Siege of Louisbourg (1758): Britain Takes France's Fortress

The Siege of Louisbourg of 1758 was a seven-week British operation that captured France’s main fortress in Atlantic Canada, on Cape Breton Island (then Île Royale). Its fall in July 1758 removed the strongest French guard on the Gulf of St. Lawrence and made possible the British campaign against Quebec the following year, a turning point of the French and Indian War.

Background: France’s Atlantic stronghold

France began building Louisbourg after the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) took away mainland Acadia and Newfoundland. The walled town on Cape Breton protected a rich cod fishery, sheltered French shipping and watched over the entrance to the St. Lawrence. Contemporaries often called it the “Gibraltar of the North”, although its landward walls had serious weaknesses.

In 1745 a force of New England volunteers led by William Pepperrell, backed by a Royal Navy squadron under Peter Warren, captured the town after a siege of about six weeks. The Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle returned it to France in 1748. When war broke out again in the 1750s, part of the wider Seven Years’ War, Louisbourg became a key British target. A first expedition in 1757 was abandoned when a strong French fleet gathered in the harbour and a storm scattered the British ships.

The British expedition

Under William Pitt’s direction, the British prepared a far larger effort for 1758. Admiral Edward Boscawen commanded a fleet of roughly 150 ships, including about 40 warships, while Major General Jeffery Amherst led an army of some 13,000 soldiers. Among his brigadiers was the 31-year-old James Wolfe.

The French governor, Augustin de Boschenry de Drucour, had around 3,500 regular soldiers and marines, plus militia and the crews of the warships in the harbour, giving a total defending force usually estimated at 6,000 to 7,500 men. His main hope was to delay the British for as long as possible, so that they could not move on to Quebec that summer.

The landing at Kennington Cove

Heavy surf delayed the landing for several days. Early on 8 June 1758 the British boats rowed for the shore west of the town at Anse de la Cormorandière, known to the British as Kennington Cove (Freshwater Cove in some accounts). French troops dug in above the beach opened a heavy fire, and Wolfe signalled the boats to turn back.

A few boats on the flank found a sheltered landing among the rocks and got men ashore. Wolfe followed them, his men scrambled up the slope, and the French defenders, fearing they would be cut off, fell back into the fortress. The landing that came close to failure decided the siege’s opening phase.

The siege

Amherst moved methodically. Wolfe marched round the harbour to Lighthouse Point, where British batteries began firing on the island battery that guarded the harbour mouth and on the French ships inside. Siege lines and gun positions then crept closer to the town’s western walls.

The French ships in the harbour suffered badly. On 21 July a British shell set fire to Le Célèbre, and the flames spread to L’Entreprenant and Le Capricieux, all of which were destroyed. On the night of 25–26 July, British sailors in small boats rowed into the harbour and attacked the last two ships of the line: Le Prudent was burned and Le Bienfaisant captured and towed away, the scene shown in the engraving above.

By then the town’s walls were breached in places and many houses had burned. On 26 July 1758 Drucour asked for terms. Amherst refused the garrison the “honours of war”, the customary right to march out with flags and weapons, and the French had to surrender as prisoners. Some French officers wanted to fight on rather than accept those terms, but Drucour agreed to save the civilian population from an assault.

Key people

• Jeffery Amherst, the careful British army commander, who later accepted the surrender of Montreal in 1760.
• Edward Boscawen, the admiral whose fleet blockaded the harbour and supported the landings.
• James Wolfe, the brigadier whose energy at Kennington Cove and Lighthouse Point made his reputation and won him command against Quebec.
• Augustin de Drucour, the French governor, whose defence lasted long enough to save Quebec for one more year.
• Marie-Anne Drucour, the governor’s wife, who according to tradition fired cannon from the ramparts to encourage the garrison.

Consequences

The siege lasted long enough that the British judged it too late in the season to sail on to Quebec in 1758. Instead, Wolfe raided French settlements around the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and the British began deporting French inhabitants from Île Royale and Île Saint-Jean (Prince Edward Island), a continuation of the Expulsion of the Acadians.

In 1759 Wolfe led the army up the St. Lawrence and won the Battle of the Plains of Abraham. Louisbourg’s prisoners, around 5,600 soldiers, sailors and others by most counts, were shipped to Britain. Fearing that the fortress might again be handed back in a peace treaty, the British government had its walls blown up in 1760.

By the numbers

Timeline

• 1745, June: New England forces capture Louisbourg after a siege of about six weeks.
• 1748, October: The Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle returns Louisbourg to France.
• 1757, summer: A first British expedition against Louisbourg is abandoned.
• 1758, 2 June: Boscawen’s fleet arrives off Louisbourg; surf delays the landing.
• 1758, 8 June: Wolfe’s troops force a landing at Kennington Cove.
• 1758, 21 July: Three French ships of the line burn in the harbour.
• 1758, 25–26 July: British boat crews burn Le Prudent and capture Le Bienfaisant.
• 1758, 26 July: Drucour agrees to surrender; the British enter the town on 27 July.
• 1760, summer: British engineers demolish the fortifications.

Legacy

The ruins lay largely abandoned until the twentieth century. In the 1960s the Canadian government began rebuilding roughly a quarter of the eighteenth-century town, partly as a job-creation scheme for Cape Breton’s coal-mining communities. The Fortress of Louisbourg National Historic Site is now one of the largest historical reconstructions in North America.

Why it matters

The capture of Louisbourg was the first major British success of the war in North America after years of defeats, such as the Siege of Fort William Henry. It opened the St. Lawrence to the Royal Navy and set up the fall of Quebec in 1759, which decided that France would lose Canada.