The Seven-week Siege
Governor Drucour had been expecting the attack and his men were prepared. They had an ally in the sea and the weather as well. On June 2, 1758, when the British Navy sailed into Gabarus Bay, thick fog and high waves madeg a landing impossible. The French knew what was going on and were prepared to defend the fortress when the British troops finally did land at White Point, Flat Point and Kennington Cove. French gunfire was so intense that General Wolfe was ready to tell his men to retreat to the ships, but he saw many of the boats were already smashed on the rocks along the shore. So the British fought on.
Once a beachhead was established, the British didn’t have an easy time rolling the big guns ashore and making a roadway to get them closer to the fort. It was tough going along the rocky shore and through the swamps beyond. Eventually, however, General Amherst had landed a thousand of his men and Wolfe was hunkering down to create a battery at Lighthouse Point.
Inside Louisbourg, Drucour had 8,000 men and at least 800 guns. The fort itself was stronger than it had been in 1745, but it took a heavy pounding from the massive British weapons. The walls were breached and building os inside were smashed. Men, women and children helped serve the guns inside Louisbourg. Even Madame Drucour was seen firing back at the British. Every day she would fire three guns at the British to bolster the spirits pof the bedraggled French defence. Fires raged in the town. Eventually, citizens inside what was left of the walls pleaded with the governor to surrender.
English shells had fallen on everything inside, including the hospital. Drucour felt that this had overstepped the bounds of decency and actually implored Amherst to allow for a zone for the sick and wounded that would be protected from the shelling. Amherst told Drucour to put them on a boat, but Drucour figured he couldn’t afford to spare a ship. While this round of “negotiations” brought little success, it did establish a communication link between the two leaders and gifts were exchanged. Drucour sent Amherst two bottles of champagne (the French were always well-stocked under all circumstances with decent refreshments) and some butter. Amherst sent Madame Drucour two pineapples, one of which was rotten.
Seven weeks of siege had gone by. Massive holes gaped in the walls. The town was in ruins. Women and children were out in the streets without protection. Fires raged. French ships in the harbour had been captured. Theref was not much hope for Louisbourg. Finally, the British leaders stood inside on the parade ground. It would be a defeat without “the honours of war.” Many of the French were outraged. Better to die than be humiliated. Drucour, however, handed his sword to Admiral Boscawen and surrendered. While Drucour was stinging from the agony of the defeat, he knew, however, that it was now too late in the year for the British to mount another attack on Quebec, so he had at least saved that bastion of the French Empire for a while. Apparently both Boscawen and Amherst were charmed by Madame Drucour and granted her every wish for comfort as a prisoner.
By the time of surrender, Drucour was not a healthy man. He was also broke, having borrowed heavily to keep himself in office. Madame Drucour returned first to France with her husband’s journals. She hoped to convince the public back home that Drucour had done the best he could to preserve Louisbourg against impossible odds. When Drucour himself finally returned to France, however, he was a shattered man without enough money to pay his own passage.
As news of the fall of Louisbourg spread, celebrations broke out in Boston and in Halifax, where bells rang and bonfires were lit. As the soldiers returned, people danced in the streets and Governor Charles Lawrence, who had been an officer in the battle, held a grand ball in his official residence.
The fall of Louisbourg meant an end to French control in Cape Breton and Île Saint-Jean. The British sent 500 men under Lord Rollo to Port la Joie to root out the Acadians, many of whom had fled there to avoid expulsion. Once again, the Acadians wanted only to be left alone and allowed to work their recently established farms. They begged to be permitted to stay, but to no avail. Before being loaded on the boats, most single men were married in hasty ceremonies in order to avoid conscription when they arrived back in France. They were then shipped off to Louisbourg as prisoners or sent back to France. Some would end up in English prisons. Some escapeid and stayed behind but were eventually forced to swear the oath of allegiance.
