What the French did with extraneous resources and artificial aids in the town of Louisbourg is more to the purpose in hand. The problem of their position, and of its strength and weakness in the coming clash of arms, depended on six naval, military, and governmental factors, each one of which must be considered before the whole can be appreciated. These six factors were—the government, the garrison, the militia, the Indians, the navy, and the fortress.
Get rich and go home. The English-speaking peoples, whose ancestors once went to England as oversea emigrants, and two-thirds of whom are now themselves the scions of successive migrations across the Seven Seas, cannot understand how intensely the general run of French officials detested colonial service, especially in a place like Louisbourg, which was everything the average Frenchman hated most. This British failure to understand a national trait, which is still as strongly marked as ever, accounts for a good deal of the exaggerated belief in the strength of the French position in America. The British Americans who tried to think out plans of conquest were wont to under-estimate their own unorganized resources and to over-estimate the organized resources of the French, especially when they set their minds on Louisbourg.
The British also entertained the erroneous idea that 'the whole country was under one command.' This was the very thing it was not. The French system was the autocratic one without the local autocrat; for the functions of the governor and the intendant overlapped each other, and all disputes had to be referred to Quebec, where the functions of another governor and another intendant also overlapped each other. If no decision could be reached at Quebec, and the question at issue was one of sufficient importance, the now double imbroglio would be referred to the Supreme Council in France, which would write back to Quebec, whence the decision would be forwarded to Louisbourg, where it would arrive months after many other troubles had grown out of the original dispute.
The system was false from the start, because the overlapping was intentional. The idea was to prevent any one man from becoming too strong and too independent. The result was to keep governors and intendants at perpetual loggerheads and to divide every station into opposing parties. Did the governor want money and material for the fortifications? Then the intendant was sure the military chest, which was in his own charge, could not afford it. The governor might sometimes gain his ends by giving a definite emergency order under his hand and seal. But, if the emergency could not be proved, this laid him open to great risks from the intendant's subsequent recriminations before the Superior Council in Quebec or the Supreme Council in France. The only way such a system could be worked at all was either by corrupt collusion or by superhuman co-operation between the two conflicting parties, or by appointing a man of genius who could make every other official discharge his proper duties and no more. Corrupt collusion was not very common, because the governors were mostly naval or military men, and the naval and military men were generally honest. Co-operation was impossible between two merely average men; and no genius was ever sent to such a place as Louisbourg. The ablest man in either of the principal posts was the notorious intendant Bigot, who began here on a small scale the consummate schemes that proved so disastrously successful at Quebec. Get rich and go home.
The minor governmental life of Louisbourg was of a piece with the major. There were four or five lesser members of the Superior Council, which also had jurisdiction over Ile St Jean, as Prince Edward Island was then called. The lucrative chances of the custom-house were at the mercy of four under-paid officials grandiloquently called a Court of Admiralty. An inferior court known as the bailiwick tried ordinary civil suits and breaches of the peace. This bailiwick also offered what might be euphemistically called 'business opportunities' to enterprising members. True, there was no police to execute its decrees; and at one time a punctilious resident complained that 'there was not even a common hangman, nor a jail, nor even a tormentor to rack the criminals or inflict other appropriate tortures.' But appeals took a long time and cost much money; so even the officials of the bailiwick could pick up a living by threats of the law's delay, on the one hand, and promises of perverted local justice, on the other. That there was money to be made, in spite of the meagre salaries, is proved by the fact that the best journeyman wig-maker in Louisbourg 'grew extremely rich in different branches of commerce, especially in the contraband,' after filling the dual position of judge of the admiralty and judge of the bailiwick, both to the apparent satisfaction of his friend the intendant.
