How far these two Frenchmen contributed to the beginning of trade in Hudson Bay, and to the founding of the Hudson Bay Company, has been a matter of much controversy. The question was originally of some importance, for French claims to priority of occupation in the Arctic regions rested in large measure on the real or the alleged doings of the two adventurers. Like the rest of the world, they must have heard of the existence of Hudson Bay, for the voyages to discover the North-West Passage, though not made by Frenchmen, were not made in secret; and they had gathered information from the Indians of Canada as to the possibilities of fur trading in these northern regions. They had more than once attempted, between 1658 and 1663, to make their way by land to the bay, but never seem to have reached its shores; and the first recorded overland visit from Canada, is that of a French priest, Albanel, who, in 1671-2, journeyed from Quebec to Lake St. John, and thence, by the line of the Rupert river, came to the sea, to find an English factory already established at the mouth of the river.
Gillam returned to England in 1669, and on May 2, 1670, the Hudson Bay Company came into existence. On that day Charles II issued a royal charter, creating a corporate body under the title of 'The Governor and Company of Adventurers of England trading into Hudson's Bay.' Prince Rupert was the first Governor; Albemarle, Ashley, and Arlington were among the original grantees. The preamble of the charter recited that the persons named had 'at their own great cost and charges, undertaken an expedition for Hudson's Bay, in the North-West part of America, for the discovery of a new passage into the South Sea, and for the finding some trade for furs, minerals, and other considerable commodities'; and in their corporate capacity the Company were constituted absolute lords and proprietors, with a complete monopoly of trade of all the lands and seas 'that lie within the entrance of the straits, commonly called Hudson'sStraits,' so far as they were not already actually granted to or possessed by British subjects, or the subjects of any other Christian Prince or State. The charter enacted that 'the said land' should be 'from henceforth reckoned and reputed as one of our plantations or colonies in America, called Rupert's Land.'
Armed with practically unlimited powers over an unlimited area, the company lost little time in sending out ships and establishing factories. In addition to Fort Rupert at the south-eastern end of James Bay, Fort Hayes, or Moose Fort, was constructed at the south-western end of the bay, at the mouth of the Moose river; and some distance to the north of the latter fort, Fort Albany was placed at the outlet of the Albany river. Voyages were also made to the mouth of the Nelson river, on the western shore of Hudson Bay, but no attempt was made to plant a factory there till the year 1682.
It was in that year and at Fort Nelson, as it was called, that French and English first came into collision in the far North. Radisson and Des Groseilliers, who had taken service with the English in consequence of being fined by the Governor of Canada for making their early journeys without his licence, subsequently returned to Canada, and piloted their countrymen by sea into Hudson Bay. A company was formed in Canada in 1682, the Compagnie du Nord, and sent out an expedition from Quebec with these two men on board. They reached the Nelson river; a few days before they arrived a Boston vessel appeared on the scene, and a few days subsequently a vessel came from England, sent by the Hudson Bay Company to build a fort. After a short interval the French overpowered the English; but two years later, in 1684, Radisson and Des Groseilliers having in the meantime again come back to the Hudson Bay Company, that company recovered its fort, and the French lost their footing on Hudson Bay.
In the following year two Frenchmen passed overland from the bay to Canada by the Abbitibbi river, Lake Temiscaming, and the Ottawa; and it was determined to send a Canadian expedition by that route to attack the factories of the Hudson Bay Company. The rulers of Canada viewed with distrust English settlements to the north of New France, as they feared and distrusted the English colonies on the southern side, and they determined if possible to strangle them in infancy. Denonville was now Governor of Canada; and early in the year 1686 he dispatched a party of soldiers and Canadians to attack the forts on Hudson Bay. It was the kind of expedition in which French Canadians excelled, indifferent to privation and hardship, trained to toil through ice and snow, through unknown forests, making the rivers the highways for sleigh or canoe. Their leader was De Troyes, and with him went three sons of the celebrated Le Moyne family, including the most noted of them, Iberville. The Frenchmen followed the line of the Ottawa and the Abbitibbi, and in June, 1686, surprised and took Fort Hayes on the outlet of the Moose river. Crossing the eastern end of James Bay on the floating ice, they next reached Fort Rupert, seized a ship which was moored in front of the fort, and overpowered the fort itself. The sea was by this time open to navigation, and in canoes and the captured vessel the victorious Frenchmen turned west to attack Fort Albany. There was here some semblance of siege, but the little English garrison was forced to capitulate, and leaving Iberville in charge of the fort, which was renamed Fort St. Anne, De Troyes returned in November to Canada.
This successful raid was organized and carried out in a time of peace between the English and French Crowns; and, when the Englishmen who had been taken prisoners at the forts found their way home, the Hudson Bay Company laid the case before the Government, demanding satisfaction for the wrong done and restitution of their property.There was little likelihood of redress while James II was King of England. On November 16, 1686, he concluded a treaty of neutrality with the French King, the Treaty of Whitehall; and a mixed commission of French and English was appointed to inquire into the claims of the company. No settlement was arrived at: in 1688 came the Revolution in England; in 1692 the battle of La Hogue crippled the French at sea; and at length, in 1693, an English expedition was sent to Hudson Bay which recovered all the forts in James Bay.
The northernmost post of the Hudson Bay Company, the post on the Nelson river, or rather on the Hayes river, which flows into the same estuary, had not been taken by the French in their buccaneering expedition of 1686. It was known indifferently as Port Nelson or Fort York. It was at some distance from the forts in James Bay, and promised to be an outlet for trade from the regions west of the great lakes. It had been threatened by the French in 1690, and in October, 1694, the bold and restless Iberville, who had returned to Canada in 1687, appeared before it with two ships. After a short siege it capitulated, and was renamed Fort Bourbon; and Iberville followed up his success by recapturing the forts in James Bay. Thus, by the middle of 1695, the French held every post in Hudson Bay. In the next year came English ships, and all the positions were regained for England.