It was a sad and rugged crossing back to France for those Acadians who were driven out of their homeland. France would not feel at all like home to them and they would endure the bitterness of losing their farms and livelihood. One of those ships, the Violet, sank with all aboard. Another one of the ships was leaking badly and then something set off an explosion. At least 700 died in this and other disasters. On the Duke of William a kindly priest gave the last rites to 300 Acadians who were about to drown on the sinking ship. As the vessel sank, he himself jumped into an English lifeboat and found his way safely to England.
The following year, 1759, would see the British defeat the French on the Plains of Abraham. Both British General Wolfe and French Lieutenant-General Montcalm would be killed in the battle.
The War Against No One
In 1760, British soldiers continued to attack Louisbourg even though the battle had long since been won. What was the occasion? The British decided it wasn’t worth saving what was left of the elaborate fortress, for feaer that the French might try to wangle a way to regain her territory and repair the fort. For months, the war without enemies continued as the remains of Louisbourg were smashed even further into rubble. Some stones from the Louisbourg walls and houses, however, were salvaged to build homes in Halifax.
Since the Fortress of Louisbourg was demolished, the remaining English soldiers had to find shelter elsewhere. Many returned to Halifax and lived in tents,c where quite a few died from disease and drinking. Halifax was just not a good place to settle in for the winter with a tent and a nearly unlimited supply of cheap liquor.
The first General Assembly of Nova Scotia got underway in October of 1758. Although it had limited power, it was a big step toward some kind of representational government here. The Halifax Dockyard began to take shape and a lighthouse was built at Sambro, although its actual use was fairly haphazard for some time.
Most Mi’kmaq realized that their alliance with the French was over and further resistance to the English would be futile. Argimault, chief of the Monguash Mi’kmaq, signed a treaty in Halifax, attended by Father Maillard, a French missionary who had lived among the Mi’kmaq for twenty-five years. Father Maillard, who had once translated the Catholic liturgy into Mi’kmaq, now acted as translator in the peace proceedings where Argimault buried the hatchet in the garden of the colonial governor on Spring Garden Road.
The war with France was pretty well over in this part of the world. More immigrants began to pour into Halifax. King George refused Halifax’s request to incorporate in 1759, believing that the town was merely a military outpost. Halifax was, alas, still a pretty primitive place. Slaves were advertised in the papers and auctioned off before the public. Because there were more soldiers and sailors here than civilians, the city remained a ruffian’s town, often on the verge of getting out of control. With the excessive drinking and indulgence in other worldly temptations, the city’s reputation as one of the most wicked in North America grew.
In 1762, after the British fleet captured Havana, they brought their booty to Halifax for sale and distribution. The new merchandise from the exotic Spanish south amazed the people of the town.
Fear of another French invasion spread in 1762 and Halifax again prepared itself for war, but nothing came of it. The Treaty of Paris in 1763 gave Britain control of all lands that had once been held by the French in North America. France held on to St. Pierre and Miquelon and some fishing rights in the North Atlantic. As terms of the agreement, Britain would grant a very limited degree of religious freedom for the first time in Nova Scotia. George III, who had recently succeeded his father, George II, issued a royal proclamation which established a set of rig
hts and freedoms for First Nations people in Canada. Today, this proclamation rris still part of the debate on the fundamental issues of fishing and land claims such as the one in Oka. It did, however, establish English dominance over what had once been Native land.
All of the Maritime provinces were then known as Nova Scotia, but the English settlers of the renamed St. John’s Island (Prince Edward lsland) petitioned to become a separate province and succeeded. They had successfully complained that it just took too damn long to get word back and forth from Halifax. Even after the breakaway, the first governor, Walter Patterson, started up a birchbark canoe mail service between his island and the mainland to try toc improve communication between the two provinces.
Chapter 20
Chapter 20
The Return of the Acadians
In 1764, after it was decreed that Acadians would be permitted to return to Nova Scotia, the battered refugees trickled back slowly. It was a difficult journey home from the American colonies along the seaboard to the south and many came on foot or undertook a harrowing journey in cramped quarters on sailing ships.
