Another Siege of Louisbourg

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

Our special project presenting the definitive account of France in Canada by Francis Parkman, one of America’s greatest historians.

Previously in Montcalm and Wolfe, Volume 7 of the French in Canada series. Continuing Chapter 19.

At length, on the first of June, the southeastern horizon was white with a cloud of canvas. The long-expected crisis was come. Drucour, the governor, sent two thousand regulars, with about a thousand militia and Indians, to guard the various landing-places; and the rest, aided by the sailors, remained to hold the town.

[Rapport de Grucour. Journal du Siége.]

At the end of May Admiral Boscawen was at Halifax with twenty-three ships of the line, eighteen frigates and fireships and a fleet of transports, on board of which were eleven thousand and six hundred soldiers, all regulars, except five hundred provincial rangers.[1] Amherst had not yet arrived and on the twenty-eighth, Boscawen, in pursuance of his orders and to prevent loss of time, put to sea without him; but scarcely had the fleet sailed out of Halifax, when they met the ship that bore the expected general. Amherst took command of the troops; and the expedition held its way till the second of June, when they saw the rocky shore-line of Cape Breton and descried the masts of the French squadron in the harbor of Louisbourg.

[1: Of this force, according to Mante, only 9,900 were fit for duty. The table printed by Knox (I. 127) shows a total of 11,112, besides officers, artillery and rangers. The Authentic Account of the Reduction of Louisbourg, by a Spectator, puts the force at 11,326 men, besides officers. Entick makes the whole 11,936.]

Boscawen sailed into Gabarus Bay. The sea was rough; but in the afternoon Amherst, Lawrence and Wolfe, with a number of naval officers, reconnoitered the shore in boats, coasting it for miles and approaching it as near as the French batteries would permit. The rocks were white with surf and every accessible point was strongly guarded. Boscawen saw little chance of success. He sent for his captains and consulted them separately. They thought, like him, that it would be rash to attempt a landing and proposed a council of war. One of them alone, an old sea officer named Ferguson advised his commander to take the responsibility himself, hold no council and make the attempt at every risk. Boscawen took his advice and declared that he would not leave Gabarus Bay till he had fulfilled his instructions and set the troops on shore.

[Entick, III. 224.]

West of Louisbourg there were three accessible places, Freshwater Cove, four miles from the town and Flat Point and White Point, which were nearer, the last being within a mile of the fortifications. East of the town there was an inlet called Lorambec, also available for landing. In order to distract the attention of the enemy, it was resolved to threaten all these places and to form the troops into three divisions, two of which, under Lawrence and Whitmore, were to advance towards Flat Point and White Point, while a detached regiment was to make a feint at Lorambec. Wolfe, with the third division, was to make the real attack and try to force a landing at Freshwater Cove, which, as it proved, was the most strongly defended of all. When on shore Wolfe was an habitual invalid and when at sea every heave of the ship made him wretched; but his ardor was unquenchable. Before leaving England he wrote to a friend:

Being of the profession of arms, I would seek all occasions to serve; and therefore have thrown myself in the way of the American war, though I know that the very passage threatens my life and that my constitution must be utterly ruined and undone.”

On the next day, the third, the surf was so high that nothing could be attempted. On the fourth there was a thick fog and a gale. The frigate “Trent” struck on a rock and some of the transports were near being stranded. On the fifth there was another fog and a raging surf. On the sixth there was fog, with rain in the morning and better weather towards noon, whereupon the signal was made and the troops entered the boats; but the sea rose again and they were ordered back to the ships. On the seventh more fog and more surf till night, when the sea grew calmer and orders were given for another attempt. At two in the morning of the eighth the troops were in the boats again. At daybreak the frigates of the squadron, anchoring before each point of real or pretended attack, opened a fierce cannonade on the French intrenchments; and, a quarter of an hour after, the three divisions rowed towards the shore. That of the left, under Wolfe, consisted of four companies of grenadiers, with the light infantry and New England rangers, followed and supported by Fraser’s Highlanders and eight more companies of grenadiers. They pulled for Freshwater Cove. Here there was a crescent-shaped beach, a quarter of a mile long, with rocks at each end. On the shore above, about a thousand Frenchmen, under Lieutenant-Colonel de Saint-Julien, lay behind entrenchments covered in front by spruce and fir trees, felled and laid on the ground with the tops outward.[2] Eight cannon and swivels were planted to sweep every part of the beach and its approaches and these pieces were masked by young evergreens stuck in the ground before them.