Once more, in 1697, Iberville appeared on the scene. He had in the meantime taken Fort Pemaquid on the Acadian frontier, and overrun Newfoundland; and starting from Placentia, with four ships of war sent out from France, he made sail for Hudson Bay. The destination was Port Nelson; but the vessels became separated, and with a single ship, Iberville, when nearing the fort, came into collision with three armed English merchantmen. The bold Frenchman closed with them, one to three, sank one of the vessels, took a second,while the third made its escape. A heavy gale came on, his own ship was driven ashore and broken up; but landing with his men, he was rejoined shortly afterwards by the rest of the French squadron, and laying siege to the fort compelled it to capitulate. This feat of arms took place early in September, 1697; on the twentieth of the same month the Peace of Ryswick was signed, and under its terms the French were placed in possession of all the Hudson Bay forts, with the exception of Fort Albany.15They held them down to the year 1713, when the Peace of Utrecht in no uncertain words gave back to Great Britain 'to be possessed in full right for ever, the Bay and Straits of Hudson, together with all lands, seas, seacoasts, rivers and places situate in the same Bay and Straits and which belong thereunto, no tracts of land or of sea being excepted, which are at present possessed by the subjects of France.' Boundaries, which by the treaty were to be defined, were never fixed; but no French ship appeared again with hostile intent in Hudson Bay until the year 1782.
15The manner in which the Treaty of Ryswick worked out in favour of the French in Hudson Bay is explained, as far as it can be explained, in Kingsford'sHistory of Canada,vol. iii, pp. 39-41.
NOTE.—For the first part of the above chapter, seeKINGSFORD'SHistory of Canada,vol. ii.Sir J. BOURINOT'SCape Breton(referred toabove, note).The same author'sCanada,in the 'Story of the Nations' Series, chap. vii, andDr. PATTERSON'SPaper onSir William Alexander and the Scottish Attempt to Colonize Acadia,published in theProceedings and Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada,vol. x, 1892.
For the second part, see KINGSFORD'SHistory of Canada,vol. iii.
Two books have recently been published on the Hudson Bay Company, viz:The Remarkable History of the Hudson's Bay Company,by GEORGEBRYCE, M.A., LL.D., andThe Great Company (1667-1871),by BECKLESWILSON.
LOUISBOURG
LOUISBOURG
The Treaty of Utrecht provided that 'the island called Cape Breton, as also all others both in the mouth of the river of St. Lawrence and in the gulf of the same name, shall hereafter belong of right to the French, and the Most Christian King shall have all manner of liberty to fortify any place or places there.' It was an important provision. Driven from Acadia and Newfoundland, with the reservation of certain fishing rights along a specified part of the Newfoundland coast, the French would have lost the seaboard altogether but for the possession of these islands at the entrance of the river of Canada.
A French eye-witness of the siege of Louisbourg in 1745 described, in a contemporary pamphlet, the value of Cape Breton Island to France. It was used, he says, to provide a place for the French settlers who were leaving Newfoundland after the cession of that island to Great Britain by the Treaty of Utrecht, but 'this was not all. It was necessary that we should retain a position that would make us at all times masters of the entrance to the River which leads to New France.'1Similar testimony to its value is given by an English writer. 'Cape Breton Island is a subject no good Englishman can write or read with pleasure. The giving of it to the French by the Treaty of Utrecht may prove as great a loss to the Kingdom, as the Sinking Fund amountsto or even the charge of the last war.'2Cape Breton, in short, kept open for France the mouth of the St. Lawrence, and the story of New France became more than ever the story of that river, and of the waterways which connected it with the far West, and with the newborn French colony in Louisiana.
1Louisbourg in 1745,the anonymousLettre d'un habitant de Louisbourg,translated and edited by Professor Wrong (Toronto, 1897), p. 26.
2Oldmixon'sBritish Empire in America(1741 ed.), vol. i, p. 37.
From 1713, for thirty years, there was nominally peace between Great Britain and France. In 1743, English troops assisted the Austrians and defeated the French at the battle of Dettingen; but war was not formally proclaimed between the two powers until the following year, 1744, when it lasted for four years, being terminated by the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748. During the years of so-called peace, French Governors, French priests, French explorers and border leaders lost no opportunity of strengthening the French position in North America.
Intrigue and covert force were notably at work in Acadia. By the Treaty of Utrecht, King Louis ceded to Great Britain 'all Nova Scotia or Accadie with its ancient boundaries.' What were the ancient boundaries? They were left to be demarcated by commissioners of the two nations; but no demarcation ever took place, and meanwhile French on the one hand, and English on the other, construed the term 'Acadia' according to their respective interests. While Acadia was French, the French widened, the English narrowed, the area to which the name might apply. When Acadia became English, the contention was reversed; and the French, who had included in Acadia a large extent of mainland, claimed that the peninsula of Nova Scotia alone was covered by the terms of the treaty.
Within that peninsula there were, at the time when the treaty was signed, some two thousand French settlers—a simple peasantry, uneducated, priest-ridden, of the same type as thehabitansof the St. Lawrence; but more primitive,more old-fashioned, clinging to their homes, to their national traditions, to their faith. Under the fourteenth article of the treaty, French subjects were given liberty to remove themselves within one year; if they preferred to remain and become subjects of the British Crown, they were to enjoy the free exercise of the Roman Catholic religion 'as far as the laws of Great Britain do allow the same.' The Acadians themselves did not wish to leave their farms and homesteads, nor did the English, when they took over Acadia, wish to lose the white settlers of the peninsula, who might reasonably be expected to become loyal and valuable citizens. The French authorities, on the other hand, desired to remove them in order to populate their own territories and deplete the ceded lands. Thus from the outset the intention of the treaty was frustrated, and the unfortunate Acadians suffered between two masters. As years went on, English and French views alike changed. The French, having by priestly influence rendered the Acadians thoroughly disaffected to English rule, and having year by year stronger hope of recovering Acadia, wished the Acadians to remain where they were, a growing hostile population around a weak English garrison. The English, on the other hand, seeing the impossibility of securing the loyalty of the peasantry, wished to be rid of them, and in the end deported large numbers of them to other lands.
