CHAPTER VII
LOUISBOURG
| Cape Breton Island under the provisions of the Peace of Utrecht. Importance of the island to France. |
The Treaty of Utrecht provided that 'the island called Cape Breton, as also all others both in the mouth of the river of St. Lawrence and in the gulf of the same name, shall hereafter belong of right to the French, and the Most Christian King shall have all manner of liberty to fortify any place or places there.' It was an important provision. Driven from Acadia and Newfoundland, with the reservation of certain fishing rights along a specified part of the Newfoundland coast, the French would have lost the seaboard altogether but for the possession of these islands at the entrance of the river of Canada.
A French eye-witness of the siege of Louisbourg in 1745 described, in a contemporary pamphlet, the value of Cape Breton Island to France. It was used, he says, to provide a place for the French settlers who were leaving Newfoundland after the cession of that island to Great Britain by the Treaty of Utrecht, but 'this was not all. It was necessary that we should retain a position that would make us at all times masters of the entrance to the River which leads to New France.'1 Similar testimony to its value is given by an English writer. 'Cape Breton Island is a subject no good Englishman can write or read with pleasure. The giving of it to the French by the Treaty of Utrecht may prove as great a loss to the Kingdom, as the Sinking Fund amounts to or even the charge of the last war.'2 Cape Breton, in short, kept open for France the mouth of the St. Lawrence, and the story of New France became more than ever the story of that river, and of the waterways which connected it with the far West, and with the newborn French colony in Louisiana.
1 Louisbourg in 1745, the anonymous Lettre d'un habitant de Louisbourg, translated and edited by Professor Wrong (Toronto, 1897), p. 26.
2 Oldmixon's British Empire in America (1741 ed.), vol. i, p. 37.
From 1713, for thirty years, there was nominally peace between Great Britain and France. In 1743, English troops assisted the Austrians and defeated the French at the battle of Dettingen; but war was not formally proclaimed between the two powers until the following year, 1744, when it lasted for four years, being terminated by the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748. During the years of so-called peace, French Governors, French priests, French explorers and border leaders lost no opportunity of strengthening the French position in North America.