[2: Drucour reports 985 soldiers as stationed here under Saint-Julien there were also some Indians. Freshwater Cove, otherwise Kennington Cove, was called La Cormorandière by the French.]

The English were allowed to come within close range unmolested. Then the batteries opened and a deadly storm of grape and musketry was poured upon the boats. It was clear in an instant that to advance farther would be destruction; and Wolfe waved his hand as a signal to sheer off. At some distance on the right and little exposed to the fire, were three boats of light infantry under Lieutenants Hopkins and Brown and Ensign Grant; who, mistaking the signal or wilfully misinterpreting it, made directly for the shore before them. It was a few roads east of the beach; a craggy coast and a strand strewn with rocks and lashed with breakers but sheltered from the cannon by a small projecting point. The three officers leaped ashore, followed by their men. Wolfe saw the movement and hastened to support it. The boat of Major Scott, who commanded the light infantry and rangers, next came up and was stove in an instant; but Scott gained the shore, climbed the crags and found himself with ten men in front of some seventy French and Indians. Half his followers were killed and wounded and three bullets were shot through his clothes; but with admirable gallantry he held his ground till others came to his aid.[3] The remaining boats now reached the landing. Many were stove

among the rocks and others were overset; some of the men were dragged back by the surf and drowned; some lost their muskets and were drenched to the skin: but the greater part got safe ashore. Among the foremost was seen the tall, attenuated form of Brigadier Wolfe, armed with nothing but a cane, as he leaped into the surf and climbed the crags with his soldiers. As they reached the top they formed in compact order and attacked and carried with the bayonet the nearest French battery, a few rods distant. The division of Lawrence soon came up; and as the attention of the enemy was now distracted, they made their landing with little opposition at the farther end of the beach whither they were followed by Amherst himself. The French, attacked on right and left and fearing, with good reason, that they would be cut off from the town, abandoned all their cannon and fled into the woods. About seventy of them were captured and fifty killed. The rest, circling among the hills and around the marshes, made their way to Louisbourg and those at the intermediate posts joined their flight. The English followed through a matted growth of firs till they reached the cleared ground; when the cannon, opening on them from the ramparts, stopped the pursuit. The first move of the great game was played and won.[4]

[3: Pichon, Mémoires du Cap-Breton, 284.]

[4: Journal of Amherst, in Mante, 117. Amherst to Pitt, 11 June, 1758. Authentic Account of the Reduction of Louisbourg, by a Spectator, 11. General Orders of Amherst, 3-7 June, 1759. Letter from an Officer, in Knox, I. 191; Entick, III. 225. The French accounts generally agree in essentials with the English. The English lost one hundred and nine, killed, wounded and drowned.]

Amherst made his camp just beyond range of the French cannon and Flat Point Cove was chosen as the landing-place of guns and stores. Clearing the ground, making roads and pitching tents filled the rest of the day. At night there was a glare of flames from the direction of the town. The French had abandoned the Grand Battery after setting fire to the buildings in it and to the houses and fish-stages along the shore of the harbor. During the following days stores were landed as fast as the surf would permit: but the task was so difficult that from first to last more than a hundred boats were stove in accomplishing it; and such was the violence of the waves that none of the siege-guns could be got ashore till the eighteenth. The camp extended two miles along a stream that flowed down to the Cove among the low, woody hills that curved around the town and harbor. Redoubts were made to protect its front and blockhouses to guard its left and rear from the bands of Acadians known to be hovering in the woods.

