The Taking of Louisburg, 1745

W m Pepperrell
Decisive Events in American History
BY SAMUEL ADAMS DRAKE AUTHOR OF “BURGOYNE’S INVASION OF 1777” ETC.
BOSTON MDCCCXCI LEE AND SHEPARD PUBLISHERS 10 MILK STREET NEXT “THE OLD SOUTH MEETING HOUSE” NEW YORK CHAS. T. DILLINGHAM 718 AND 720 BROADWAY
Copyright, 1890, By Lee and Shepard.
ISLAND BATTERY, WITH LOUISBURG IN THE DISTANCE.
The creation of great maritime fortresses, primarily designed to hold with iron hand important highways of commerce, like Gibraltar, or simply to guard great naval arsenals, like Kronstadt, or, again, placed where some great river has cleft a broad path into the heart of a country, thus laying it open to invasion, has long formed part of the military policy of all maritime nations.
In the New World the Spaniards were the first to emphasize their adhesion to these essential principles by the erection of strongholds at Havana, Carthagena, Porto Bello, and Vera Cruz, not more to guarantee the integrity of their colonial possessions, than to protect themselves against the rapacity of the titled freebooters of Europe, to whom the treasure fleets of Mexico and the East offered a most alluring prey. When Spain carried the purse, all the crowned heads of Europe seem to have turned highwaymen.
With this single exception the seaboard defences of the Atlantic coast, even as late as the middle of the eighteenth century, were of the most trivial character, nor was it owing to any provision for defence that the chief ports of the English colonies enjoyed the long immunity they did. England left her colonies to stand or fall upon their own resources. Fortunate beyond expectation, they simply throve by neglect. France, with a widely different colonial policy, did a little better, but with a niggardly hand, while her system was squeezing the life-blood out of her colonists, drop by drop. Had there been a Drake or a Hawkins in the Spanish service, Spain might easily have revenged all past affronts by laying desolate every creek and harbor of the unprotected North Atlantic coast. She had the armed ports, as we have just shown. She had the ships and sailors. What, then, was to have prevented her from destroying the undefended villages of Charleston, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston?