With them in the same depository are the Belknap Papers, three volumes,[950] as well as a composite volume, Louisbourg Papers, devoted entirely to the expedition.[951] Others of the scattered papers of Pepperrell have since been found elsewhere. Dr. Usher Parsons, in his Life of Pepperrell,[952] beside using what Belknap possessed, sifted a mass of papers found in an old shed on the Pepperrell estate. This lot covered the years 1696-1759, and some of them were scarcely legible. The mercantile letters and accounts among them yielded little, but there was a smaller body of Pepperrell’s own letters and those of his correspondents, which proved of more or less historical value.
Unremitting search yielded gain to Dr. Parsons in other directions. Some manuscripts coming from a Kittery house into the hands of Capt. Luther Dame, of Newburyport, were reported upon by Col. A. H. Hoyt in the New England Hist. and Geneal. Reg. (Oct., 1874, p. 451), in a paper afterwards reprinted by him, separately, with revision; but they throw no considerable light upon the Louisbourg siege. They would add little to what Parsons presents in chronologically arranged excerpts from letters and other records which make up his account of the expedition.[953]
Of all other contemporary accounts and aids, most, so far as known, have been put into print, though George Bancroft quotes a journal of Seth Pomeroy,[954] not yet in type; and there are papers which might still be gleaned in the Mass. Archives. There are in print the instructions of Shirley, and a correspondence between Pepperrell and Warren (Mass. Hist. Collections, i. 13-60); letters of Wentworth and Shirley on the plan of attack, and other letters of Shirley (Provincial Papers of New Hampshire, vol. v. pp. 931, 949, etc.); and many others of Pepperrell, Warren, Shirley, etc. (Rhode Island Colonial Records, vol. v.). The Colonial Records of Connecticut (vol. ix.) for this period give full details of the legislative enactment regarding the part that colony bore in the expedition; but the absence of most of the illustrative documents from her archives during that interval deprives us, doubtless, of a correspondence similar to that which is included in the Rhode Island printed Records.
Shirley’s letters to Governor Thomas, of Penna., respecting the preparations for the Louisbourg expedition, are in Penna. Archives, i. 667, etc.
Stray letters and documents of some interest, but throwing no essential light upon historical events, are found in the N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., v. 88; xii. 263; xix. 225, etc.
Various accounts of the siege, of no great extent were published soon after its close. Chief among them was an Accurate journal and account of the proceedings of the New England land forces, during the late expedition against the French settlements on Cape Breton to the time of the surrender of Louisbourg, Exon, 1746 (40 pp.). The manuscript of this journal was sent to England by Pepperrell to his friend Capt. Henry Stafford; and as printed it was attested by Pepperrell, Brig.-General Waldo, Col. Moore, Lieut.-Col. Lothrop, and Lieut.-Col. Gridley.[955] This journal was printed, with some curious verbal differences, as an appendix to a Letter from William Shirley, Esq., to the Duke of Newcastle, with a Journal of the Siege of Louisbourg, London, 1746. It was by vote of the legislature, Dec. 30, 1746, reprinted in Boston, once by Rogers and Fowle, and again by J. Draper.[956] An account by Col. James Gibson, published in London in 1745, as a Journal of the late siege by the troops of North America against the French at Cape Breton,[957] contained a large engraved plan of the siege, of which a reduced fac-simile is annexed.[958] The narrative was edited in Boston in 1847 by Lorenzo D. Johnson, under the misleading title A Boston merchant of 1745. Other diaries of the siege, of greater or less extent, have been printed, like Wolcott’s,[959] in the Collections (vol. i.) of the Connecticut Historical Society; Curwen’s in his letters (Hist. Collections Essex Institute, vol. iii. 186), and in his Journal, edited by Ward (p. 8); Craft’s journal (Hist. Coll. Essex Inst., iv. p. 181); that of Adonijah Bidwell, the chaplain of the fleet (N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., April, 1873); and the folio tract entitled A particular Account of the taking of Cape Breton by Admiral Warren and Sir William Pepperell, with a description of the place ... and the articles of capitulation, By Philip Durell, Esq., Capt. of his majesty’s ship “Superbe.” To which is added a letter from an officer of marines, etc., etc., London, 1745. Durell’s account is dated June 20, 1745, in Louisbourg harbor. Douglass gives the force by sea and land before Louisbourg. Summary, etc., i. 350.
A list of the commissioned officers of the expedition, drawn from the Belknap Papers, is edited by Charles Hudson in the N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., Oct., 1870.[960] In Ibid., April, 1868, a list of 221 names of the common soldiers had been printed; but in July, 1871, a much longer enumeration is made out by Mr. Hudson from the Pepperrell papers, the Council Records, and other sources. Potter in the N. H. Adj.-General’s Report, ii. (1866, pp. 61-76), afterwards published as Mil. Hist. of N. H., gives the New Hampshire rolls of Louisbourg soldiers.
On the occasion of a Thanksgiving (July 18, 1745) in Boston, two sermons preserve to us some additional if slight details. That of Thomas Prince, Extraordinary events the doings of God and marvellous in pious eyes, Boston and London, 1745 (Harv. Coll. lib., 4375.42 and 43), is mainly reprinted in S. G. Drake’s Five Years’ French and Indian Wars, p. 187; and that of the Rev. Charles Chauncy, the brother-in-law of Pepperrell, Marvellous Things done by the right hand and holy arm of God in getting him the victory, was printed both in Boston and London.[961]