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A Half Century of Conflict, Volume II

F >> Francis Parkman >> A Half Century of Conflict, Volume II




Pepperrell managed the critical work of landing with creditable skill. The
rocks and the surf were more dangerous than the enemy. Several boats,
filled with men, rowed towards Flat Point; but on a signal from the
flagship "Shirley," rowed back again, Morpain flattering himself that his
appearance had frightened them off. Being joined by several other boats,
the united party, a hundred men in all, pulled for another landing-place
called Fresh-water Cove, or Anse de la Cormorandière, two miles farther up
Gabarus Bay. Morpain and his party ran to meet them; but the boats were
first in the race, and as soon as the New England men got ashore, they
rushed upon the French, killed six of them, captured as many more,
including an officer named Boularderie, and put the rest to flight, with
the loss, on their own side, of two men slightly wounded.
[Footnote: _Pepperrell to Shirley, 12 May 1745. Shirley to
Newcastle, 28 Oct. 1745. Journal of the Siege,_ attested
by Pepperrell and four other chief officers (London, 1746).] Further
resistance to the landing was impossible, for a swarm of boats pushed
against the rough and stony beach, the men dashing through the surf, till
before night about two thousand were on shore. [Footnote: Bigot says six
thousand, or two thousand more than the whole New England force, which was
constantly overestimated by the French.] The rest, or about two thousand
more, landed at their leisure on the next day.

On the 2d of May Vaughan led four hundred men to the hills near the town,
and saluted it with three cheers,--somewhat to the discomposure of the
French, though they describe the unwelcome visitors as a disorderly crowd.
Vaughan's next proceeding pleased them still less. He marched behind the
hills, in rear of the Grand Battery, to the northeast arm of the harbor,
where there were extensive magazines of naval stores. These his men set on
fire, and the pitch, tar, and other combustibles made a prodigious smoke.
He was returning, in the morning, with a small party of followers behind
the hills, when coming opposite the Grand Battery, and observing it from
the ridge, he saw neither flag on the flagstaff, nor smoke from the barrack
chimneys. One of his party was a Cape Cod Indian. Vaughan bribed him with a
flask of brandy which he had in his pocket,--though, as the clerical
historian takes pains to assure us, he never used it himself,--and the
Indian, pretending to be drunk, or, as some say, mad, staggered towards the
battery to reconnoitre. [Footnote: Belknap, II.] All was quiet. He
clambered in at an embrasure, and found the place empty. The rest of the
party followed, and one of them, William Tufts, of Medford, a boy of
eighteen, climbed the flagstaff, holding in his teeth his red coat, which
he made fast at the top, as a substitute for the British flag,--a
proceeding that drew upon him a volley of unsuccessful cannon-shot from the
town batteries. [Footnote: John Langdon Sibley, in _N. E. Hist, and Gen.
Register_, XXV. 377. The _Boston Gazette_ of 3 June, 1771, has a
notice of Tufts's recent death, with an exaggerated account of his exploit,
and an appeal for aid to his destitute family.]

Vaughan then sent this hasty note to Pepperrell: "May it please your Honour
to be informed that by the grace of God and the courage of 13 men, I
entered the Royal Battery about 9 o'clock, and am waiting for a
reinforcement and a flag." Soon after, four boats, filled with men,
approached from the town to re-occupy the battery,--no doubt in order to
save the munitions and stores, and complete the destruction of the cannon.
Vaughan and his thirteen men, standing on the open beach, under the fire of
the town and the Island Battery, plied the boats with musketry, and kept
them from landing, till Lieutenant-Colonel Bradstreet appeared with a
reinforcement, on which the French pulled back to Louisbourg. [Footnote:
Vaughan's party seems to have consisted in all of sixteen men, three of
whom took no part in this affair.]

The English supposed that the French in the battery, when the clouds of
smoke drifted over them from the burning storehouses, thought that they
were to be attacked in force, and abandoned their post in a panic. This was
not the case. "A detachment of the enemy," writes the _Habitant de
Louisbourg_, "advanced to the neighborhood of the Royal Battery." This
was Vaughan's four hundred on their way to burn the storehouses. "At once
we were all seized with fright," pursues this candid writer, "and on the
instant it was proposed to abandon this magnificent battery, which would
have been our best defence, if one had known how to use it. Various
councils were held, in a tumultuous way. It would be hard to tell the
reasons for such a strange proceeding. Not one shot had yet been fired at
the battery, which the enemy could not take, except by making regular
approaches, as if against the town itself, and by besieging it, so to
speak, in form. Some persons remonstrated, but in vain; and so a battery of
thirty cannon, which had cost the King immense sums, was abandoned before
it was attacked."