The main agents of mischief were on the one side French priests, political and religious fanatics, who threatened and cajoled their flocks; on the other the British Government, which left Acadia to take care of itself. It is deplorable to read the accounts given of Annapolis, as Port Royal was now called, and of the state of its garrison. What should have been the strong and thriving capital of a British province, remained for years nothing more than practically a very weak outpost in the enemy's country.
A long time passed in vainly attempting to make theAcadians swear allegiance to the King of England. At length, in 1730, Governor Philipps reported that he had succeeded in persuading each adult member of the population to 'promise and solemnly swear on the faith of a Christian that I will be thoroughly faithful and will truly obey his Majesty George II'; but the adoption of this form of words had little effect on the minds or the conduct of the French settlers. Strength to insist on loyalty and to punish traitorous dealing was not supplied from home; the Governors were unable to enforce their proclamations, and the governed were irritated by orders which were not carried into effect. Meanwhile, from 1720 onwards, Louisbourg grew up in artificial strength, the Dunkirk of America, the most powerful fortress on the Atlantic coast. Money and soldiers came out from France, while the British possession almost under the guns of the fortress was starved and neglected. To reconquer Acadia for the French, writes the eye-witness of the siege of Louisbourg in 1745, 'it was only necessary to appear before this English colony ... and to land a few men'; and yet in 1745 Acadia had been in British keeping for thirty-five years.
On the mainland, French policy was the same as in the Acadian peninsula, nominally to keep the peace, secretly to incite the natives to war. For generations the Abenaki Indians had raided at frequent intervals the New England frontier; yet fear and the necessities of trade might at length have kept them quiet, had it not been for the instigation of the Canadian Government and its priestly agents. In 1713, and again in 1717, Abenaki chiefs had come to terms with Massachusetts; but there could be no peace as long as the savages were carefully instructed that the English were the enemies of their religion and the robbers of their lands. The savages were in truth in a hard case. Peace meant the aggressive growth of the white men's settlements, inevitable encroachment on the red men's heritage. Warmeant cutting off the New England trade, and inadequate support from France. They sent to Quebec to ask what aid they might expect from Canada. 'I will send you in secret,' said the Governor Vaudreuil, 'tomahawks, powder, and shot.' It was such a reply as the English Governors of New York had been wont to give to the Iroquois; and the Abenakis, like the Iroquois, were little satisfied with it. To fight the battles of France while the French looked on, was not what the Indians wished or understood. Yet their priests taught them to do it, and the Canadian Government stiffened their resolution by sending in mission Indians from Canada.
The foremost French emissary among the Abenaki Indians at this time was a Jesuit priest, Sebastian Rasle, keen in controversy, uncompromising in zeal, a bitter foe of the English, but not so utterly inhuman as were some of his colleagues. His mission was among the Norridgewocks, high up on the Kennebec river, where the head waters of that river flowing down to the Atlantic are at no very great distance from the Chaudière river which runs into the St. Lawrence. Against this place, in August, 1724, a strong body of men was sent from Massachusetts. They rowed up the Kennebec in whaleboats, and, landing at some distance below the Indian village, marched on it, and took it by surprise. Rasle was shot dead, the Indians were killed or dispersed, their homes were burnt to the ground; and the expedition returned in safety, having struck a strong and relentless blow at a centre of French and Indian hostility to the English colonists. War went on for some little time longer, and the English raided the tribes of the Penobscot. At length, in 1726, the Indians came to terms; and a peace was concluded which lasted for many years, dépôts being established at various points, where the natives could to their advantage barter furs with the traders of New England.
The principal point to notice in the dreary record ofmurder and pillage is the attitude of the Canadian Government and their superiors in France. Letters were intercepted, proving beyond dispute that the Indians were acting under the direct encouragement of the French authorities. In time of peace and nominal friendship the old struggle was ever going on. North America was a chessboard. On the French side the Indians were in front, pawns in the game. Behind them was the King temporarily in check, bishops or their representatives, half-breed knights of tortuous movement, and the castles of Louisbourg and Quebec.
The mouth of the Niagara river had long been held in intermittent fashion by the French, and by 1720, in spite of jealous opposition on the part of the Five Nation Indians, a permanent fort was built there. The English in their turn, in the year 1727, established and garrisoned a trading fort at Oswego, on the southern shore of Lake Ontario,3Burnet, the Governor of New York, finding the necessary funds, as the colonial Legislature would not vote the money. The establishment of this station was a serious blow to French trade, nullifying to a large extent the advantage of holding Niagara. In vain the Canadians tried to incite the Five Nations to destroy it; and in vain, in 1749, they planted a rival post, Fort Rouillé, at Toronto,4on the other side of the lake, to command the direct route to Lake Huron by Lake Simcoe. To Oswego the Indians brought their furs, and the traffic enriched the Iroquois and their English neighbours in New York.
3See the letter from Governor Burnet to the Board of Trade, dated New York, May 9, 1727: 'I have this spring sent up workmen to build a stone house of strength at a place called Oswego, at the mouth of the Onnondage river, where our principal trade with the far Nations is carried on. I have obtained the consent of the Six Nations to build it.' Papers relating to Oswego in O'Callaghan'sDocumentary History of New York,vol. i, p. 447.
4The name of Toronto appears before the founding of this fort. On the old maps, i.e. on Delisle's map of Canada, published in 1703, Lake Simcoe appears as Lake Toronto.
