Cape Breton Ghost

Media interest in history is triggered almost exclusively by anniversaries: the 400th anniversary of the founding of Quebec, the 60th anniversary of the state of Israel and other such occasions provide the excuse for a little historical reflection on the evening news or in newspaper editorials. Historians and academic presses have tried to capitalize on this trend by preparing works timed for publication to coincide with the anniversary in question, and A.J.B. Johnston’s Endgame 1758: The Promise, the Glory and the Despair of Louisbourg’s Last Decade is an example of the genre. But not all anniversaries are created equal. Some, such as Quebec’s 400th, attract large amounts of public and private funding, a semi-retired Beatle and a corresponding amount of public attention. Others, such as the 250th anniversary of the fall of Louisbourg, remain more shadowy, even though their historical significance is arguably similar. Anniversary history as a form of public history is more about politics than history; thus, while most Canadians will be at least vaguely aware that Quebec was founded 400 years ago this year, few will find anything in their print or electronic media commemorating Louisbourg’s fall.

Fortunately, those motivated to look will find Johnston’s treatment of this event, handsomely produced by Cape Breton University Press, in their libraries and bookstores. It is the closing instalment of what the author terms a four-volume “biography” of Île Royale (Cape Breton), covering the final decade of the colony’s existence from its return to the French in 1749 to its fall in July 1758. The reader need not feel guilty about starting with dessert. Endgame 1758 can be read on its own, but it may whet the reader’s appetite (as it did this reader) for Johnston’s earlier work on the social history of Louisbourg. It also sent me back to Christopher Moore’s Louisbourg Portraits, a Governor General’s Award–winning collection of five novella-like biographies of inhabitants of French Louisbourg. For Johnston, a longtime historian with Parks Canada, Endgame 1758 is a fitting capstone to a career devoted to French colonial Louisbourg, and of all the author’s books the one most obviously written with a cross-over audience in mind. The prose is often appropriately dramatic, and colourful individuals and narrative drive play a greater role than in Johnston’s earlier work, which of necessity is more quantitative and analytical in nature.

A quick refresher on the history of Louisbourg is probably necessary for most readers at this point. After Acadia (peninsular Nova Scotia) and Plaisance (Placentia), Newfoundland were ceded to Britain by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, France decided to create a new base to serve both economic and defensive needs: economic, to continue the prosecution of the highly lucrative cod fishery, and defensive, to guard its remaining northern Atlantic colonies, Île Royale and Île Saint-Jean (Prince Edward Island), as well as Laurentian New France. That base was the fortified town of Louisbourg on the southeast tip of Cape Breton Island. It grew rapidly in the three decades after its foundation in 1713 to become one of the busiest ports in colonial North America, with a population of about 2,500 civilians and anywhere from 500 to 3,000 soldiers. When an expedition from the fortress destroyed the settlement at Canso in British Nova Scotia in 1744, it provided the perfect casus belli for a New England attack on Louisbourg the following year. The fortress fell, the British took control and the inhabitants were shipped back to France. Unfortunately for the New Englanders, Britain gave Louisbourg back to the French at the close of yet another European war in 1748, and the former French inhabitants sailed back to reclaim their homes and warehouses in 1749. Their joy as they did so was tinctured with apprehension: the foundation of Halifax in the same year signalled a new phase in the Anglo-French imperial rivalry, one where Britain was now determined to “see all French pieces swept off the colonial chessboard.”

Johnston provides a compelling account of how that policy was carried out in the ensuing decade, until the final campaign in June 1758 when some 27,000 British combatants in 150 vessels, including 42 warships with nearly 2,000 cannons, began their assault on a beleaguered town defended by some 8,500 French troops and 21 ships armed with 700 cannons. Louisbourg surrendered after a seven-week siege in which 1,000 people on both sides lost their lives, and shortly thereafter the town’s remaining inhabitants once again sailed for France. The British demolished the fortifications in 1760, and the settlement that eventually re-emerged on the site never attained its former size. In 1961 the federal government decided to reconstruct part of the original walled town as a means of providing work for unemployed coal miners—one of the more inspired ways of addressing that perennial feature of the Cape Breton social landscape. In the 1970s the site took on the contours it exhibits today, with about one quarter of the original walled town reconstructed.

So, aside from a really big battle when it fell, why should the fate of Louisbourg interest us today? Isn’t this another example of Atlantic Canada having too much history and not enough economy? Well, let’s talk about economy for a moment. Louisbourg’s cod-based economy was much more important to France than the fur trade in Quebec, which is why France was prepared to invest so much blood and treasure there. While the French state devoted a fifth of its entire annual budget for all its colonies to Louisbourg alone by the 1730s, the money was well spent. Louis XV’s remark that he expended so much gold on Louisbourg that he expected to be able to see its towers rising in the distance, turns out, alas, to be apocryphal according to Johnston. In any case, the king had no reason to complain: the return from cod and cod liver oil alone in France amounted to three to four times the state’s investment over the colony’s 40-year history, not to mention the profits from other types of commerce such as Caribbean sugar flowing through the port. Aside from its direct economic value, the fishery centred on Louisbourg and the Gulf of St. Lawrence trained a quarter of the men required to staff the French navy. Its loss disrupted the entire French colonial system, and gave the British navy even more of an advantage over its rival in future wars.