Wolfe, with twelve hundred men, made his way six or seven miles round the harbor, took possession of the battery at Lighthouse Point which the French had abandoned, planted guns and mortars and opened fire on the Island Battery that guarded the entrance. Other guns were placed at different points along the shore and soon opened on the French ships. The ships and batteries replied. The artillery fight raged night and day; till on the twenty-fifth the island guns were dismounted and silenced. Wolfe then strengthened his posts, secured his communications and returned to the main army in front of the town.

Amherst had reconnoitered the ground and chosen a hillock at the edge of the marsh, less than half a mile from the ramparts, as the point for opening his trenches. A road with an epaulement to protect it must first be made to the spot; and as the way was over a tract of deep mud covered with water-weeds and moss, the labor was prodigious. A thousand men worked at it day and night under the fire of the town and ships.

When the French looked landward from their ramparts they could see scarcely a sign of the impending storm. Behind them Wolfe’s cannon were playing busily from Lighthouse Point and the heights around the harbor; but, before them, the broad flat marsh and the low hills seemed almost a solitude. Two miles distant, they could descry some of the English tents; but the greater part were hidden by the inequalities of the ground. On the right, a prolongation of the harbor reached nearly half a mile beyond the town, ending in a small lagoon formed by a projecting sandbar and known as the Barachois. Near this bar lay moored the little frigate “Aréthuse,” under a gallant officer named Vauquelin. Her position was a perilous one; but so long as she could maintain it she could sweep with her fire the ground before the works and seriously impede the operations of the enemy. The other naval captains were less venturous; and when the English landed, they wanted to leave the harbor and save their ships. Drucour insisted that they should stay to aid the defense and they complied; but soon left their moorings and anchored as close as possible under the guns of the town, in order to escape the fire of Wolfe’s batteries. Hence there was great murmuring among the military officers, who would have had them engage the hostile guns at short range. The frigate “Écho,” under cover of a fog, had been sent to Quebec for aid; but she was chased and captured; and, a day or two after, the French saw her pass the mouth of the harbor with an English flag at her mast-head.

From Montcalm and Wolfe, Chapter 19 by Francis Parkman

To be continued.

The below is from Francis Parkman’s Preface to this book.

A very large amount of unpublished material has been used in its preparation, consisting for the most part of documents copied from the archives and libraries of France and England, especially from the Archives de la Marine et des Colonies, the Archives de la Guerre, and the Archives Nationales at Paris, and the Public Record Office and the British Museum at London. The papers copied for the present work in France alone exceed six thousand folio pages of manuscript, additional and supplementary to the “Paris Documents” procured for the State of New York under the agency of Mr. Brodhead. The copies made in England form ten volumes, besides many English documents consulted in the original manuscript. Great numbers of autograph letters, diaries, and other writings of persons engaged in the war have also been examined on this side of the Atlantic.

I owe to the kindness of the present Marquis de Montcalm the permission to copy all the letters written by his ancestor, General Montcalm, when in America, to members of his family in France. General Montcalm, from his first arrival in Canada to a few days before his death, also carried on an active correspondence with one of his chief officers, Bourlamaque, with whom he was on terms of intimacy. These autograph letters are now preserved in a private collection. I have examined them and obtained copies of the whole. They form an interesting complement to the official correspondence of the writer, and throw the most curious side-lights on the persons and events of the time.

Besides manuscripts, the printed matter in the form of books, pamphlets, contemporary newspapers, and other publications relating to the American part of the Seven Years’ War, is varied and abundant; and I believe I may safely say that nothing in it of much consequence has escaped me. The liberality of some of the older States of the Union, especially New York and Pennsylvania, in printing the voluminous records of their colonial history, has saved me a deal of tedious labor.

The whole of this published and unpublished mass of evidence has been read and collated with extreme care, and more than common pains have been taken to secure accuracy of statement. The study of books and papers, however, could not alone answer the purpose. The plan of the work was formed in early youth; and though various causes have long delayed its execution, it has always been kept in view. Meanwhile, I have visited and examined every spot where events of any importance in connection with the contest took place, and have observed with attention such scenes and persons as might help to illustrate those I meant to describe. In short, the subject has been studied as much from life and in the open air as at the library table.

BOSTON, Sept. 16, 1884.

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