But, menacing as was this outpost on the lake to thecommercial interests of Canada, greater danger threatened both New England and New York from another move made by the French. Far up on Lake Champlain, at the point where the lake narrows into a wide river, stretching many miles to the south, there is a small isthmus on the western side standing out boldly in the lake. It was known to the English as Crown Point; and here in 1731, at the instance of a well-known French officer, the Chevalier Saint Luc de la Corne, the French built a fort commanding the strait, and named it Fort St. Frederic. The English colonies protested, but did not use united force to back their protests; and the position remained, fortified in time of peace, an evidence of French claims and a base for future attack.
War began again in March, 1744, and in May the French commander at Louisbourg took action. There was a small fishing village at Canso, on the narrow arm of the sea which divides Nova Scotia from Cape Breton Island. It was guarded by a blockhouse, garrisoned by about eighty English soldiers. A far stronger force from Louisbourg came against it, the garrison surrendered, and the place was burnt. The Frenchman who commanded the expedition, Duvivier, a descendant of La Tour, was then sent to attack Annapolis, and appeared before it in August. Ill fortified, ill garrisoned, the little town had at least a good English officer in charge—Major Mascarene, of Huguenot descent. The French offered terms of capitulation, threatening the arrival of more troops from Louisbourg; but these reinforcements did not arrive, the Acadians did not rise in mass, and in September the besiegers disappeared, having effected nothing.
Neglected by the British Government, Acadia was valued by New England. Massachusetts had in past years taken and held Port Royal, and knew well that English interests in America were not compatible with the French regaining the Acadian peninsula. The taking of Canso, the attemptto take Port Royal or Annapolis, roused the 'Bostonnais,' and led to an enterprise second to none in colonial history.
The Governor of Massachusetts at the time was William Shirley. A Sussex man, son of a merchant in the City of London, bred to the law, he had gone out to Boston in 1731, and in ten years' time, by judicious pushing, became Governor of the colony. He was a layman with military instincts, and, taking up the rôle of Cato, never ceased to preach to the ministers at home and to his fellow colonists on the spot, that Canada must be conquered, and the French driven from North America. His policy was good and clearsighted, his military ability was of no large order; but, like William Phipps, while he loved himself, he loved his country also; and eventually, after falling under a cloud, and being relegated to the government of the Bahamas, he came back to end his days in Massachusetts as a private citizen, and was buried at Boston in 1771.
To this enterprising man, it is said, the idea of attacking Louisbourg with colonial forces was suggested by William Vaughan, a New Englander, interested in the fishing trade on the coast of Maine. The scheme seemed a wild one. A fortress strong, as far as the newest military skill and unlimited money could strengthen it, was to be attacked and taken by untrained colonists. Yet there were solid hopes of success, and the dream came true. The English prisoners, carried from Canso to Louisbourg, had been sent on to Boston, and told of the actual condition of the French. The garrison at Louisbourg was not very numerous: they were ill commanded and mutinous. If the fortifications were formidable, within them were the elements of weakness.
Shirley called the Massachusetts Assembly together in secret session, and propounded his scheme for an expedition against Louisbourg. The scheme was rejected. Soon afterwards a petition in its favour was presented from Boston and other coast towns: the question came again before theAssembly, and the proposals were carried by one vote. All the English colonies down to and including Pennsylvania were invited to help; but, though New York sent a little money and a few guns, the enterprise was practically left to New England alone. Massachusetts contributed about 3,000 men, Connecticut, 500; and William Pepperell, shipbuilder and merchant of Kittery Point, Maine, was named as commander. He was of Devonshire descent, a colonel of militia, and, though he had little military experience, he was a man of good judgement and common sense.
A request had been sent to England for ships of war, and Warren, the English commodore at Antigua in the West Indies, was asked to bring his squadron. When the message reached him, he was without orders from home, and refused to sail; but almost immediately afterwards permission came, and he left at once for the North American coast, joining the expedition, which had already started, at their rendezvous at Canso.
It was on March 24, 1745 that the New Englanders left Boston; on or about April 4 the transports began to arrive at Canso. They carried men who knew little or nothing of scientific warfare, and for whom amateur strategists had drawn up fantastic plans of campaign; but they were colonists of tough English breed, their Puritan proclivities had been strengthened by the Methodist revival, and the great preacher, George Whitfield, had given to Pepperell for the motto of the expedition 'Nil desperandum Christo duce.'
'Louisbourg is built upon a tongue of land which stretches out into the sea and gives the town an oblong shape. It is about half a league in circumference.'5The tongue of land in question is part of a larger peninsula running out to the south and east from the coast of Cape Breton Island. The little promontory, which was covered by thetown and fortifications of Louisbourg, has an almost due easterly direction, and it is prolonged to the east by reefs ending in a small rocky island, on which the French erected a battery to command the mouth of the harbour, the channel being about half a mile wide. The harbour lay to the north and north-east of the town; on the other side was the ocean. To the west of the whole peninsula, of which the Louisbourg promontory was but a small part, is a large semicircular bay, known as Gabarus Bay. Surrounded by the sea on all sides but one, on that one side—the western side—the town was strongly protected by a ditch and rampart, outside which was marshy ground. Moreover, almost due north of the town, on the edge of the harbour, was a battery, known as the Grand Battery, over against the Island Battery which has been already mentioned. Nature, French money, and French engineers had combined to make a stronghold, which seemed almost impregnable.
5From the anonymousLettre d'un habitant de Louisbourg,translated by Professor Wrong, pp. 27, 28.
The garrison consisted of between 500 and 600 regular troops, with 1,300 to 1,400 militia.6Among the regulars were Swiss soldiers, who had mutinied at the preceding Christmas time and infected their French comrades with the spirit of insubordination. They mutinied, it was said, about their rations, as to the 'butter and bacon' which the King supplied. In Louisbourg, as elsewhere in Canada, peculation was rife, and officers and commissaries made profit at the privates' expense. The Governor, Duquesnel, had died in the previous October. His successor, Duchambon, was not the man for a crisis. The walls were there and brave men behind them, but confidence in a determined and prescient leader was wanting; and, as the consequence of maladministration, we read that 'the regular soldiers were distrusted, so that it was necessary to charge the inhabitants with the most dangerous duties.'
