Louisbourg Surrenders Again

The answer was prompt and stern: the garrison must surrender as prisoners of war; a definite reply must be given within an hour.

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 18.

When Wolfe had silenced the Island Battery, a new and imminent danger threatened Louisbourg. Boscawen might enter the harbor, overpower the French naval force and cannonade the town on its weakest side. Therefore Drucour resolved to sink four large ships at the entrance; and on a dark and foggy night this was successfully accomplished. Two more vessels were afterwards sunk and the harbor was then thought safe.

The English had at last finished their preparations and were urging on the siege with determined vigor. The landward view was a solitude no longer. They could be seen in multitudes piling earth and fascines beyond the hillock at the edge of the marsh. On the twenty-fifth they occupied the hillock itself and fortified themselves there under a shower of bombs. Then they threw up earth on the right and pushed their approaches towards the Barachois, in spite of a hot fire from the frigate “Aréthuse.” Next, they appeared on the left towards the sea about a third of a mile from the Princess’s Bastion. It was Wolfe, with a strong detachment, throwing up a redoubt and opening an entrenchment. Late on the night of the ninth of July six hundred French troops sallied to interrupt the work. The English grenadiers in the trenches fought stubbornly with bayonet and sword but were forced back to the second line, where a desperate conflict in the dark took place; and after severe loss on both sides the French were driven back. Some days before, there had been another sortie on the opposite side, near the Barachois, resulting in a repulse of the French and the seizure by Wolfe of a more advanced position.

Various courtesies were exchanged between the two commanders. Drucour, on occasion of a flag of truce, wrote to Amherst that there was a surgeon of uncommon skill in Louisbourg, whose services were at the command of any English officer who might need them. Amherst on his part sent to his enemy letters and messages from wounded Frenchmen in his hands, adding his compliments to Madame Drucour, with an expression of regret for the disquiet to which she was exposed, begging her at the same time to accept a gift of pineapples from the West Indies. She returned his courtesy by sending him a basket of wine; after which amenities the cannon roared again. Madame Drucour was a woman of heroic spirit. Every day she was on the ramparts, where her presence roused the soldiers to enthusiasm; and every day with her own hand she fired three cannon to encourage them.

The English lines grew closer and closer and their fire more and more destructive. Desgouttes, the naval commander, withdrew the “Aréthuse” from her exposed position, where her fire had greatly annoyed the besiegers. The shot-holes in her sides were plugged up and in the dark night of the fourteenth of July she was towed through the obstructions in the mouth of the harbor and sent to France to report the situation of Louisbourg. More fortunate than her predecessor, she escaped the English in a fog. Only five vessels now remained afloat in the harbor and these were feebly manned, as the greater part of their officers and crews had come ashore, to the number of two thousand, lodging under tents in the town, amid the scarcely suppressed murmurs of the army officers.

On the eighth of July news came that the partisan Boishébert was approaching with four hundred Acadians, Canadians and Micmacs to attack the English outposts and detachments. He did little or nothing, however, besides capturing a few stragglers. On the sixteenth, early in the evening, a party of English, led by Wolfe, dashed forward, drove off a band of French volunteers, seized a rising ground called Hauteur-de-la-Potence, or Gallows Hill and began to entrench themselves scarcely three hundred yards from the Dauphin’s Bastion. The town opened on them furiously with grapeshot; but in the intervals of the firing the sound of their picks and spades could plainly be heard. In the morning they were seen throwing up earth like moles as they burrowed their way forward; and on the twenty-first they opened another parallel, within two hundred yards of the rampart. Still their sappers pushed on. Every day they had more guns in position and on right and left their fire grew hotter. Their pickets made a lodgment along the foot of the glacis and fired up the slope at the French in the covered way.

The twenty-first was a memorable day. In the afternoon a bomb fell on the ship “Célèbre” and set her on fire. An explosion followed. The few men on board could not save her and she drifted from her moorings. The wind blew the flames into the rigging of the “Entreprenant,” and then into that of the “Capricieux.” At night all three were in full blaze; for when the fire broke out the English batteries turned on them a tempest of shot and shell to prevent it from being extinguished. The glare of the triple conflagration lighted up the town, the trenches, the harbor and the surrounding hills, while the burning ships shot off their guns at random as they slowly drifted westward and grounded at last near the Barachois. In the morning they were consumed to the water’s edge; and of all the squadron the “Prudent” and the “Bienfaisant” alone were left.

In the citadel, of which the King’s Bastion formed the front, there was a large oblong stone building containing the chapel, lodgings for men and officers and at the southern end the quarters of the Governor. On the morning after the burning of the ships a shell fell through the roof among a party of soldiers in the chamber below, burst and set the place on fire. In half an hour the chapel and all the northern part of the building were in flames; and no sooner did the smoke rise above the bastion than the English threw into it a steady shower of missiles. Yet soldiers, sailors and inhabitants hastened to the spot and labored desperately to check the fire. They saved the end occupied by Drucour and his wife but all the rest was destroyed. Under the adjacent rampart were the casemates, one of which was crowded with wounded officers and the rest with women and children seeking shelter in these subterranean dens. Before the entrances there was a long barrier of timber to protect them from exploding shells; and as the wind blew the flames towards it, there was danger that it would take fire and suffocate those within. They rushed out, crazed with fright and ran hither and thither with outcries and shrieks amid the storm of iron.

