A Historical Geography of the British Colonies Part 22

{204} [Sidenote: _Reception of the news in England, and at Boston._]

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]

[Footnote 7: Quoted in Parkman's _A Half Century of Conflict_ (1892 ed.), vol. ii, p. 153.]

[Sidenote: _Sermon at Boston on the event._]

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,[8] well ill.u.s.trates the view which the Puritans of Ma.s.sachusetts 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 in {205} the 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 G.o.d in the circ.u.mstances 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 G.o.d 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.

[Footnote 8: _Extraordinary events, the doings of G.o.d, and marvellous in pious eyes_. Ill.u.s.trated 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, a.s.sisted by a British squadron. By Thomas Prince, M.A. Pamphlet, Boston and London, 5th ed. 1746.

Dedicated to H. E. William Shirley.]

[Sidenote: _Subsequent career of Pepperell_]

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 in {206} America, 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.

[Sidenote: _and Warren._]

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.

[Sidenote: _The New Englanders garrison Louisbourg._]

[Sidenote: _Relieved by regular troops._]

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.'[9]

Shirley 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.

[Footnote 9: Quoted in Parkman's _A Half Century of Conflict_, vol.

ii, p. 166.]

[Sidenote: _Preparations for invasion of Canada._]

[Sidenote: _The plan miscarries._]

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, {207} 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 Ma.s.sachusetts levies; but this plan, too, was frustrated by news of a coming fleet from France, and the fears of Quebec were transferred to Boston.

[Sidenote: _Failure of a counter expedition by the French._]

The fleet in question left La Roch.e.l.le 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 Jonquiere, a naval officer, who had gone out on board the fleet to take over the {208} government 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 Jonquiere 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.

[Sidenote: _Canadian raids._]

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 Ma.s.sachusetts, 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, Ma.s.sachusetts, and New Hampshire were harried by Canadians and Indians, using the French fort at Crown Point as their base.

[Sidenote: _French success at Grand Pre._]

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 Ma.s.sachusetts, consisting of some 500 men under Colonel n.o.ble, who in December, {209} 1746, reached the Basin of Mines, and occupied the village of Grand Pre. 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 Pre. Under cover of night, one party and another attacked the detached houses in which the English were lodged; Colonel n.o.ble 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 Pre 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 Pre was in a few weeks' time reoccupied by the English; and not long afterwards the French retired from the Acadian frontier into Canada.

[Sidenote: _Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle._]

[Sidenote: _Louisbourg given back to France._]

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 rest.i.tution, 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 humiliating {210} provision, that English hostages should be given to France until the rest.i.tution of Louisbourg had actually taken place.

[Sidenote: _Foundation of Halifax._]

[Sidenote: _The peace from the English and from the colonial point of view._]

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 Ma.s.sachusetts 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 pa.s.s 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 the {211} same 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 pa.s.sed into history as not merely a disappointment but an irretrievable disaster.

[Sidenote: _Western discovery._]

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 Fe; in other words, to reach Spanish America, an object which did not commend itself to Spain.

[Sidenote: _Knowledge gained of Lake of the Woods and Lake Winnipeg._]

[Sidenote: _Fort built in the Sioux country._]

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, French _coureurs de bois_, or _voyageurs_, as they began to be called, gained information of the Lake of the Woods, and of the Lac des a.s.siniboines, now Lake Winnipeg. The princ.i.p.al 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, {212} proved intractable neighbours, and ten years later the fort was abandoned.

[Sidenote: _Verendrye._]

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.

[Sidenote: _The water-parting on the west of Lake Superior._]

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; {213} 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 the _voyageurs_ crossed 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 a.s.siniboine, 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.

[Sidenote: _Verendrye's journeys and forts._]

[Sidenote: _His sons near the Rocky mountains._]

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 a.s.siniboine 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 a.s.siniboine 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 b.u.t.tress 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 explorers {214} came 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.

[Sidenote: _The Rocky mountains._]

The Rocky mountains, as we know them, were not known in the eighteenth century.[10] In 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 earliest {215} explorers has in our own time found more than fulfilment in a Dominion from sea to sea.