6It is difficult to make out from theLettre d'un habitantwhether or not the 1,300 to 1,400 men included the regulars, but probably not.
Having waited for about three weeks at Canso, and rebuilt and garrisoned the blockhouse, the New Englanders went on to their destination. On April 30 the transports sailed into Gabarus Bay, making for Flat Point, three miles due west of Louisbourg. A small French force was detached to oppose them; but the boats made good their landing, two miles further to the west, at a little inlet called Freshwater Cove. Here the whole force of 4,000 men was disembarked; and, two days later, a party under Vaughan, having marched behind the town, found the Grand Battery deserted and occupied it, turning its guns in due course upon their rightful owners. The precipitate abandonment of this battery by the French, on the ground that its defences were inadequate, proved a fatal blunder, giving the besiegers a firm position in the rear of the town, whereas the direct attack was over swamp and marsh.
The siege now began in earnest. Warren's squadron, which was at a later stage reinforced from England, blockaded the harbour, and on May 19 achieved an important success in capturing theVigilant,a large French ship of war, whose supplies of food and ammunition, destined for the garrison, passed instead into the hands of the besiegers. Warren could not however enter the harbour, as long as the Island Battery commanded the entrance.
The bulk of the work fell on the land force, and well they did it. Ill clothed, ill housed, suffering so much from exposure and privations, that at one time out of 4,000 men little more than one-half were fit for duty, without transport, dragging the guns themselves across the morasses, without skilled engineers, and with hardly any trained gunners, they none the less pushed the siege with boisterous audacity, mingling religious fervour with schoolboy recklessness. They fought better in this way—their own way—than by adhering to strict military rule, and their commander, William Pepperell, knew his men. His was a difficult task.There was some little friction between the King's man and the colonist, but, on the whole, Warren on the sea and Pepperell on the land worked in harmony, due in no small measure to the tact and good sense of the New England commander.
There was a further danger to the besiegers, of attack from the mainland side. Canadians and Indians were reported to be marching to the relief of the garrison. They were a party sent from Canada to besiege Annapolis, who drew off and marched for Louisbourg on receiving an urgent message for help from Duchambon, but arrived only in time to hear that the town had surrendered and to retreat again in safety into Acadia.
As long as the Island Battery remained intact, it was or seemed impossible to attack from the sea. Accordingly an attempt was made to take it. At midnight, on May 26, a storming party put out in boats from the Grand Battery, and rowed to the strongly fortified rock on which the Island Battery stood. The result was an entire failure. Firing under cover, the French wrecked many of the boats, and shot down the soldiers who landed. The English lost 189 men, being nearly half the attacking force, 119 of whom were taken prisoners. It was clear that the battery could not be taken by assault, and the besiegers proceeded gradually to cripple it by mounting guns on Lighthouse Point, being the opposite side of the narrow entrance to the harbour. These guns did good execution, and, while the Island Battery lost its sting, the defences of the town on the land side were steadily weakened by the besiegers' fire.
At length Warren and Pepperell decided that the time had come to assault the town simultaneously by land and sea. The French saw what was intended; they were worn with fatigue and anxiety; their houses were riddled with shot and shell; and the townspeople urged the Governor to capitulate. Fair terms were granted by the English commanders, who knew that their own position was none too secure. Thegarrison was allowed to march out with the honours of war, and safe transport to France was guaranteed to the officers and men, as well as to the inhabitants of Louisbourg, on the promise that none should bear arms against England for the space of a year. On these conditions Duchambon surrendered, and on June 17, after a siege of forty-seven days, the English became masters of Louisbourg.
The capitulation was made jointly to Pepperell and Warren. The French eye-witness of the siege is at pains to distinguish between them; for Warren he has nothing but praise, for Pepperell the reverse. 'Mr. Warren,' he writes, 'is a young man about thirty-five years old, very handsome, and full of the noblest sentiments.' Against Pepperell he brings charges of bad faith in carrying out the terms of the capitulation, adding, 'What could we expect from a man who, it is said, is the son of a shoemaker at Boston?' As a matter of fact, Pepperell, on occupying Louisbourg, kept his undisciplined men well in hand, much to their disgust, and little loot rewarded their weeks of toil and suffering. To Warren's sailors, on the other hand, there accrued a large amount of prize-money; for, by the device of keeping the French flag flying after the surrender of the town had taken place, various French vessels were decoyed and captured.
In after years, when the American colonies had taken arms against the mother country, men argued as to whether the taking of Louisbourg was due to the English sailors and their commander, or to the colonists. As a matter of fact, neither without the other could have achieved success, but the enterprise was conceived by the colonists, on the colonists fell the brunt of the fighting, and to them, not to England, the chief credit was due. 'The enterprise,' says the French writer already quoted, 'was less that of the nation or of the King than of the inhabitants of New England alone.' It was in truth a wonderful feat, and till our own times it was never sufficiently appreciated.
There was rejoicing in England; but England in the year 1745, the year of the Jacobite rebellion, had other sights before her eyes, and other sounds in the ears of her people. It may well have been, too, that joy at success over the enemy of the nation was alloyed by uneasy and unworthy consciousness of the growing strength and self-confidence of the New England beyond the sea. But to Boston the tidings were tidings of unmixed joy and pride. The Lord had risen to fight for His chosen people, the dour and stubborn Puritan, and the stronghold of the idolaters was laid low.
