These ramparts nowhere rise more than fifty feet above the sea-level, but are everywhere of amazing thickness and solidity. The moat was originally eighty feet across, and the walls stood thirty feet above it, but these dimensions have been much reduced by the work of time and weather. A considerable part of the line was further defended by a marsh, through which a storming column would have found it impossible to advance, and hardly less difficult to make a retreat. The besiegers were therefore obliged to concentrate their attack upon one or two points, and these had been rendered the most formidable of the whole line in consequence of the knowledge that the other parts were comparatively unassailable. In other words, the besieged were able to control, in a measure, where the besiegers should attack them.
Natural Obstacles made use of.
Although the partly ruined bomb-proofs are the only specimens of masonry now to be seen in making this tour, the broad and deep excavation of the moat and covered-way, and the clean, well-grassed slopes of the glacis, promise to hold together for another century at least. Brambles and fallen earth choke up the embrasures. It is necessary to use care in order to avoid treading upon a toad or a snake while you are groping among the mouldy casemates or when crossing the parade. Those magical words “In the King’s name,” so often proclaimed here with salvos of artillery, have now no echo except in the sullen dash of the sea against the rocky shores outside the perishing fortress, and
“What care these roarers for the name of King?”
Graveyard, Point Rochefort.
Still following the sheep-paths that zigzag about so as nearly to double the distance, I next turned back toward the harbor, leaving on my right the bleak and wind-swept field in which, to the lasting reproach of New England, five hundred of her bravest sons lie without stone or monument to mark their last resting-place. It is true that most of these men died of disease, and not in battle; yet to see the place as I saw it, in all its pitiful nakedness, isolation, and neglect, is the one thing at Louisburg that a New Englander would gladly have missed; and he will be very apt to walk on with a slower and less confident step, and with something less of admiration for the glory which consigns men to such oblivion as this.
Royal Battery.
To give anything like an adequate idea of how skilfully all the peculiarities of the ground were in some cases made use of in forming the defences, or in others, with equal art, overcome, would require a long chapter to itself. In order to render the main fortress more secure, the French engineer officers selected a spot three-fourths of a mile above it, on the harbor shore, on which they erected a battery that raked the open roadstead with its fire. It was a very strong factor in the system of defences as against a sea attack. This isolated work was called the Royal Battery, or in the English accounts, the Grand Battery. Yet, so far from contributing to the successful defence of the fortress, it became, in the hands of the besiegers, a powerful auxiliary to its capture. But the whole system of defence here shows that the marshes extending on the side of Gabarus Bay, where a landing was practicable only in calm weather, were considered an insuperable obstacle to the movements of artillery; and without artillery Louisburg could never have been seriously attacked from the land side. Against a sea attack it was virtually impregnable.
III
LOUISBURG TO SOLVE IMPORTANT POLITICAL AND MILITARY PROBLEMS
Having glanced at the purely military exigencies, which had at length forced themselves upon the attention of French statesmen, and having gone over the ground with the view of impressing its topographical features more firmly in our minds, we may now look at the underlying political and economic causes, out of which the French court finally matured a scheme for the maintenance of their colonial possessions in Canada in the broadest sense.