on the Provincials that they would have to garrison Louisbourg till the next open season. The unwelcome truth was that, except for a few raw recruits, no reliefs were forthcoming from any quarter. The promised regulars had left Gibraltar so late that they had to be sent to Virginia for the winter, lest the sudden change to cold and clammy Louisbourg should put them on the sick list. The two new regiments, Shirley's and Pepperrell's, which were to be recruited in the American colonies and form part of the Imperial Army, could not be raised in time. There even seemed to be some doubt as to whether they could be raised at all. The absence of Pepperrell from New England, the hatred of garrison duty in Louisbourg, and resentment at seeing some Englishmen commissioned to command Americans, were three great obstacles in the way. The only other resource was the colonial militia, whose waifs and strays alone could be induced to enlist.

Thus, once the ice began to form, the despairing Provincial garrison saw there could be no escape. The only discharge was death. What were then known as camp fevers had already broken out in August. As many as twenty-seven funerals in a single day passed by the old lime-kiln on the desolate point beyond the seaward walls of Louisbourg. 'After we got into the Towne, a sordid indolence or Sloth, for want of Discipline, induced putrid fevers and dyssentrys, which at length became contagious, and the people died like rotten sheep.' Medical men were ignorant and few. Proper attendance was wholly lacking. But the devotion of the Puritan chaplains, rivalling that of the early Jesuits, ran through those awful horrors like a thread of gold. Here is a typical entry of one day's pastoral care: 'Prayed at Hospital. Prayed at Citadel. Preached at Grand Batery. Visited [a long list of names] all verry Sick. [More names] Dy'd. Am but poorly myself, but able to keep about.'

No survivor ever forgot the miseries of that dire winter in cold and clammy Louisbourg. When April brought the Gibraltar regiments from Virginia, Pepperrell sent in to Shirley his general report on the three thousand men with whom he had begun the autumn. Barely one thousand were fit for duty. Eleven hundred lay sick and suffering in the ghastly hospital. Eight hundred and ninety lay buried out on the dreary tongue of land between the lime-pit and the fog-bound, ice-encumbered sea.

Warren took over the command of all the forces, as he had been appointed governor of Louisbourg by the king's commission. Shirley had meanwhile been revolving new plans, this time for the complete extirpation of the French in Canada during the present summer of 1746. He suggested that Warren should be the naval joint commander, and Warren, of course, was nothing loth.

Massachusetts again rose grandly to the situation. She voted 3,500 men, with a four pound sterling bounty to each one of them. New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Rhode Island followed well. New York and New Jersey did less in proportion. Maryland did less still. Virginia would only pass a lukewarm vote for a single hundred men. Pennsylvania, as usual, refused to do anything at all. The legislature was under the control of the Quakers, who, when it came to war, were no better than parasites. upon the body politic. They never objected to enjoying the commercial benefits of conquest; any more than they objected to living on land which could never have been either won or held without the arms they reprobated. But their principles forbade them to face either the danger or expense of war. The honour of the other Pennsylvanians was, however, nobly saved by a contingent of four hundred, raised as a purely private venture. Altogether, the new Provincial army amounted to over 8,000 men.

The French in Canada were thoroughly alarmed. Rumour had magnified the invading fleet and army till, in July, the Acadians reported the combined forces, British regulars included, at somewhere between forty and fifty thousand. But the alarm proved groundless. The regulars were sent on an abortive expedition against the coast of France, while the Duke of Newcastle ordered Shirley to discharge the 'very expensive' Provincials, who were now in Imperial pay, 'as cheap as possible.' This was then done, to the intense disgust of the colonies concerned. New York and Massachusetts, however, were so loth to give up without striking a single blow that they raised a small force, on their own account, to take Crown Point and gain control of Lake Champlain. [Footnote: An account of this expedition will be found in Chapter ii of 'The War Chief of the Six Nations' in this Series.]