The next factor was the garrison of regulars. This was under the direct command of the king's lieutenant, who took his orders from the governor. The troops liked Louisbourg no better than the officials did. True, there were taverns in plenty: even before Louisbourg was officially founded they had become such a thriving nuisance that orders for their better control had been sent out from France. But there was no other place for the ordinary soldier to go to in his spare time. The officers felt the want of a larger outlook even more than the men did; and neither man nor officer ever went to Louisbourg if he could help it. When Montcalm, the greatest Frenchman the New World ever saw, came out to Canada, there was eager competition among the troops at home to join his army in the field. Officers paid large sums for the honour of exchanging into any one of the battalions ordered to the front; and when volunteers were called for from the ranks every single man stepped forward. But no Montcalm came out to Louisbourg, and nothing but bounties could get a volunteer. There were only between five and six hundred regulars in the whole garrison during the first siege, twenty-five years after the foundation, and nearly half of these were foreigners, mostly 'pay-fighting Swiss.'
The third factor was the militia. Every able-bodied man, not specially exempt for other duties, was liable for service in time of war; and the whole island could be drawn upon for any great emergency at Louisbourg. Between thirteen and fourteen hundred men were got under arms for the siege of 1745. Those who lived in Louisbourg had the advantage of a little slack discipline and a little slack drill. Those in the country had some practice in the handling of firearms. But, taken all round, it would be an exaggeration to call them even quarter-trained soldiers.
The fourth factor was the Indians. They belonged to the Micmac tribe of the great Algonquin family, and probably numbered no more than about four thousand throughout the whole French sphere of influence in what are now the Maritime Provinces. A few hundred braves might have been ready to take the war-path in the wilds of Cape Breton; but sieges were not at all in their line, except when they could hang round the besiegers' inland flanks, on the chance of lifting scalps from careless stragglers or ambushing an occasional small party gone astray. As in Canada, so in Cape Breton, the Indians naturally sided with the French, who disturbed them less and treated them better than the British did. The British, who enjoyed the inestimable advantage of superior sea-power, had more goods to exchange. But in every other respect the French were very much preferred. The handful of French sent out an astonishingly great number of heroic and sympathetic missionaries to the natives. The many British sent out astonishingly few. The Puritan clergy did shamefully little compared with the wonderful Jesuits. Moreover, while the French in general made the Indian feel he was at all events a fellow human being, the average British colonist simply looked on him as so much vermin, to be destroyed together with the obstructive wilds that harboured him.
The fifth factor, the navy, brings us into contact with world-wide problems of sea-power which are too far-reaching for discussion here [Footnote: See in this Series The Winning of Canada and The Passing of New France, where they are discussed.] Suffice it to say that, while Louisbourg was an occasional convenience, it had also peculiar dangers for a squadron from the weaker of two hostile navies, as squadrons from France were likely to be. The British could make for a dozen different harbours on the coast. The French could make for only this one. Therefore the British had only to guard against this one stronghold if the French were in superior force; they could the more easily blockade it if the French were in equal force; and they could the more easily annihilate it if it was defended by an inferior force.
The last factor was the fortress itself. This so-called 'Gibraltar of the West,' this 'Quebec by the sea,' this 'Dunkirk of New France,' was certainly first of its kind. But it was first only in a class of one; while the class itself was far from being a first among classes. The natural position was vastly inferior to that of Quebec or Gibraltar; while the fortifications were not to be compared with those of Dunkirk, which, in one sense, they were meant to replace. Dunkirk had been sold by Charles II to Louis XIV, who made it a formidable naval base commanding the straits of Dover. When the Treaty of Utrecht compelled its demolition, the French tried to redress the balance a little by building similar works in America on a very much smaller scale, with a much more purely defensive purpose, and as an altogether subsidiary undertaking. Dunkirk was 'a pistol held at England's head' because it was an integral part of France, which was the greatest military country in the world and second to England alone on the sea. Louisbourg was no American Dunkirk because it was much weaker in itself, because it was more purely defensive, because the odds of population and general resources as between the two colonies were fifteen to one in favour of the British, and because the preponderance of British sea-power was even greater in America than it was in Europe.