two before-mentioned parties in case
of a repulse, and to attack the Grand Battery
(which attack must be made at the same time with
the two other attacks) will take two hours more at
least. After these four bodies are formed, their
march to their respective posts from which they are
to make their attacks will take up another two
hours, which, supposing the transports to arrive at
Chapeau Rouge Bay at nine o'clock in the evening
and not before (as it will be necessary for them to
do in order to land and march under cover of the
night) will bring them to four o'clock in the morn
ing, being daybreak, before they begin their attack,
which will be full late for them to begin."
That is to say, nearly a hundred vessels, of all
sailing capacities and sizes, are to arrive simultane
ously at nine o'clock in the evening, at a specified
point in a bay into which probably not one of them
ever sailed before, disembark their troops, who are
to march from two to four miles through bogs and
over rocks, in the darkness, cross a fortress ditch
of two to ten rods in width, scale the walls in two
places

The Capture of Louisbourg. 1 1
places, as well as the walls of the Grand Battery
two miles away, and do it in four hours from
landing, and seven hours from casting anchor at
precisely nine o'clock. It must have been a relief
to Pepperell and Wolcott to find at the end of the
long minute documents a postscript in these words:
" Notwithstanding these instructions you have re
ceived from me, I must leave you to act, upon
unforeseen emergencies, according to your best
discretion." The "unforeseen emergencies" developed right
away. The New Hampshire flotilla arrived at the
rendezvous at Canso, April i. The Massachusetts
vessels dropped in along from the 5th to the loth,
and Connecticut got there by the 25th. But
Chapeau Rouge Bay was frozen solid. Massachu
setts men had been fretting a fortnight over the
ice and Connecticut's tardiness. But the delay had
been a great blessing.
Commander Peter Warren, who from his station
in the West Indies had sent his refusal to Governor
Shirley to take part in the Louisbourg expedition
on the ground that it was a mere provincial enter
prise, unauthorized by the Home Government,
had, two days after that refusal, received dispatches
ordering his fleet to Boston, for general co-opera
tion with Governor Shirley, in any service which might

12 The Capture of Louisbourg.
might seem important. Arriving off" Boston he
learned from a pilot of the sailing of the provincial
flotilla, and without pausing for conference with
Shirley set sail after them. By the 23d of April
he was off Canso with four frigates of from forty to
sixty guns each, an unexpected and wholly amazing
reinforcement ! The ice broke up in Chapeau
Rouge Bay on April 27th. The fleet sailed the 29th,
intending to reach the directed landing-place at
nine in the evening. But another " unexpected
emergency " developed. The wind fell to a calm,
and in the morning the whole armament, with the
big frigates in the offing, was full in view from the
ramparts of Louisbourg. Shirley's fine scheme for
taking Louisbourg by surprise had clean gone
overboard. Fortunately the "discretion," to which
the governor in the case of " unexpected emer
gencies" commended the provincial commanders,
remained still with them on deck.
Left to their own resources the men got ashore,
as I have said, a hundred and fifty years ago this
afternoon, and they went straight at their daring
and indeed almost foolhardy enterprise.
Into the details of the forty-nine days struggle
which followed I have no time to enter. I cannot
pause to describe how the very next morning after
landing a detachment of men under Vaughn, the
Damariscotta

The Capture of Louisbourg. 13
Damariscotta pioneer, set fire to an extensive
range of storehouses, filled with important supplies,
naval and military, out beyond the Grand Battery,
or how under the excitement and alarm of the
smoke and fire from this combustion, the garrison
of the Grand Battery itself most unaccountably and
most disastrously evacuated that indispensably
important part of the defences, and left its thirty
heavy cannon to be turned by the provincials
against the town. I cannot narrate the story of
the dragging of the cannon from the vessels by
men often up to their knees or thighs in mud,
across bogs and hillocks, first to Green Hill, a mile
from the King's Bastion at Louisbourg ; then, suc
cessively, by toilsome stages to a second, third,
fourth, and finally to a fifth point of vantage, all the
while under fire from the fortress and all the while
keeping up an answering fire from their own guns.
I cannot tell how, over on Light-House point, the
gallant provincials erected a battery, digging ten
heavy cannon out of the sand where the French
men had concealed them, to make it of and turning
its destructive fire against the formidable Island
Fort which held the entrance to the harbor. I have
no time to enlarge on the disappointment of the
beleagured garrison when they learned that
Warren's fleet outside had captured on the 19th
of May

14 The Capture of Louisbourg.
of May the French ship of war Vigilant of sixty-
four guns, which was approaching for their relief,
and which now only afforded, as the Grand Battery
fortress and the Light-House point guns had done,
a new agency of assault against them. I cannot
tell what heroic, though futile, efforts were made
on the 26th of May to capture the Island Fort un
der cover of night, in doing which the provincial
forces lost more men than in all the rest of the
siege ; nor can I allude to the occasional glimpses
we got of the employment or divertisements of the
men in off hours of duty ; how they caught trout
and lobsters ; how they raced, wrestled and pitched
quoits ; or how some of them wandering too far
from the camp, lost a scalp or two at the hands of
the Indians lurking in the camp rear. I cannot
tell how Captain Moody exhorted ; how Roger
Wolcott (doubtless for lack of Warner's Safe
Kidney Cure) was doubled up with " nephritic
pains," or how the enemy within the town had
their share of sufferings also from houses riddled
with shots, from discordant counsels, and from
prevalent sickness.
I can only say that on the 15th of June, in im
mediate prospect of a combined assault by sea as
well as land (the crippled condition of the Island
Fort now for the first time permitting the attempt of the

The Captiire of Louisbourg. 15
of the fleet to enter the harbor), a flag of truce
with proposals for surrender came from Ducham-
bon, the Louisbourg commander, to the tattered
and wearied but tenacious provincials. The next
day was consumed with negotiating the terms.
But on the 17th the English fleet sailed quietly
into the harbor, and the keys of the city and the
fortress were presented to Pepperell by the French
general. Louisbourg was captured. The joyful
army held a banquet to celebrate the victory.
Chaplain Moody was to say grace. Remembering
his Sunday prayers, the officers felt a little nervous
as to the length of time they should be detained
from their repast. The chaplain surprised and
gratified them by praying : " Good Lord, we have
so much to thank Thee for that time will be too
short and we must leave it to eternity. Bless our
food and fellowship on this joyful occasion, for the
sake of Christ our Lord, Amen." Governor Wol
cott could not attend the dinner for still continued
lack of Warner's Kidney Cure.
The news of Louisbourg's surrender reached
Boston at one o'clock on the morning of the 3d of
July. It reached Hartford on the 5th. Every
where it was received with tumults of rejoicing.
Guns were fired, bells rung, congratulations ex
changed. And

1 6 The Capture of Louisbourg.
And well they might be. An expedition which,
by all laws of probable reasoning, was doomed
from the outset to certain defeat, had by the good
" discretion " of the commanders in the "unfore
seen emergencies" which arose, and (it must not
be forgotten, for those commanders most distinctly
recognized it), by a series of incalculable and
astonishing conspiring circumstances in their
behalf, which no wit of man could have anticipated,
much less provided for, been turned into a tri
umphant success. The scheme for the reduction
of the American Gibraltar drawn by a lawyer, to
be executed by a merchant, at the head of a force
of farmers and mechanics, was nevertheless in re
sult a triumph. What the cool and careful Parkman
calls a " mad scheme " proved in the issue one of
the most splendid achievements of the century.
Well may any of us who are fortunate enough to
have had ancestors in that memorable event feel
proud of being among the sons of the captors of
Louisbourg.