'Good Lord,' said the old and usually long-winded Chaplain Moody, in his grace before dinner at the end of the siege, 'we have so much to thank Thee for that time will be too short, and we must leave it for eternity.'7
7Quoted in Parkman'sA Half Century of Conflict(1892 ed.), vol. ii, p. 153.
A General Thanksgiving was held at Boston on Thursday July 18, 1745. At the South Church in that city the Rev. Thomas Prince, one of the pastors, preached on the great New England victory. He took for his text 'This is the Lord's doing: it is marvellous in our eyes'; and his sermon, which has been preserved to us,8well illustrates the view which the Puritans of Massachusetts took of their success. The hand of the Lord was visible to them in every detail of the 'most adventurous enterprise against the French settlements at Cape Breton and their exceeding strong city of Louisbourg, for warlike power the pride and terror of these northern seas.' The preacher recounted the advantages which the island gave to France, its abundance of pit coal, its commodious harbours, 'its happy situation inthe centre of our fishery at the entrance of the Bay and River of Canada.' He noted the natural and artificial strength of the walled city, added to for thirty years, until Louisbourg became 'the Dunkirk of North America, and in some respects of greater importance.' He traced the finger of God in the circumstances preliminary to and attending its capture; how the British prisoners, carried to Louisbourg, on their return to Boston brought information 'whereby we came to be more acquainted with their situation and the proper places of landing and attacking'; how the New Englander had accounts 'of the uneasiness of the Switzers there for want of pay and provision'; how the weather was fair, the men were willing, supplies were plentiful; how God guided the decision of the Court of Representatives, and timed the arrival of 'the brave and active Commodore Warren, a great friend to these Plantations.' The landing, the taking of the Grand Battery, the 'happy harmony between our various officers,' even disease, reverse, toil and labour, all were signs of a particular Providence working out His great design and leading His people into a place of shelter. Thus was Louisbourg taken 'by means of so small a number, less than 4,000 land men, unused to war, undisciplined, and that had never seen a siege in their lives.' 'As it was,' said the preacher, referring to the Treaty of Utrecht, 'one of the chief disgraces of Queen Anne's reign to resign this island to the French, it is happily one of the glories of King George II's to restore it to the British empire.' The measure of joy at the taking of Louisbourg must also have been the measure of disappointment at its subsequent retrocession by the terms of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle.
8Extraordinary events, the doings of God, and marvellous in pious eyes. Illustrated in a sermon at the South Church in Boston (New England), on the General Thanksgiving, Thursday, July 18, 1745. Occasioned by taking the city of Louisbourg, on the isle of Cape Breton, by New England soldiers, assisted by a British squadron. By Thomas Prince, M.A. Pamphlet, Boston and London, 5th ed. 1746. Dedicated to H. E. William Shirley.
Of the two men who led the English to victory on this memorable occasion, Pepperell was made a baronet—the first colonist to receive that honour: he lived to help his countrymen still further in their struggle with France. Through his exertions a royal regiment was raised inAmerica, and the New England shipping yards added a fine frigate to the British navy. He died in 1759, holding the commission of Lieutenant-General in the British army.
Warren, in 1747, took part, as second in command, in Anson's naval victory over the French off Cape Finisterre, and in the same year he was elected member of Parliament for Westminster. He died in 1752, at the age of forty-nine, one of the richest commoners in England; and a monument to him stands in the north transept of Westminster Abbey. It tells that he was a 'Knight of the Bath, a Vice Admiral of the Red Squadron of the fleet, and member of the City and Liberty of Westminster'; but it does not tell how close was his sympathy with the English in America, married, as he was, to an American lady, and owner of estates in Manhattan Island and on the Mohawk river; nor, amid the verbiage of eighteenth-century adulation, is there any mention of the part which he took in helping the New England colonists to conquer Louisbourg.
The New Englanders garrisoned Louisbourg for the better part of a year. The soldiers were discontented, with some reason. Their success had brought them little or no profit: they wanted to be back on their farms: the town which they occupied was dismantled and insanitary; pestilence broke out, and 'the people died like rotten sheep.'9Shirley came up from Boston to keep the soldiers quiet, but not till April, 1746, were the colonists relieved by regular troops, sent from Gibraltar. Warren then took sole command for a short time, being succeeded by another sailor, Commodore Knowles.
9Quoted in Parkman'sA Half Century of Conflict,vol. ii, p. 166.
Shirley intended the capture of Louisbourg to be but the beginning of the end, the end being the conquest of Canada. The French Government, on the other hand, were determined to recover their fortress. Each was for the time disappointed. In the early months of 1746, the colonies,elated by their recent and great success, cheerfully answered to the call for soldiers to invade Canada. The home Government promised eight battalions, and had them ready for embarkation at Portsmouth; the plan of campaign—the usual plan of dual invasion by the St. Lawrence and Lake Champlain—was duly outlined; Quebec was thrown into a state of alarm and hurried preparation, when, as so often before, all came to nothing, owing to the shuffling and delays of the ministers of the Crown, in this instance the incompetent Duke of Newcastle. The troops destined for America were diverted to Europe; one more opportunity was lost; one more nail was driven into the coffin of colonial loyalty. Realizing, as the autumn of 1746 drew on, that an invasion of Canada was now out of the question, Shirley determined to attack the French advanced position at Crown Point with the New York and Massachusetts levies; but this plan, too, was frustrated by news of a coming fleet from France, and the fears of Quebec were transferred to Boston.
