The Great Fortress | Page 2

The fishermen of
various nations had frequented different ports all round these shores for
centuries; and, by the irony of fate, the new French capital of Cape
Breton was founded at the entrance to the bay which had long been
known as English Harbour. Everything that rechristening could do,
however, was done to make Cape Breton French. Not only was English
Harbour now called Louisbourg, but St Peter's became Port Toulouse,
St Anne's became Port Dauphin, and the whole island itself was
solemnly christened Ile Royale.
The shores of the St Lawrence up to Quebec and Montreal were as
entirely French as the islands in the Gulf. But Acadia, which used to
form the connection by land between Cape Breton and Canada, had
now become a British possession inhabited by the so-called 'neutral
French.' These Acadians, few in numbers and quite unorganized, were
drawn in opposite directions, on the one hand by their French
proclivities, on the other by their rooted affection for their own farms.
Unlike the French Newfoundlanders, who came in a body from
Plaisance (now Placentia), the Acadians preferred to stay at home. In
1717 an effort was made to bring some of them into Louisbourg. But it
only succeeded in attracting the merest handful. On the whole, the
French authorities preferred leaving the Acadians as they were, in case
a change in the fortunes of war might bring them once more under the
fleurs-de-lis, when the connection by land between Quebec and the sea
would again be complete. A plan for promoting the immigration of the
Irish Roman Catholics living near Cape Breton never got beyond the
stage of official memoranda. Thus the population of the new capital
consisted only of government employees, French fishermen from
Newfoundland and other neighbouring places, waifs and strays from
points farther off, bounty-fed engages from France, and a swarm of
camp-following traders. The regular garrison was always somewhat of
a class apart.
The French in Cape Breton needed all the artificial aid they could get

from guns and forts. Even in Canada there was only a handful of
French, all told, at the time of the Treaty of Utrecht--twenty-five
thousand; while the British colonists in North America numbered
fifteen times as many. The respective populations had trebled by the
time of the Cession of Canada to the British fifty years later, but with a
tendency for the vast British preponderance to increase still more.
Canada naturally had neither men nor money to spare for Louisbourg;
so the whole cost of building the fortress, thirty million livres, came
direct from France. This sum was then the equivalent, in purchasing
power, of at least as many dollars now, though the old French livre was
only rated at the contemporary value of twenty cents. But the original
plans were never carried out; moreover, not half the money that
actually was spent ever reached the military chest at all. There were too
many thievish fingers by the way.
The French were not a colonizing people, their governing officials
hated a tour of duty oversea, and Louisbourg was the most unpopular
of all the stations in the service. Those Frenchmen who did care for
outlandish places went east to India or west to Canada. Nobody wanted
to go to a small, dull, out-of-the-way garrison town like Louisbourg,
where there was no social life whatever--nothing but fishermen,
smugglers, petty traders, a discontented garrison, generally half
composed of foreigners, and a band of dishonest, second-rate officials,
whose one idea was how to get rich and get home. The inspectors who
were sent out either failed in their duty and joined the official gang of
thieves, or else resigned in disgust. Worse still, because this taint was at
the very source, the royal government in France was already beset with
that entanglement of weakness and corruption which lasted throughout
the whole century between the decline of Louis XIV and the meteoric
rise of Napoleon.
The founders of Louisbourg took their time to build it. It was so very
profitable to spin the work out as long as possible. The plan of the
fortress was good. It was modelled after the plans of Vauban, who had
been the greatest engineer in the greatest European army of the
previous generation. But the actual execution was hampered, at every
turn, by want of firmness at headquarters and want of honest labour on

the spot. Sea sand was plentiful, worthless, and cheap. So it was used
for the mortar, with most disastrous results. The stone was hewn from a
quarry of porphyritic trap near by and used for the walls in the rough.
Cut stone and good bricks were brought out from France as ballast by
the fishing fleet. Some of these finer materials were built into the
governor's and the intendant's quarters. Others