Duchambon says that soon after the English landed, he got a letter from
Thierry, the captain in command of the Royal Battery, advising that the
cannon should be spiked and the works blown up. It was then, according to
the Governor, that the council was called, and a unanimous vote passed to
follow Thierry's advice, on the ground that the defences of the battery
were in bad condition, and that the four hundred men posted there could not
stand against three or four thousand. [Footnote: _Duchambon au Ministre,
2 Sept. 1745_. This is the Governor's official report. "Four hundred
men" is perhaps a copyist's error, the actual number in the battery being
not above two hundred.] The engineer, Verrier, opposed the blowing up of
the works, and they were therefore left untouched. Thierry and his
garrison came off in boats, after spiking the cannon in a hasty way,
without stopping to knock off the trunnions or burn the carriages. They
threw their loose gunpowder into the well, but left behind a good number of
cannon cartridges, two hundred and eighty large bombshells, and other
ordnance stores, invaluable both to the enemy and to themselves. Brigadier
Waldo was sent to occupy the battery with his regiment, and Major Seth
Pomeroy, the gunsmith, with twenty soldier-mechanics, was set at drilling
out the spiked touch-holes of the cannon. These were twenty-eight
forty-two-pounders, and two eighteen-pounders. Several were ready for use
the next morning, and immediately opened on the town,--which, writes a
soldier in his diary, "damaged the houses and made the women cry." "The
enemy," says the _Habitant de Louisbourg_, "saluted us with our own
cannon, and made a terrific fire, smashing everything within range."
[Footnote: _Waldo to Shirley, 12 May, 1745_. Some of the French
writers say twenty-eight thirty-six-pounders, while all the English call
them forty-twos,--which they must have been, as the forty-two-pound shot
brought from Boston fitted them.] [Footnote: Mr. Theodore Roosevelt draws
my attention to the fact that cannon were differently rated in the French
and English navies of the seventeenth century, and that a French thirty-six
carried a ball as large as an English forty-two, or even a little larger.]

The English occupation of the Grand Battery may be called the decisive
event of the siege. There seems no doubt that the French could have
averted the disaster long enough to make it of little help to the invaders.
The water-front of the battery was impregnable. The rear defences consisted
of a loopholed wall of masonry, with a ditch ten feet deep and twelve feet
wide, and also a covered way and glacis, which General Wolcott describes as
unfinished. In this he mistook. They were not unfinished, but had been
partly demolished, with a view to reconstruction. The rear wall was flanked
by two towers, which, says Duchambon, were demolished; but General Wolcott
declares that swivels were still mounted on them, [Footnote: _Journal of
Major-General Wolcott_.] and he adds that "two hundred men might hold
the battery against five thousand without cannon." The English landed their
cannon near Flat Point; and before they could be turned against the Grand
Battery, they must be dragged four miles over hills and rocks, through
spongy marshes and jungles of matted evergreens. This would have required a
week or more. The alternative was an escalade, in which the undisciplined
assailants would no doubt have met a bloody rebuff. Thus this Grand
Battery, which, says Wolcott, "is in fact a fort," might at least have been
held long enough to save the munitions and stores, and effectually disable
the cannon, which supplied the English with the only artillery they had,
competent to the work before them. The hasty abandonment of this important
post was not Duchambon's only blunder, but it was the worst of them all.

On the night after their landing, the New England men slept in the woods,
wet or dry, with or without blankets, as the case might be, and in the
morning set themselves to encamping with as much order as they were capable
of. A brook ran down from the hills and entered the sea two miles or more
from the town. The ground on each side, though rough, was high and dry, and
here most of the regiments made their quarters,--Willard's, Moulton's, and
Moore's on the east side, and Burr's and Pepperrell's on the west. Those on
the east, in some cases, saw fit to extend themselves towards Louisbourg as
far as the edge of the intervening marsh; but were soon forced back to a
safer position by the cannon-balls of the fortress, which came bowling
amongst them. This marsh was that green, flat sponge of mud and moss that
stretched from this point to the glacis of Louisbourg.