The fleet in question left La Rochelle at midsummer in the year 1746. It consisted of twenty-one ships of war and a number of transports, carrying 3,000 troops. The whole was under the command of the Duc d'Anville. Disaster in the form of tempest and pestilence attended the expedition from first to last. The ships were scattered on the ocean, and it was not until the end of September that the admiral, with three ships, reached Chebucto (now Halifax) harbour. Here, while waiting for the rest of the fleet, he died; and the vice-admiral, D'Estournel, arriving immediately afterwards, saw no hope for the shattered expedition but to return to France. His officers, on the other hand, urged an attack on Annapolis, and D'Estournel, in a fit of mortification and mental distress, put an end to his life. The command now devolved on the Marquis de la Jonquière, a naval officer, who had gone out on board the fleet to take over thegovernment of Canada. He waited into October at Chebucto, the Acadians brought him provisions, but his men still died of disease day by day. He sailed for Annapolis, but encountered fresh storms off Cape Sable; and at length the miserable remains of the fleet made their way back to France, the loss of life having been, it was said, 2,500 men. In the following year, 1747, La Jonquière again set out from France in another fleet, but again he failed to reach Canada; the ships were encountered and defeated off Cape Finisterre by Anson and Warren, and the outgoing Governor of Canada was carried a prisoner to England.
The main operations of the war were supplemented by the usual series of raids from Canada. In the winter of 1745, Fort Saratoga, thirty-six miles from Albany, was attacked and taken by French and Indians from Crown Point; the place was burnt, and its inhabitants were carried into captivity. It was again reoccupied by the English, but in 1747 was evacuated and burnt as indefensible, to the disgust of the Five Nation Indians, who looked upon the proceeding as evidence of weakness and cowardice. Another successful French attack was made, in August, 1746, on Fort Massachusetts, standing on an eastern tributary of the Hudson, on the line of communication between Albany and the Connecticut river. In short, for three years, the borders of New York, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire were harried by Canadians and Indians, using the French fort at Crown Point as their base.
But the most notable success in this petty warfare was achieved on the Acadian frontier. The isthmus of Chignecto, which connects the Nova Scotian peninsula with the mainland, was, at the time of D'Anville's expedition, held by a comparatively strong force of Canadians under De Ramesay. Fearing for the safety of Annapolis and the rest of Acadia, Shirley sent reinforcements from Massachusetts, consisting of some 500 men under Colonel Noble, who in December,1746, reached the Basin of Mines, and occupied the village of Grand Pré. They were quartered throughout the village, taking no sufficient precautions against surprise; Ramesay therefore, on hearing of the position, determined towards the latter end of January to attack them. He had with him the best of the Canadian partisan leaders; and unable, owing to an accident, to take personal charge of the expedition, he placed the command in the hands of Coulon de Villiers.
In the depth of winter, with sledges and snow-shoes, the French set out; they started from the isthmus on January 23, on February 10 they were on the outskirts of Grand Pré. Under cover of night, one party and another attacked the detached houses in which the English were lodged; Colonel Noble and over seventy of his followers were killed; sixty were wounded, fifty-four were taken prisoners. The rest capitulated, on condition of safe return to Annapolis; and on February 14 they marched out, leaving Grand Pré in the hands of the French, who in their turn shortly afterwards retired to their old position at Chignecto. It was a brilliant feat of arms, but, like most of these border attacks, had no lasting effect. Grand Pré was in a few weeks' time reoccupied by the English; and not long afterwards the French retired from the Acadian frontier into Canada.
The war, known in history as the War of the Austrian Succession, had brought to none of the combatants much honour or profit. On the continent the Austrians and their English allies met with little success, on the sea the French were equally unsuccessful. The end was a peace, as between England and France, based on the principle of mutual restitution, such a peace as left the seeds of future war. England gave back Louisbourg and Cape Breton Island, France gave back Madras, which had surrendered in 1746 to Labourdonnais. The treaty contained the somewhat humiliatingprovision, that English hostages should be given to France until the restitution of Louisbourg had actually taken place.
In July, 1749, the French re-entered their fortress; and in the same year a large body of settlers was sent out by the British Government to Chebucto harbour, where the city of Halifax was founded. The settlement was designed to be a rival to Louisbourg. Its foundation was evidence that the Imperial Government was at length not wholly indifferent to the value of Acadia; and Halifax is almost unique, among English cities in America, in having owed its origin to the direct action of the State. But no founding of new townships, we may well imagine, could compensate the New Englanders for losing the fruits of their victory. It is said that the first answer of King George II, when pressed to give back Louisbourg to France was that it belonged not to him but to the people of Boston. If these were his words, he spoke truly; the Massachusetts men had won the town, and England gave it away. Yet on no other terms could peace be secured; and it is not easy to pass a fair criticism on the transaction. Then, as now, England had to reckon with conflicting interests within her Empire. Then, as now, she had self-governing colonies which necessarily did not see eye to eye on all points with the mother country. The horizon of New England was bounded by the Atlantic, and the fate of a factory in the East Indies, or even international arrangements on the continent of Europe, were beyond the colonists' ken. They saw only that their blood and their money had been given in vain, and that the fortress, which they had wrested from France, was hers again. English statesmen, on the other hand, looked east as well as west; and near home, across the Channel, was the spectacle of campaigns that brought more loss than gain. As successful war in Europe had given Acadia to the English, so want of success in thesame quarter reacted on America. The account was made up, the balance was struck, and the retrocession of Louisbourg was the price of peace. But it was a heavy price to pay, for it seemed to have been paid by the American colonists alone; and, had not another war soon followed, and Louisbourg been again taken by a general whom the Americans loved, the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle might have passed into history as not merely a disappointment but an irretrievable disaster.
French exploration in North America followed, as has been seen, the line of the lakes and the rivers. From Louisiana, in the first half of the eighteenth century, various expeditions were made in a westerly direction—up the Red River, the Arkansas, the Missouri, and its tributary the Kansas river—the object of the French explorers being to enter into friendly relations with the Comanches and other Indians of the western plains, and gradually to open up trade with New Mexico and the city of Santa Fé; in other words, to reach Spanish America, an object which did not commend itself to Spain.