In the neighboring Queen’s Bastion was a large range of barracks built of wood by the New England troops after their capture of the fortress in 1745. So flimsy and combustible was it that the French writers call it a “house of cards” and “a paper of matches.” Here were lodged the greater part of the garrison: but such was the danger of fire, that they were now ordered to leave it; and they accordingly lay in the streets or along the foot of the ramparts, under shelters of timber which gave some little protection against bombs. The order was well timed; for on the night after the fire in the King’s Bastion, a shell filled with combustibles set this building also in flames. A fearful scene ensued. All the English batteries opened upon it. The roar of mortars and cannon, the rushing and screaming of round-shot and grape, the hissing of fuses and the explosion of grenades and bombs mingled with a storm of musketry from the covered way and trenches; while, by the glare of the conflagration, the English regiments were seen drawn up in battle array, before the ramparts, as if preparing for an assault.

Two days after, at one o’clock in the morning, a burst of loud cheers was heard in the distance, followed by confused cries and the noise of musketry, which lasted but a moment. Six hundred English sailors had silently rowed into the harbor and seized the two remaining ships, the “Prudent” and the “Bienfaisant.” After the first hubbub all was silent for half an hour. Then a light glowed through the thick fog that covered the water. The “Prudent” was burning. Being aground with the low tide, her captors had set her on fire, allowing the men on board to escape to the town in her boats. The flames soon wrapped her from stem to stern; and as the broad glare pierced the illumined mists, the English sailors, reckless of shot and shell, towed her companion-ship, with all on board, to a safe anchorage under Wolfe’s batteries.

The position of the besieged was deplorable. Nearly a fourth of their number were in the hospitals; while the rest, exhausted with incessant toil, could find no place to snatch an hour of sleep; “and yet,” says an officer, “they still show ardor.” “Today,” he again says, on the twenty-fourth, “the fire of the place is so weak that it is more like funeral guns than a defense.” On the front of the town only four cannon could fire at all. The rest were either dismounted or silenced by the musketry from the trenches. The masonry of the ramparts had been shaken by the concussion of their own guns; and now, in the Dauphin’s and King’s bastions, the English shot brought it down in masses. The trenches had been pushed so close on the rising grounds at the right that a great part of the covered way was enfiladed, while a battery on a hill across the harbor swept the whole front with a flank fire. Amherst had ordered the gunners to spare the houses of the town; but, according to French accounts, the order had little effect, for shot and shell fell everywhere. “There is not a house in the place,” says the Diary just quoted, “that has not felt the effects of this formidable artillery. From yesterday morning till seven o’clock this evening we reckon that a thousand or twelve hundred bombs, great and small, have been thrown into the town, accompanied all the time by the fire of forty pieces of cannon, served with an activity not often seen. The hospital and the houses around it, which also serve as hospitals, are attacked with cannon and mortar. The surgeon trembles as he amputates a limb amid cries of Gare la bombe! and leaves his patient in the midst of the operation, lest he should share his fate. The sick and wounded, stretched on mattresses, utter cries of pain, which do not cease till a shot or the bursting of a shell ends them.”[1] On the twenty-sixth the last cannon was silenced in front of the town and the English batteries had made a breach which seemed practicable for assault.

[1: Early in the siege Drucour wrote to Amherst asking that the hospitals should be exempt from fire. Amherst answered that shot and shell might fall on any part of so small a town but promised to insure the sick and wounded from molestation if Drucour would send them either to the island at the mouth of the harbor, or to any of the ships, if anchored apart from the rest. The offer was declined, for reasons not stated. Drucour gives the correspondence in his Diary.]

On the day before, Drucour, with his chief officers and the engineer, Franquet, had made the tour of the covered way and examined the state of the defenses. All but Franquet were for offering to capitulate. Early on the next morning a council of war was held, at which were present Drucour, Franquet, Desgouttes, naval commander, Houllière, commander of the regulars and the several chiefs of battalions. Franquet presented a memorial setting forth the state of the fortifications. As it was he who had reconstructed and repaired them, he was anxious to show the quality of his work in the best light possible; and therefore, in the view of his auditors, he understated the effects of the English fire. Hence an altercation arose, ending in a unanimous decision to ask for terms. Accordingly, at ten o’clock, a white flag was displayed over the breach in the Dauphin’s Bastion and an officer named Loppinot was sent out with offers to capitulate. The answer was prompt and stern: the garrison must surrender as prisoners of war; a definite reply must be given within an hour; in case of refusal the place will be attacked by land and sea.

[Mante and other English writers give the text of this reply.]

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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