The journal (1758) of Captain Gorham’s rangers and other forces under Major Morris, in a marauding expedition to the Bay of Fundy, is given in the Aspinwall Papers, in Mass. Hist. Coll., xxxix. 222.
Franquet, who a year or two before the war began was sent by the French to strengthen Louisbourg and inspect the defences of Canada, kept a journal, which Parkman uses in his Montcalm and Wolfe.
Admiral Knowles, in the memorial for back pay which he presented in 1774 to the British government, claimed the credit of having planned the movements for this second capture of Louisbourg.
The most authoritative contemporary account of the siege of 1758, on the English side, is contained in the despatches of Amherst and Boscawen sent to Pitt, extracts from which were published as A journal of the landing of his majesty’s forces on the island of Cape Breton, and of the siege and surrender of Louisbourg (22 pp.). What is called a third edition of this tract was printed in Boston in 1758.[1032] The so-called journal of Amherst was printed in the London Magazine, and is included in Thomas Mante’s Hist. of the Late War in North America (London, 1772).
Of the contemporary French accounts, Parkman says he had before him four long and minute diaries of the siege. The first is that of Drucour, the French commander, containing his correspondence with Amherst, Boscawen, and Desgouttes, the naval chief of the French. Tourville, who commanded the “Capricieux,” one of the French fleet, kept a second of these diaries. A third and fourth are without the names of their writers. They agree in nearly all essential particulars.[1033] The Parkman MSS., in the Mass. Hist. Society’s library, contain many letters from participants in the siege, which were copied from the Paris Archives de la Marine. The manuscript of Chevalier Johnstone, a Scotch Jacobite serving with the French, gives an account of the siege, which is described elsewhere (post, in chapter viii.) and has been used by Parkman. The Documents Collected in France—Massachussetts Archives (vol. ix. p. i.) contains one of the narratives.
FROM BROWN’S CAPE BRETON.
