Endgame 1758: The Promise, the Glory, and the Despair of Louisbourg's Last Decade

Chapter 1: Opening Moves, 1749

Opening Moves, 1749 ome dates loom larger than others, and in what is now Atlantic Canada, 1749 was a year of paramount importance. Two events that summer were to have a deep impact on all peoples in the region : Mi’kmaq, Wolastoqiyik (Maliseet), French, Acadians, and British. One event was the British founding of Halifax; the other was the French reoccupation of Louisbourg. It was no coincidence that the two initiatives occurred within days of each other. The unprecedented British settlement initiative in Nova Scotia was undertaken precisely because the French were reestablishing themselves at Louisbourg. Authorities in London were not willing to see an enemy ville fortifiée reemerge on Cape Breton Island without creating a rival stronghold of their own. The twin actions of 1749 took place in an atmosphere of anticipated war. No one ever knows the future, yet there were few who regarded the treaty signed at Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748 as the start of an enduring peace. Most expected further hostilities, and sooner rather than later. In the case of the indigenous peoples in the region, they felt no commitment to the peace settlement signed overseas between the two European powers. The Mi’kmaq, the Wolastoqiyik, and the Abenaki had not been part of any stage of the negotiations, nor were they signatories to the final treaty. The particular grievances the Mi’kmaq had about the British founding of Halifax were summarized in a document composed in the 1 S 24 Mi’kmaw and French languages and sent on to the newly arrived governor Edward Cornwallis. The letter opened: “The place where you are, where you are building dwellings, where you are now building a fort, where you want, as it were, to enthrone yourself, this land of which you wish to make yourself now absolute master, this land belongs to me.”1 British officials who read or heard such declarations from the Mi’kmaq or other Aboriginal peoples were unmoved. It was a rare European who had sympathy for what the twentieth century would come to know as the rights of indigenous peoples. For their part the French encouraged and aided allies such as the Mi’kmaq in their gripes and struggles against the British. Much of the French success in North America lay in their ability to develop alliances with indigenous nations, first against rival Aboriginal tribes, “then against the English colonists, and eventually against the British army.”2 That did not mean, however, that the French recognized the sovereign rights of the indigenous peoples any more than did the British. If they had, they might have invited the Mi’kmaq and others to provide input into the treaties the French monarch made with his British counterpart, when territories were being signed away or acquired. To eighteenth-century Europeans, indeed to nineteenth-century Europeans, such participation was inconceivable. From the perspective of the imperial governments in Great Britain and France, the founding of Halifax and the refounding of Louisbourg were strategic acts that allowed each to retain its respective sphere of in- fluence in the Atlantic region. If things went as both hoped—which was impossible because their visions overlapped and clashed—then the initiatives of 1749 might allow them to expand their spheres. The warlike edge of the two ventures was apparent to any onlooker. Each expedition contained a sizable military contingent along with civilian settlers. Each had large financial subsidies from its backing administration, which was exceptional in the generally parsimonious colonial era. The arrival in 1749 of massive flotillas, one French off the Cape Breton coast and one British off the eastern shore of Nova Scotia, was not about the peaceful settlement of the region. They were the opening gestures in what would turn out to be a decade of tension and warfare. A century and a half of Opening Moves, 1749 25 simmering rivalry and warfare, begun in 1613 when an expedition of Virginians sailed north to destroy several French settlements in Acadie, was about to begin to boil.3 Preliminaries The negotiation of the final version of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle took months. By the time the preliminary agreements were reached at the end of April 1748, long before the peace was formally signed on October 18, 1748, the direction in which the treaty was heading was obvious to both the British and the French. With regard to Atlantic Canada, the clock...