Before the year 1700, the course of the upper Mississippi was known. Nicolas Perrot, in or about 1685, is said to have established posts where the river widens out into Lake Pepin; and further north, Frenchcoureurs de bois,orvoyageurs,as they began to be called, gained information of the Lake of the Woods, and of the Lac des Assiniboines, now Lake Winnipeg. The principal Indian tribes in the regions of the upper Mississippi were Sioux; and, with a view to making them friends to France, and penetrating through their country to the western sea, the Jesuit traveller Charlevoix recommended, in 1723, that a mission should be established among them. A few years later, in 1727, a company was formed for trading in the Sioux country, and built a new fort on Lake Pepin called, after the then Governor of Canada, Fort Beauharnois. The Sioux, however,proved intractable neighbours, and ten years later the fort was abandoned.
In 1728, there was a small French outpost at Nipigon, at the western end of Lake Superior, on its northern side—where the river Nipigon flows from the lake of the same name into Lake Superior. The commander was Pierre de Varennes de la Verendrye, son of a lieutenant of the Carignan Regiment, who had settled at and been Governor of Three Rivers. As a young man, La Verendrye had crossed the sea to fight in the armies of France, and had been badly wounded on the field of Malplaquet. He lived to leave his name high in the list of western explorers. At his distant station on Lake Superior, he heard the stories that Indians brought, mixture of fact and fable, of waters to the west that led to the long-sought-for sea; he offered to follow up the clue, and, with the usual opposition from jealous Canadian merchants, and the usual barren authority from the French Government to explore at his own expense, in return for the grant of a monopoly of the fur trade to the west and north of Lake Superior, he gave the rest of his life to western discovery.
As the water-parting between the basin of the St. Lawrence and that of the Mississippi is hardly marked by any height of land, so the divide between the chain of lakes which feed the St. Lawrence and the more westerly waters, of which Lake Winnipeg is the centre, is a slight rise of ground which it is difficult to distinguish on the maps. A low range of hills runs round the western end of Lake Superior, at the highest point not more than 1,000 feet above the level of the lake. These uplands separate the tributaries of Lake Superior and the St. Lawrence from the feeders of Lake Winnipeg. There were two routes across the divide, one leaving Lake Superior at Thunder Bay, near the point where Port Arthur now stands, and following for a short distance the present line of the Canadian Pacific Railway;the other a little further south, leaving the lake at or near Pigeon river, and going westward along the present boundary line between Canada and the United States. On this latter route was the Grand Portage, by which thevoyageurscrossed the water-parting at about sixty miles distance from Lake Superior, and reached Rainy Lake. Rainy Lake drains into the Lake of the Woods, and the Lake of the Woods drains into Lake Winnipeg. This last great lake, fed by the Saskatchewan, the Assiniboine, the Red River, and many other rivers and lakes, finds its outlet by the Nelson river to Hudson Bay, and a chain of posts carried from Lake Superior to Lake Winnipeg would tend to divert the western fur trade from Hudson Bay to the St. Lawrence.
In the summer of 1731, La Verendrye started west by the Grand Portage; and in the next eight or nine years established posts along the water line, from Rainy Lake to where the Saskatchewan river enters Lake Winnipeg from the north-west. One of these forts or stations was Fort La Reine on the Assiniboine river, which formed the starting-point for an advance over the western plains through what is now the State of Dakota. In 1742, two of his sons made their way from the Assiniboine to the Missouri, crossed the latter river, and, traversing the prairies in a westerly and south-westerly direction, reached the country drained by the tributaries of the Yellowstone river. How far they went is matter of conjecture, and doubt is thrown on their claim to have been the first discoverers of the Rocky mountains. It is stated that, on January 1, 1743, they came in sight of high mountains, which are supposed to have been the Bighorn range in Wyoming and Montana, an eastern buttress of the Rocky mountains, lying in front of the Yellowstone National Park; but no mention is made in the story of snowy peaks, such as would indicate discovery of the great mountain barrier of America. The explorerscame back in fifteen months' time. Their father died in 1749, and, like other pioneers, they reaped but little fruit, in honour or in profit, from all their labours. They did not find the western sea, they possibly did not descry the Rocky mountains; but to La Verendrye and his sons it must be credited that a new water area in the far west was fully made known to the world, and that trade routes were opened beyond the basin of the St. Lawrence and the basin of the Mississippi, reaching to the great Saskatchewan river and to the waters which flow into Hudson Bay.
The Rocky mountains, as we know them, were not known in the eighteenth century.10In 1793 Sir Alexander Mackenzie crossed them far in the North, by the line of the Peace river, and reached the Pacific Ocean on the coast of British Columbia; but the full revelation of the main range dates from the year 1805, when Lewis and Clarke followed the Missouri to its source, and thence made their way over the mountain barrier to the western sea. In short, as long as Canada was New France, and for years afterwards, it was for trading and for colonizing purposes a region of inland waters; it was not also, as it now is, a land of plains, with a background of giant mountains, and behind them the further ocean. Yet it was to reach the further ocean that Europeans first came into Canada, and the earnest expectation of the earliestexplorers has in our own time found more than fulfilment in a Dominion from sea to sea.
10In Jeffreys'American Atlas,1775, the Assiniboils (sic) or St. Charles river is prolonged to the Pacific by a dotted line, entitled the 'River of the West.' Below it a range of mountains is traced from north to south, with the note, 'Hereabouts are supposed to be the mountains of bright stones mentioned in the map of the Indian Ochagach.' In Carver'sTravels through North America in 1766-8,published in 1778, p. 121, the Rocky mountains 'are called the Shining Mountains from an infinite number of chrystal stones of amazing size with which they are covered, and which, when the sun shines full upon them, sparkle so as to be seen at a very great distance.' Morse'sAmerican Geography,1794, shows the Rocky mountains on the map of America. In the text they are called 'Shining Mountains.' In Arrowsmith'sMap of North America,dated 1795-6, they are called Stony Mountains. In a later edition of 1811 the name 'Rocky Mountains' appears.