There was great want of tents, for material to make them was scarce in New
England. Old sails were often used instead, being stretched over
poles,--perhaps after the fashion of a Sioux teepee. When these could not
be had, the men built huts of sods, with roofs of spruce-boughs overlapping
like a thatch; for at that early season, bark would not peel from the
trees. The landing of guns, munitions, and stores was a formidable task,
consuming many days and destroying many boats, as happened again when
Amherst landed his cannon at this same place. Large flat boats, brought
from Boston, were used for the purpose, and the loads were carried ashore
on the heads of the men, wading through ice-cold surf to the waist, after
which, having no change of clothing, they slept on the ground through the
chill and foggy nights, reckless of future rheumatisms. [Footnote: The
author of _The Importance and Advantage of Cape Breton_ says: "When
the hardships they were exposed to come to be considered, the behaviour of
these men will hardly gain credit. They went ashore wet, had no [dry]
clothes to cover them, were exposed in this condition to cold, foggy
nights, and yet cheerfully underwent these difficulties for the sake of
executing a project they had voluntarily undertaken."]

A worse task was before them. The cannon were to be dragged over the marsh
to Green Hill, a spur of the line of rough heights that half encircled the
town and harbor. Here the first battery was to be planted; and from this
point other guns were to be dragged onward to more advanced stations,--a
distance in all of more than two miles, thought by the French to be
impassable. So, in fact, it seemed; for at the first attempt, the wheels
of the cannon sank to the hubs in mud and moss, then the carriage, and
finally the piece itself slowly disappeared. Lieutenant-Colonel Meserve, of
the New Hampshire regiment, a ship-builder by trade, presently overcame the
difficulty. By his direction sledges of timber were made, sixteen feet long
and five feet wide; a cannon was placed on each of these, and it was then
dragged over the marsh by a team of two hundred men, harnessed with
rope-traces and breast-straps, and wading to the knees. Horses or oxen
would have foundered in the mire. The way had often to be changed, as the
mossy surface was soon churned into a hopeless slough along the line of
march. The work could be done only at night or in thick fog, the men being
completely exposed to the cannon of the town. Thirteen years after, when
General Amherst besieged Louisbourg again, he dragged his cannon to the
same hill over the same marsh; but having at his command, instead of four
thousand militiamen, eleven thousand British regulars, with all appliances
and means to boot, he made a road, with prodigious labor, through the mire,
and protected it from the French shot by an epaulement, or lateral
earthwork. [Footnote: See _Montcalm and Wolfe_, chap. xix.]

Pepperrell writes in ardent words of the cheerfulness of his men "under
almost incredible hardships." Shoes and clothing failed, till many were in
tatters and many barefooted; [Footnote: _Pepperrell to Newcastle, 28
June, 1745._] yet they toiled on with unconquerable spirit, and
within four days had planted a battery of six guns on Green Hill, which was
about a mile from the King's Bastion of Louisbourg. In another week they
had dragged four twenty-two-pound cannon and ten coehorns--gravely called
"cowhorns" by the bucolic Pomeroy--six or seven hundred yards farther, and
planted them within easy range of the citadel. Two of the cannon burst, and
were replaced by four more and a large mortar, which burst in its turn, and
Shirley was begged to send another. Meanwhile a battery, chiefly of
coehorns, had been planted on a hillock four hundred and forty yards from
the West Gate, where it greatly annoyed the French; and on the next night
an advanced battery was placed just opposite the same gate, and scarcely
two hundred and fifty yards from it. This West Gate, the principal gate of
Louisbourg, opened upon the tract of high, firm ground that lay on the left
of the besiegers, between the marsh and the harbor, an arm of which here
extended westward beyond the town, into what was called the Barachois, a
salt pond formed by a projecting spit of sand. On the side of the Barachois
farthest from the town was a hillock on which stood the house of an
_habitant_ named Martissan. Here, on the 20th of May, a fifth battery
was planted, consisting of two of the French forty-two-pounders taken in
the Grand Battery, to which three others were afterwards added. Each of
these heavy pieces was dragged to its destination by a team of three
hundred men over rough and rocky ground swept by the French artillery. This
fifth battery, called the Northwest, or Titcomb's, proved most destructive
to the fortress. [Footnote: _Journal of the Siege_, appended to
Shirley's report to Newcastle; _Duchambon au Ministre_, 2 Sept. 1745;
_Lettre d'un Habitant_; Pomeroy, etc.]

