[961] Carter-Brown, iii. nos. 796, 805. Cf. Samuel Niles, A brief and plain essay on God’s wonder-working Providence for New England in the reduction of Louisbourg. N. London (T. Green), 1747. This is in verse. (Sabin, xiii. 55,330.)
[962] Burrows (Life of Lord Hawke, p. 341) says of this tract: “Few papers convey a more accurate description of contemporary opinion on the colonial questions disputed between Great Britain and France in the last century.”
[963] “A train of favorable, unforeseen, and even astonishing events facilitated the conquest,” says Amos Adams in his Concise Hist. of New England, etc. Palfrey in his review of Mahon speaks of it as “one of the wildest undertakings ever projected by sane people.” Whatever the fortuitous character of the conquest, there was an attempt made in England to give the chief credit of it to Warren, who never landed a marine during its progress.
This assumption was violently maintained in the debates in Parliament at the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. The question is examined by Stone in his Life of Johnson, i. 152, who also, p. 58, gives an account of Warren and his residence in New York. English statesmen were not so instructed later, but that Lord John Russell, in his introduction to the Bedford Correspondence, i. p. xliv., could say: “Commodore Warren, having been despatched by the Duke of Bedford for that purpose, took Louisbourg.”
[964] The French record of some of the principal official documents is in the Collection de Manuscrits (Quebec), vol. iii., such as the summons of May 7, the declination of May 18 (pp. 220, 221), the papers of the final surrender and exchange of prisoners (pp. 221-236, 265, 314, 377), and Du Chambon’s account of the siege, written from Rochefort, Sept. 2, 1745 (p. 237).
[965] Inquiry has not disclosed that any portrait of Gridley exists.
[966] Both of these works contain another map, Plan of the City and Harbour of Louisbourg, showing the landing place of the British in 1745 and 1758, and their encampment in 1758.
[967] The Carter-Brown Catalogue (iii. no. 1,469) gives the date of publication 1765, and assigns its publication to “Mary Ann Rocque, topographer to his Royal Highness, the Duke of Gloucester.”
[968] Amer. Magazine (Boston), Dec., 1745. Some of Shirley’s admirers caused his portrait to be painted, and some years later they gave it to the town of Boston, and it was hung in Faneuil Hall. Town Records, 1742-57, p. 26.