Before October came the whole of the colonies were preparing for a quiet winter, except that it was to be preceded by the little raid on Crown Point, when, quite suddenly, astounding news arrived from sea. This was that the French had sent out a regular armada to retake Louisbourg and harry the coast to the south. Every ship brought in further and still more alarming particulars. The usual exaggerations gained the usual credence. But the real force, if properly handled and combined, was dangerous enough. It consisted of fourteen sail of the line and twenty-one frigates, with transports carrying over three thousand veteran troops; altogether, about 17,000 men, or more than twice as many as those in the contingents lately raised for taking Canada.

New York and Massachusetts at once recalled their Crown Point expeditions. Boston was garrisoned by 8,000 men. All the provinces did their well-scared best. There was no danger except along the coast; for there were enough armed men to have simply mobbed to death any three thousand Frenchmen who marched into the hostile continent, which would engulf them if they lost touch with the fleet, and wear them out if they kept communications open. Those who knew anything of war knew this perfectly well; and they more than half suspected that the French force had been doubled or trebled by the panic-mongers. But the panic spread, and spread inland, for all that. No British country had ever been so thoroughly alarmed since England had watched the Great Armada sailing up the Channel.

The poets and preachers quickly changed their tune. Ames's Almanac for 1746 had recently edified Bostonians with a song of triumph over fallen Louisbourg:

Bright Hesperus, the Harbinger of Day, Smiled gently down on Shirley's prosperous sway, The Prince of Light rode in his burning car, To see the overtures of Peace and War Around the world, and bade his charioteer, Who marks the periods of each month and year, Rein in his steeds, and rest upon High Noon To view our Victory over Cape Brittoon.

But now the Reverend Thomas Prince's litany, rhymed by a later bard, summed up the gist of all the supplications that ascended from the Puritans:

O Lord! We would not advise; But if, in Thy Providence, A Tempest should arise, To drive the French fleet hence, And scatter it far and wide, Or sink it in the sea, We should be satisfied, And Thine the Glory be.

Strange to say, this pious suggestion had been mostly answered before it had been made. Disaster after disaster fell upon the doomed French fleet from the very day it sailed. The admiral was the Duc d'Anville, one of the illustrious La Rochefoucaulds, whose family name is known wherever French is read. He was not wanting either in courage or good sense; but, like his fleet, he had little experience at sea. The French ships, as usual, were better than the British. But the French themselves were a nation of landsmen. They had no great class of seamen to draw upon at will, a fact which made an average French crew inferior to an average British one. This was bad enough. But the most important point of all was that their fleets were still worse than their single ships. The British always had fleets at sea, constantly engaged in combined manoeuvres. The French had not; and, in face of the British command of the sea, they could not have them. The French harbours were watched so closely that the French fleets were often attacked and defeated before they had begun to learn how to work together. Consequently, they found it still harder to unite two different fleets against their almost ubiquitous enemy.

D'Anville's problem was insoluble from the start, Four large men-of-war from the West Indies were to join him at Chibucto Bay, now the harbour of Halifax, under Admiral Conflans, the same who was defeated by Hawke in Quiberon Bay thirteen years later, on the very day that Wolfe was buried. Each contributory part of the great French naval plan failed in the working out. D'Anville's command was a collection of ships, not a co-ordinated fleet. The French dockyards had been neglected; so some of the ships were late, which made it impossible to practise manoeuvres before sailing for the front. Then, in the bungling hurry of fitting out, the hulls of several vessels were left foul, which made them dull sailers; while nearly all the holds were left unscoured, which, of course, helped to propagate the fevers, scurvy, plague, and pestilence brought on by bad food badly stowed. Nor was this all. Officers who had put in so little sea time with working fleets were naturally slack and inclined to be discontented. The fact that they were under sealed orders, which had been communicated only to d'Anville, roused their suspicions while his weakness in telling them they were bound for Louisbourg almost produced a mutiny.

The fleet left France at midsummer, had a very rough passage through the Bay of Biscay, and ran into a long, dead calm off the Azores. This ended in a storm, during which several vessels were struck by lightning, which, in one case, caused a magazine explosion that killed and wounded over thirty men. It was not till the last week of September that d'Anville made the excellently safe