All these operations were accomplished with the utmost ardor and energy,
but with a scorn of rule and precedent that astonished and bewildered the
French. The raw New England men went their own way, laughed at trenches and
zigzags, and persisted in trusting their lives to the night and the fog.
Several writers say that the English engineer Bastide tried to teach them
discretion; but this could hardly be, for Bastide, whose station was
Annapolis, did not reach Louisbourg till the 5th of June, when the
batteries were finished and the siege was nearly ended. A recent French
writer makes the curious assertion that it was one of the ministers, or
army chaplains, who took upon him the vain task of instruction in the art
of war on this occasion. [Footnote: Ferland, _Cours d'Histoire du
Canada_, II. 477. "L'ennemi ne nous attaquoit point dans les formes, et
ne pratiquoit point aucun retranchement pour se couvrir." _Habitant de
Louisbourg_.]

This ignorant and self-satisfied recklessness might have cost the besiegers
dear if the French, instead of being perplexed and startled at the novelty
of their proceedings, had taken advantage of it; but Duchambon and some of
his officers, remembering the mutiny of the past winter, feared to make
sorties, lest the soldiers might desert or take part with the enemy. The
danger of this appears to have been small. Warren speaks with wonder in his
letters of the rarity of desertions, of which there appear to have been but
three during the siege,--one being that of a half-idiot, from whom no
information could be got. A bolder commander would not have stood idle
while his own cannon were planted by the enemy to batter down his walls;
and whatever the risks of a sortie, the risks of not making one were
greater. "Both troops and militia eagerly demanded it, and I believe it
would have succeeded," writes the Intendant, Bigot. [Footnote: _Bigot au
Ministre, 1 Août, 1745._] The attempt was actually made more than
once in a half-hearted way,--notably on the 8th of May, when the French
attacked the most advanced battery, and were repulsed, with little loss on
either side.

The _Habitant de Louisbourg_ says: "The enemy did not attack us with
any regularity, and made no intrenchments to cover themselves." This last
is not exact. Not being wholly demented, they made intrenchments, such as
they were,--at least at the advanced battery; [Footnote: _Diary of Joseph
Sherburn, Captain at the Advanced Battery._] as they would otherwise
have been swept out of existence, being under the concentred fire of
several French batteries, two of which were within the range of a musket
shot.

The scarcity of good gunners was one of the chief difficulties of the
besiegers. As privateering, and piracy also, against Frenchmen and
Spaniards was a favorite pursuit in New England, there were men in
Pepperrell's army who knew how to handle cannon; but their number was
insufficient, and the General sent a note to Warren, begging that he would
lend him a few experienced gunners to teach their trade to the raw hands at
the batteries. Three or four were sent, and they found apt pupils.

Pepperrell placed the advanced battery in charge of Captain Joseph
[Footnote: He signs his name Jos. Sherburn; but in a list of the officers
of the New Hampshire Regiment it appears in full as Joseph.] Sherburn,
telling him to enlist as many gunners as he could. On the next day Sherburn
reported that he had found six, one of whom seems to have been sent by
Warren. With these and a number of raw men he repaired to his perilous
station, where "I found," he says, "a very poor intrenchment. Our best
shelter from the French fire, which was very hot, was hogsheads filled with
earth." He and his men made the West Gate their chief mark; but before they
could get a fair sight of it, they were forced to shoot down the
fish-flakes, or stages for drying cod, that obstructed the view. Some of
their party were soon killed,--Captain Pierce by a cannon-ball, Thomas Ash
by a "bumb," and others by musketry. In the night they improved their
defences, and mounted on them three more guns, one of eighteen-pound
calibre, and the others of forty-two,--French pieces dragged from the Grand
Battery, a mile and three quarters round the Barachois.

The cannon could be loaded only under a constant fire of musketry, which
the enemy briskly returned. The French practice was excellent. A soldier
who in bravado mounted the rampart and stood there for a moment, was shot
dead with five bullets. The men on both sides called to each other in
scraps of bad French or broken English; while the French drank ironical
healths to the New England men, and gave them bantering invitations to
breakfast.

Sherburn continues his diary. "Sunday morning. Began our fire with as much
fury as possible, and the French returned it as warmly from the Citidale
[citadel], West Gate, and North East Battery with Cannon, Mortars, and
continual showers of musket balls; but by 11 o'clock we had beat them all
from their guns." He goes on to say that at noon his men were forced to
stop firing from want of powder, that he went with his gunners to get some,
and that while they were gone, somebody, said to be Mr. Vaughan, brought a
supply, on which the men loaded the forty-two-pounders in a bungling way,
and fired them. One was dismounted, and the other burst; a barrel and a
half-barrel of powder blew up, killed two men, and injured two more. Again:
"Wednesday. Hot fire on both sides, till the French were beat from all
their guns. May 29th went to 2 Gun [Titcomb's] Battery to give the gunners
some directions; then returned to my own station, where I spent the rest of
the day with pleasure, seeing our Shott Tumble down their walls and Flagg
Staff."

