A half-century of conflict. France and England in North America. Part ...

144 LOUISBOURG TAKEN. [1745.Tenderness in the Strongest manner." — Shirley to Newcastle, 6 November,1745.The English documents on the siege of Louisbourg are many andvoluminous. The Pepperrell Papers and the Belknap Papers, bothin the library of the Massachusetts Historical Society, afford a vastnumber of contemporary letters and documents on the subject.The large volume entitled Siege of Louisbourg, in the same repository,contains many more, including a number of autograph diariesof soldiers and others. To these are to be added the journals ofGeneral Wolcott, James Gibson, Benjamin Cleaves, Seth Pomeroy,and several others, in print or manuscript, among which is especiallyto be noted the journal appended to Shirley's Letter to theDuke of Newcastle of October 28, 1745, and bearing the names of Pepperrell,Brigadier Waldo, Colonel Moore, and Lieutenant-ColonelsLothrop and Gridley, who attest its accuracy. Many papers havealso been drawn from the Public Record Office of London.Accounts of this affair have hitherto rested, with but slightexceptions, on English sources alone. The archives of France havefurnished useful material to the foregoing narrative, notably thelong report of the governor, Duchambon, to the minister of war,and the letter of the intendant. Bigot, to the same personage,within about six weeks after the surrender. But the most curiousFrench evidence respecting the siege is the Lettre d'un Habitant deLouisbourg contenant une Relation exacte ^ circonstanci€e de la Prisede I'lsle-Roijale par les Anglois. A Quebec, chez Guillaume le Sincere,a I'Image de la V€rit^, 1745. This little work, of eighty-one printedpages, is extremely rare. I could study it only by having a literatimtranscript made from the copy in the Biblioth^que Nationale, as itwas not in the British Museum. It bears the signature B. L. N.,and is dated a ... ce 28 Aout, 1745. The imprint of Qu^ec, etc.,is certainly a mask, the book having no doubt been printed inFrance. It severely criticises Duchambon, and makes him mainlyanswerable for the disaster.For French views of the siege of Louisbourg, see Appendix B.