D'Anville's problem was insoluble from the start, Four large men-of-war from the West Indies were to join him at Chibucto Bay, now the harbour of Halifax, under Admiral Conflans, the same who was defeated by Hawke in Quiberon Bay thirteen years later, on the very day that Wolfe was buried. Each contributory part of the great French naval plan failed in the working out. D'Anville's command was a collection of ships, not a co-ordinated fleet. The French dockyards had been neglected; so some of the ships were late, which made it impossible to practise manoeuvres before sailing for the front. Then, in the bungling hurry of fitting out, the hulls of several vessels were left foul, which made them dull sailers; while nearly all the holds were left unscoured, which, of course, helped to propagate the fevers, scurvy, plague, and pestilence brought on by bad food badly stowed. Nor was this all. Officers who had put in so little sea time with working fleets were naturally slack and inclined to be discontented. The fact that they were under sealed orders, which had been communicated only to d'Anville, roused their suspicions while his weakness in telling them they were bound for Louisbourg almost produced a mutiny.
The fleet left France at midsummer, had a very rough passage through the Bay of Biscay, and ran into a long, dead calm off the Azores. This ended in a storm, during which several vessels were struck by lightning, which, in one case, caused a magazine explosion that killed and wounded over thirty men. It was not till the last week of September that d'Anville made the excellently safe harbour of Halifax. The four ships under Conflans were nowhere to be seen. They had reached the rendezvous at the beginning of the month, had cruised about for a couple of weeks, and had then gone home. D'Anville was now in no position to attack Louisbourg, much less New England. Some of his vessels were quite unserviceable. There was no friendly port nearer than Quebec. All his crews were sickly; and the five months' incessant and ever-increasing strain had changed him into a broken-hearted man. He died very suddenly, in the middle of the night; some said from a stroke of apoplexy, while others whispered suicide.
His successor, d'Estournel, summoned a council of war, which overruled the plan for an immediate return to France. Presently a thud, followed by groans of mortal agony, was heard in the new commander's cabin. The door was burst open, and he was found dying from the thrust of his own sword. La Jonquiere, afterwards governor-general of Canada, thereupon succeeded d'Estournel. This commander, the third within three days, was an excellent naval officer and a man of strong character. He at once set to work to reorganize the fleet. But reorganization was now impossible. Storms wrecked the vessels. The plague killed off the men: nearly three thousand had died already. Only a single thousand, one-tenth of the survivors, were really fit for duty. Yet La Jonquiere still persisted in sailing for Annapolis. One vessel was burned, while four others were turned into hospital ships, which trailed astern, dropping their dead overside, hour after hour, as they went.
But Annapolis was never attacked. The dying fleet turned back and at last reached Port Louis, on the coast of Brittany. There it found La Palme, a frigate long since given up for lost, lying at anchor, after a series of adventures that seem wellnigh impossible. First her crew's rations had been cut down to three ounces a day. Then the starving men had eaten all the rats in her filthy hold; and when rats failed they had proposed to eat their five British prisoners. The captain did his best to prevent this crowning horror. But the men, who were now ungovernable, had already gone below to cut up one prisoner into three-ounce rations, when they were brought on deck again, just in time, by the welcome cry of sail-ho! The Portuguese stranger fortunately proved to have some sheep, which were instantly killed and eaten raw.
News of these disasters to the French arms at length reached the anxious British colonies. The militia were soon discharged. The danger seemed past. And the whole population spent a merrier Christmas than any one of them had dared to hope for.
In May of the next year, 1747, La Jonquiere again sailed for Louisbourg. But when he was only four days out he was overtaken off Cape Finisterre by a superior British fleet, under Anson and Warren, and was totally defeated, after a brave resistance.
In 1748 the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle gave Louisbourg back to the French. The British colonies were furious, New England particularly so. But the war at large had not gone severely enough against the French to force them to abandon a stronghold on which they had set their hearts, and for which they were ready to give up any fair equivalent. The contemporary colonial sneer, often repeated since, and quite commonly believed, was that 'the important island of Cape Breton was exchanged for a petty factory in India.' This was not the case. Every power was weary of the war. But France was ready to go on with it rather than give up her last sea link with Canada. Unless this one point was conceded the whole British Empire would have been involved in another vast, and perhaps quite barren, campaign. The only choice the British negotiators could apparently make was a choice between two evils. And of the two they chose the less.