The Siege of Fort Beausejour, 1755, and: Saint John Fortifications, 1630-1956 (review)

Here is my bias up front: I think the world needs history books that present specialist subject matter to a broad public. These two studies do exactly that, for they are part of what the editors/publishers call the New Brunswick Military Heritage Project, "a non-profit organization devoted to public awareness of the remarkable military heritage of the province." Several books have appeared in the series—many more are planned—and all come with a similar design. Each aims to have 100 to 125 pages and to be well illustrated with a mix of period and modern maps, plans, and photos. Each also comes with a select bibliography and an index, but no footnotes or endnotes.

The similarity of the packaging aside, the books under review present two quite different topics. Chris M. Hand, a major in the Royal Canadian Regiment who researched the topic as part of the master's program at the University of New Brunswick, focuses on a single military event, the British and New England capture of the French fort at Beauséjour in June 1755. Roger Sarty and Doug Knight, the former a well-known Canadian military historian and the latter a retired Canadian army engineering officer, cover over three hundred years and a great many forts and fortification systems in their 100 or so pages. The differing timelines inevitably means that the narrative and analytical approaches in the two books differ sharply.

Because Sarty and Knight have to summarize a long period into so few pages there are places, especially in the introduction, where the condensation makes the text read more like separate bullets linked together than an elegant essay. In other spots readers familiar with Saint John must appreciate the precise location references the authors provide in the book, such as "The site was on the west side opposite Portland Point, roughly where the Harbour Bridge toll plaza now stands" (p. 24). Such descriptions are lost on those of us who live elsewhere; we are satisfied with the many maps and photos in the book.

The above observations are of course mere quibbles, for Sarty and Knight accomplished a great deal in putting together Saint John Fortifications, 1630–1956. Thanks to their book, there now exists a baseline narrative for the military history of New Brunswick's major port city where none existed previously. One learns about the many forts, batteries, and artillery upgrades that occurred, as well as about some that were planned but not built. The heyday was the Second World War, when Saint John became "one of Canada's major defended ports . . . guarded by an up-to-date, sophisticated, and complex fortress system" (p. 69).

The challenge for Chris Hand was quite different, because the capture (or fall) of Fort Beauséjour is very well known. It is mentioned in most if not all histories of the French and Indian War. The references, however, are usually fleeting, somewhere between a few sentences to a few pages. That has always been unfortunate because the June 1755 campaign against Beauséjour was fascinating and important in the history of northeastern North America. Building on his personal military background and training, and a close re-reading of all the original sources, Hand offers the most complete summary of the 1755 siege of Fort Beauséjour one is going to find. His explanations of the context that led to the siege and its aftermath may strike specialists of Acadian history as a bit thin, but then there are lots of recent books on the mid-eighteenth century history of Nova Scotia...