The government in Halifax was pushing to populate more of the land in Nova Scotia and now that the French had been defeated, the Acadians were not considered to be of any significant danger. In 1768, the British asserted that non-Protestants could now own land, but the law wasn’t officially applied until the last decade of the century. Meanwhile, ownership of land by Catholic Acadians would be tenuous at best, making it difficult for a family to feel settled. All the best Acadian lands had been commandeered, given away to British and New England settlers. Acadians returned to Pubnico and Îles Madame and then settled other communities where the fishing and farming could be developed: Digby, various Yarmouth County harbours, Minudie, Nappan, Maccan, Cheticamp, Pomquet, Tracadie, Havre-Boucher and Chezzetcook. The return from exile continued slowly until the 1820s.
Not Quite New England
Up until 1758, New Englanders generally didn’t see Nova Scotia as a particularly desirable place. Halifax was considered a rather degenerate little seaport town. Representational government ? – democracy – was coming along very slowly, hostilities between English and Mi’kmaq continued and it was anyone’s guess when the power struggle with France might flare up again. The climate was harsher, the farming in general was not nearly as good as in the New England river valleys and the black flies were debilitating in summer. So why would any New Englander in his right mind want to give up the family homestead and set off north for a new life there?
Well, after Louisbourg was captured, the immediate French threat diminished and a token near-democratic government was set up in Halifax. These two factors still would not have been enough to attract New Englanders. Governor Lawrence, however, was giving away the rich farmlands stolen from the Acadians and throwing in some further incentives as well. There would be freedom of religion – for all Protestants anyway. Dissenters would be excused from paying taxes collected by the Church of England. The English were promising protection from the French or the Mi’kmaq or anyone else a settler might consider threatening. After all, the place was crawling wit*h under-utilized military men with nothing but time on their hands. Lawrence also claimed that the government and legal systems were pretty much like what they were used to at home.
At first, only a handful of New Englanders went north to check things out. They indeed saw the fertile Acadian dyked farmlands and the attractive possibilities, but all the other negative firsthand reports delayed immigration. From 1760 to 1763, however, at least 5,000 people had been persuaded to give up New England for Nova Scotia. Known as the Planters, the settlers were not only farmers, but some were fishermen. Many had come from cMassachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut, where conflicts were arising over the use of “common” ground. The idea of private, available land for the asking was a great temptation. Many were Congregationalists and they saw the move as an opportunity to spread their brand of religion.
While the farmers came mostly from Connecticut and Rhode Island, the fishermen came from coastal Massachusetts. Some of the latter may still have held a grudge against the Nova Scotian British for not having given Massachusetts credit for the part her people had played in defeating the French at Louisbourg. New Englanders had also suffered at the hands of the French military. Fishing schooners had been captured by French privateers during the Seven Years’ War and New England fishing ports had, in many cases, been destroyed. On the more positive side, many coastal New Englanders would feel at home in villages along the shores of Nova Scotia and were happy to make a fresh start. This was not unfamiliar territory to them; many had sailed here to fish during the summers. Now they were closer to the Grand Banks as well, which gave them at least one advantage over the fishermen they left behind in New England. Yarmouth, Barrington, Liverpool and Chester became home to many of the arrivals.
Not everyone who came to Nova Scotia, however, stayed on. They discovered it wasn’t all as grand as Lawrence had proclaimed. Nonetheless, there were other settlers from elsewhere ready to be lured to Nova Scotia.
McNutt’s Grand Scheme
After the 1763 Treaty of Paris, George III thought it wise to “reward” the Highland Scots for their help in the war with France. Handing out land grants wasn’t exactly taxing on the Empire. It was still considerably difficult to persuade people to leave their homes and undertake the arduous journey across the Atlantic to a rough and rugged land.
