Maps, both French and English, showing the fortifications and harbor of Louisbourg are numerous.
Both editions of Charlevoix’s Histoire de la Nouvelle France, the duodecimo in six volumes, and the quarto in three volumes issued in 1744, the year before the siege, have plans of Louisbourg and its fortifications, and the same are reproduced in Dr. Shea’s translation of Charlevoix. They are the work of Nicholas Bellin, and to the same draughtsman belongs Le Petit Atlas Maritime, 1764, in the volume of which devoted to North America, there are other (nos. 23, 24) plans of the harbor and fortifications.
Following French sources is a Plan des fortifications de Louisbourg, published at Amsterdam by H. de Leth about 1750. A “Plan special de Louisbourg” is also to be found on the map published by N. Visscher at Amsterdam, called “Carte Nouvelle contenant la partie de l’Amérique la plus septentrionale.”
Among the French maps is one “levé en 1756,” after a plan of Louisbourg, preserved in the Dépôt des Cartes de la Marine in Paris. This appeared in 1779 in the Neptune Americo-Septentrional, “publiée par ordre du Roi;” and another, dated 1758, “levé par le chev. de la Rigaudiere,” was accompanied by a view, of which there is a copy in the Mass. Archives; Docs. collected in France, Atlas, ii. 5. In this last (composite) Atlas (ii. nos. 44, 45) are maps of the town and harbor, and a large plan of the fortifications, marked “Tome i. no. 23,” which can probably be identified.
CAPE BRETON, 1746.
Reduced fac-simile of the “Map of the Island of Cape Breton as laid down by the Sieur Bellin, 1746,” annexed to The Importance and Advantage of Cape Breton, truly stated and impartially considered, London, 1746. A general map of the island of Cape Breton, with Bellin’s name attached, is found in the several editions of Charlevoix and in the Petit Atlas maritime, par le S. Bellin, 1764. The earliest more elaborate survey of this part of the coast was the one published by J. F. W. Des Barres, in 1781, in four sheets, The South East Coast of Cape Breton Island, surveyed by Samuel Holland. A map by Kitchen was published in the London Mag., 1747.
Richard Gridley,[965] of Massachusetts Bay, who was present as an officer of the artillery, made a plan of the fortifications after the surrender, and this, called a Plan of the City and Fortifications of Louisbourg from surveys made by Richard Gridley in 1745, was engraved and published by Jefferys, in 1758, and was used by him in his History of the French Dominions in America, London, 1760 (p. 124), and in his General Topography of North America and the West Indies, London, 1768 (no. 25).[966]