As far as history goes, Johnston’s interpretation adds significantly to the reappraisal of the Seven Years’ War that has been going on since the appearance of Fred Anderson’s highly popular Crucible of War: the Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766 in 2001. Anderson argued that the Seven Years’ War was more important than the revolutionary war, in that the British victory over France created a “hollow” empire in North America. No longer a partnership between the metropole and the colonies, the empire became, increasingly, a top-down, centralized entity, less reluctant to coerce when it could not persuade—and thereby sowed the seeds of its own destruction. In an early example of imperial overstretch, the British simply could not manage the newly “united” continent of North America, where the inevitable conflicts between papists and puritans, Native peoples and Europeans, creoles and metropolitans, now played out as a vast polyhedral family feud.

If the fall of Quebec and the later decision of the British to recognize its French-derived civil law and Catholic religion in the Quebec Act 1774 are still central in this interpretation (the cover of Anderson’s book pointedly features Benjamin West’s iconic Death of General Wolfe), Johnston chides Anderson for glossing over the role of Louisbourg’s fall in the conquest of Quebec and the unfolding of the Seven Years’ War. From its unofficial start in 1754 down to mid 1758, the war had been going terribly for the British. Clashes on land had resulted in the loss of numerous British forts in the continent’s interior. While Louisbourg itself was under siege, General Montcalm held Fort Carillon (Ticonderoga) against a British force that outnumbered his own men fourfold. The British troops desperately needed a victory for morale reasons; the British public at home was clamouring for one and the New Englanders remained reluctant to commit to the war so long as its prosecution seemed so inept.

In response, Prime Minister William Pitt sent to Louisbourg “the largest single armed force ever mounted by Great Britain in North America,” larger even than that sent to Quebec the next year. The gamble—for such it was, when a turn in the weather could humble the mightiest fleet—paid off handsomely, and the victory was celebrated effusively in British America. “Boston lit a massive bonfire; Newport offered fireworks and a general illumination; Philadelphia rang bells and fired guns; and New York gave an official dinner and artillery salutes.” In London, the French regimental colours brought from Louisbourg were “carried in an elaborate procession to Saint Paul’s Cathedral where they were put on … ‘permanent’ display” (though no one now knows what happened to them). The fall of Louisbourg, the linchpin of French America, was the turning point of the Seven Years’ War. On land, the battle strategies of the French and their Native allies could keep much larger British forces at bay almost indefinitely. Ultimately, however, the French settlers had to be supplied by sea, and France’s naval defeat at Louisbourg meant that the rest of their American possessions could not be defended.

The fate of Louisbourg has always been overshadowed by the fall of Quebec a year later, and by the expulsion of some 10,000 Acadians from what are now the Maritime provinces over the years 1755 to 1762, just as Wolfe’s death at Quebec has always eclipsed his role as brigadier general at Louisbourg. The fall of Quebec and the Acadian deportations are, of course, key moments in the history of North America and Canada, and the existence of relatively large and vocal populations of Québécois and Acadians ensures that they will continue to be analyzed and commemorated. All the inhabitants of Louisbourg were deported to France, but they were “French,” not “Acadian,” and remain unlamented by historians on either side of the water. So far as anyone knows they were quickly assimilated into the French body politic, so much so, that one six-year-old deportee, Pierre Martin, rose through the ranks to become vice admiral of the French navy under Napoleon.

There is another reason to look more closely at the history of Louisbourg, and that is the light it sheds on the social pluralism of French America. Acadia was entirely rural and agricultural, Laurentian New France very largely so. Louisbourg was highly urban, and became more so over time as nervous fisherfolk moved within its walls. It was a colonie de mer, not a colonie de terre. Agriculture was almost non-existent on eastern Cape Breton—which is why the Acadians, in spite of French encouragement, mostly refused to move there even after they became subject to British sovereignty. Although undeniably members of a deeply Catholic society, the good bourgeois of Louisbourg refused to subscribe the funds necessary for a parish church (they used the garrison chapel) and would not pay the annual tithe demanded of them. There was no seigneurial system, and order was maintained through royal courts. The colony was not ethnically or racially homogeneous and, in this respect, was more like New Orleans than Quebec. The port’s inhabitants tolerated large numbers of German Protestant soldiers at times without undue friction. Louisbourg was also home to hundreds of Spaniards, Irish, Basques and African slaves, and Mi’kmaq allies regularly appeared in its streets. Although inhabitants of a medieval urban form, the ville fortifiée, there was something recognizably modern about the people of Louisbourg. They appear more like diasporic citizens of a globalized commercial society than members of a peasantry wedded to the land. French America was a more diverse entity than we have often been led to believe, and Johnston’s original research in the French national archives has allowed him to depict this portion of it more fully and sympathetically than any other anglophone historian.

A British engineer observed in the 1740s, “You never Saw Such a Country. No Bright Sun, this month past, and what Sallade I have had is from ye Heat of ye Dung [i.e. compost] not of the Sun.” Louisbourg’s notorious fogs have not changed, but Fortress Louisbourg National Historic Site itself is changing. Since its inception, it has depicted daily life in the town circa 1744, not the dramatic events of its final months in 1758. (As an aside, I can attest that the costumed interpreters are extremely knowledgeable, and you learn much more in conversation with them than from reading plaques.) Now, as part of a “refocusing” exercise at Parks Canada, Johnston reports that the siege is likely to become a “priority storyline” in the site’s interpretation: an interesting example of the growing influence of the military on Canadian consciousness. Maybe in another 50 years, if global warming has not submerged the site, it will be time for Louisbourg’s 15 minutes of fame in the spotlight of anniversary history. But you do not want to wait for that. Go to Louisbourg if you haven’t been there (the fog just makes it more atmospheric), and read this book.