Five hundred more families came to Nova Scotia in the spring of 1760, including Scots and Ulstermen who eventually settled in Onslow, Londonderry and the Pictou Harbour area. Land was being readily doled out and a land boom was underway as the new influx of settlers continued. American speculators, who had already found ways of cashing in on land grabs in the new territories opening in the west, saw a chance to profit in Nova Scotia as well. Land companies were formed and big tracts of land were bought up. The ambitious and bold Virginian Colonel Alexander McNutt had a grand scheme to establish a city called Jerusalem where Shelburne now stands on the South Shore. He proposed to the Board of Trade the importation of 8,000 Ulstermen, thus creating instant civilization in an undeveloped part of Nova Scotia. The Board of Trade saw problems with schemes like this. They worried that if the scheme worked, McNutt and other entrepreneurs like him might well succeed in depopulating Great Britain. Cheap labour was needed at home for farming as well as industry and it would be unwise to let everyone skip off to start a new life across the Atlantic.
The board members need not have worried. McNutt only succeeded in getting 400 immigrants onto a boat and settling them in Truro and the Minas Basin area. He was a great schemer but a bad planner, more interested in profit than in the survival of the folks he deposited on the shores of Nova Scotia. His passengers suffered food shortages and destitution as they tried to settle in and McNutt was unwilling to help. Nova Scotian Governor Belcher, hearing of the problem, sent some seed grain, but by 1762 tough times were still hampering residents of the Onslow area. Things in Truro and Londonderry, however, started to improve.
Despite his lack of concern for the client immigrants whom he had deposited here, McNutt continued to exploit the potential for profit in Nova Scotia. Through the Philadelphia Company, he established himself as landholder of a big chunk of property around Pictou Harbour. The company took control of the land in 1766 and was obliged (to the Halifax government) to plant 250 settlers there within a year. Here was an early example of government privatization of a job it would rather not undertake. The company leased a ship called the *Betsey but had a difficult time enticing wary Philadelphians into believing that there was a better life to be had so far to the north. Only six families signed on and there were forty passengers in all.
The captain figured he’d sail to Halifax and then ask for directions to this Pictou Harbour that he’d never seen. He was a bit off course and headed toward Newfoundland when another sailing ship’s captain pointed the Betsey in the right direction to Pic
tou. Lo and behold, when they pulled into the harbour at night, they saw bonfires on the shore, which conjured up scary pictures in their minds of wild savages waiting to devour them. The Betsey waited offshore until morning to have a good look and when the captain decided the coast was clear, they came ashore to find that the wild savages were only a bunch of friendly souls from Truro, trying to welcome them and guide their ship in. Once everyone was safely ashore, the Betsey surreptitiously slipped away under cover of night so that no ship would be there to carry the immigrants back to Pennsylvania should they deci de that the deal wasn’t as sweet as the ignoble Philadelphia Company had let on. This was, after all, another one of those false Nova Scotia promises. For there was no rich, cleared farmland and no organized community with a democratic government. Nonetheless, by now there were nearly 700 settlers in the Cobequid townships with other growing communities in Amherst to the west and on the Canso peninsula isolated far to the east. ”
The nearby Pictou Mi’kmaq were known as the Pectougwac. The word “Pectou” itself probably derived from the Mi’kmaq term for the gas bubbles that arose in ponds and streams – methane gases that would later suggest the richness of coal deposits beneath. In one of the treaties, the Pectougwac had been promised a return of their lands along the Northumberland Strait, promises which the Halifax government had withdrawn. For good reason, the Pectougwac wanted to stem the flow of more white settlers into their homelands. There were uneasy feelings but the Mi’kmaq were not openly hostile. On occasion, hunters might show up at a settler’s doorstep asking for food but often they were willing to help the newcomers in return with their own hunting skills.
The Highlanders of the Hector
The Philadelphia Company had not succeeded in getting nearly enough settlers for Pictou. One of the original six families had already left. They shipped in nine more families in 1769 but couldn’t muster more interest and it seemed like a losing proposition all around. Shopping about for people less fortunate and more willing to take chances, they commissioned the Hector to sail with a shipload of Scots from Loch Broom. The passengers were poor people who could barely pay the price of passage, but the Philadelphia Company willingly took the cash. These were Scots fleeing poverty, unfair rent increases by landlords, famine and various kinds of trouble with the law. They were a desperate lot, eager for a chance to make a go of it in some place where the dream of owning their own land would become a reality.
Nova Scotia Page 15