The following is the Intendant Bigot's account of the effect of the New
England fire: "The enemy established their batteries to such effect that
they soon destroyed the greater part of the town, broke the right flank of
the King's Bastion, ruined the Dauphin Battery with its spur, and made a
breach at the Porte Dauphine [West Gate], the neighboring wall, and the
sort of redan adjacent." [Footnote: _Bigot au Ministre, 1 Août,
1745._] Duchambon says in addition that the cannon of the right flank of
the King's Bastion could not be served, by reason of the continual fire of
the enemy, which broke the embrasures to pieces; that when he had them
repaired, they were broken to pieces (_démantibulès_) again,--and
nobody could keep his ground behind the wall of the quay, which was shot
through and through and completely riddled. [Footnote: _Duchambon au
Ministre, 2 Sept. 1745._] The town was ploughed with cannon-balls, the
streets were raked from end to end, nearly all the houses damaged, and the
people driven for refuge into the stifling casemates. The results were
creditable to novices in gunnery.

The repeated accidents from the bursting of cannon were no doubt largely
due to unskilful loading and the practice of double-shotting, to which the
over-zealous artillerists are said to have often resorted. [Footnote:
"Another forty-two-pound gun burst at the Grand Battery. All the guns are
in danger of going the same way, by double-shotting them, unless under
better regulation than at present." _Waldo to Pepperrell, 20 May,
1745_.] [Footnote: Waldo had written four days before: "Captain Hale, of
my regiment, is dangerously hurt by the bursting of another gun. He was our
mainstay for gunnery since Captain Rhodes's misfortune" (also caused by the
bursting of a cannon). _Waldo to Pepperrell, 16 May, 1745._]

It is said, in proof of the orderly conduct of the men, that not one of
them was punished during all the siege; but this shows the mild and
conciliating character of the General quite as much as any peculiar merit
of the soldiers. The state of things in and about the camp was compared by
the caustic Dr. Douglas to "a Cambridge Commencement," which academic
festival was then attended by much rough frolic and boisterous horseplay
among the disorderly crowds, white and black, bond and free, who swarmed
among the booths on Cambridge Common. The careful and scrupulous Belknap,
who knew many who took part in the siege, says: "Those who were on the spot
have frequently, in my hearing, laughed at the recital of their own
irregularities, and expressed their admiration when they reflected on the
almost miraculous preservation of the army from destruction." While the
cannon bellowed in the front, frolic and confusion reigned at the camp,
where the men raced, wrestled, pitched quoits, fired at marks,--though
there was no ammunition to spare,--and ran after the French cannon-balls,
which were carried to the batteries, to be returned to those who sent them.
Nor were calmer recreations wanting. "Some of our men went a fishing, about
2 miles off," writes Lieutenant Benjamin Cleaves in his diary: "caught 6
Troutts." And, on the same day, "Our men went to catch Lobsters: caught
30." In view of this truant disposition, it is not surprising that the
besiegers now and then lost their scalps at the hands of prowling Indians
who infested the neighborhood. Yet through all these gambols ran an
undertow of enthusiasm, born in brains still fevered from the "Great
Awakening." The New England soldier, a growth of sectarian hotbeds, fancied
that he was doing the work of God. The army was Israel, and the French were
Canaanitish idolaters. Red-hot Calvinism, acting through generations, had
modified the transplanted Englishman; and the descendant of the Puritans
was never so well pleased as when teaching their duty to other people,
whether by pen, voice, or bombshells. The ragged artillerymen, battering
the walls of papistical Louisbourg, flattered themselves with the notion
that they were champions of gospel truth.

Barefoot and tattered, they toiled on with indomitable pluck and
cheerfulness, doing the work which oxen could not do, with no comfort but
their daily dram of New England rum, as they plodded through the marsh and
over rocks, dragging the ponderous guns through fog and darkness. Their
spirit could not save them from the effects of excessive fatigue and
exposure. They were ravaged with diarrœa and fever, till fifteen hundred
men were at one time on the sick-list, and at another, Pepperrell reported
that of the four thousand only about twenty-one hundred were fit for duty.
[Footnote: _Pepperrell to Warren, 28 May, 1745._] Nearly all at
last recovered, for the weather was unusually good; yet the number fit for
service was absurdly small. Pepperrell begged for reinforcements, but got
none till the siege was ended.

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