Part 9 (1/2)
The growing power of England, on the sea, in America, and in India, was only equalled by the increasing jealousy of the Catholic nations of Europe, and especially of her ancient rival France. The question of the Austrian succession, in which these two conspicuous opposites stood for and against Maria Theresa, supplied a pretext for war; yet it hardly concealed the real purpose of each power to destroy the other; and the battles of Fontenoy, Nollwitz, and Dettingen, though fought in the heart of Europe, were as decisive for an Eastern and a Western empire as was the warfare on the frontiers of India, or the sullen conflict in the Ohio valley.
Across the Atlantic, France, as usual, dealt the first blow. With a thousand soldiers from Louisbourg, Du Vivier a.s.sailed Annapolis Royal; but neither by investment nor a.s.sault could the French overcome the small but indomitable garrison; and at length, after weeks of useless cannonade, the besiegers stole back to their stronghold in Cape Breton. This gallant repulse of a desperate attempt to regain Acadia prompted New England to an expedition against the strong fortress of Louisbourg--the standing menace to peaceful colonial development. Were it but reduced, the English seaboard would be henceforth free from all danger of French attack.
Such large considerations fired the English colonists with an enthusiasm which took little thought for the grave dangers attending such an enterprise. Excepting the citadel of Quebec itself, there was no fortress on the American continent to compare in strength with Louisbourg. Built on a narrow rocky cape which projected out into the Atlantic, the ocean girded it on three sides, and on the fourth side a mora.s.s made it difficult of approach. A powerful fortification, known as the Island Battery, protected the mouth of the harbour, and the guns of Grand Battery frowned over the inner basin. The French garrison numbered thirteen hundred chosen men. Such was the fortress which Governor s.h.i.+rley of Ma.s.sachusetts planned to destroy, and against which the daring Pepperell presently threw the ill-trained levies of New England.
One night, when the citadel of Louisbourg was brilliant with festivity, the colonists dancing and all unconscious of danger, a hundred transports from New England entered Gabarus Bay. The citizens would have held it a foolish dream that any attempt could be made to capture Louisbourg, but there, in the early morning of April 30th, 1745, Pepperell's army was disembarking before their eyes, and in the offing Commodore Warren, with four British battles.h.i.+ps, stood blockading the harbour. The bells of the martial little town rang madly in alarm, and the booming of cannon at once brought the dismayed citizens to the ramparts.
[Ill.u.s.tration: LIEUT.-GENERAL SIR WILLIAM PEPPERELL, BART.]
Without loss of time Pepperell began to make his way across the marshes lying between his camp and Louisbourg, erecting batteries as he went to answer the cannonade of the garrison. Each morning saw the intrepid besiegers closer to the walls, having advanced their intrenchments under cover of the darkness. A daring a.s.sault had meanwhile carried the grand battery, and from a salient post on Light-house Point Pepperell's guns were soon able to silence the island redoubt at the mouth of the harbour. The battle swayed from side to side as the desperate garrison made a sortie, or the besiegers impetuously rushed to the attack. But even the walls of Louisbourg could not for long withstand that furious and ceaseless cannonade, which shattered the heaviest bastions; and when the gallant fort could hold out no longer, a white flag fluttered from the broken ramparts, and the brave Duchambon, his veteran garrison decimated, marched out with the honours of war.
The loss of Louisbourg was the severest blow yet sustained by New France, and without delay a powerful expedition was organised to recapture the fortress and take revenge upon the enemy. No such formidable and menacing armada had ever left the sh.o.r.es of France as now sailed out of Roch.e.l.le, under command of the Duc d'Anville.
Thirty-nine s.h.i.+ps of the line convoyed transports bearing a veteran army westward; and the English colonists trembled for its coming.
However, the advance tidings of this terrible flotilla were all that reached the New World; for hardly had D'Anville lost sight of the French coast before two of his s.h.i.+ps fell a prey to British gunboats, and a succession of storms scattered the rest in all directions.
At length, after weeks of delay, the surviving vessels struggled one by one into the harbour of Chedabucto. In deadly dejection, D'Anville had succ.u.mbed to apoplexy; moreover, his successor, the Admiral D'Estournelle, had committed suicide; and the new commander was La Jonquiere, a distinguished naval officer, then on his way to Quebec to a.s.sume the office of Governor-General. His sorry fleet notwithstanding, La Jonquiere decided to strike a blow at Annapolis.
Thither he shaped his course; but again a violent storm overtook them on the way, and the s.h.i.+ps, unable to weather the tempest, steered straight for France once more.
Even in the face of these dark disasters France was unwilling to abandon Louisbourg, and in 1747 another powerful naval force under La Jonquiere set out for Acadia. Like its magnificent but hapless predecessor, this fleet had hardly cleared the Bay of Biscay before it came to grief. Falling in with a British squadron under Admiral Anson off Cape Finisterre, it was almost totally destroyed.
In other quarters, however, France had received amends from fortune, and in the following year the European powers signed the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, Louisbourg being restored to France in exchange for the Indian province of Madras, which had pa.s.sed from English hands during the war. To New England, whose blood and valour had achieved the demolition of the frowning fortress, this rest.i.tution was a sorrowful blow. But only ten years were to pa.s.s before this menace was removed for ever.
La Jonquiere, Governor-designate of Quebec, had been taken prisoner at the naval battle of Finisterre; and, pending his release, the Marquis de la Galissoniere presided over the fortunes, or misfortunes, of New France. The indefiniteness of the western boundary between French and English territory was perhaps the chief source of his perplexity; and to put an end to persistent English encroachments in the valley of the Ohio, Galissoniere sent Celoron de Bienville, a colonial captain, to establish a formal boundary line. This expedition nominally accomplished its purpose; but, judging from the report submitted to the Governor of Quebec, its chief result was a painful revelation. It was shown that, in spite of an expensive chain of fortified posts, the great West was fast slipping from the martial grasp of New France, and pa.s.sing under the stronger influence of English trade. The huge, unwieldy empire was clearly falling to pieces, and La Jonquiere's arrival in Quebec brought no improvement to the situation. Of high merit as a naval officer, the new Governor had less distinction in morals, and he had frankly come to Canada to mend his fortune. His administration marks the advent of that official robbery which disgraced Quebec and sapped the remaining vitality of the country.
Though the country had prospered materially under Vaudreuil, the subsequent war had stopped all progress, and the people were dreaming of empire when they needed bread.
[Ill.u.s.tration: BIENVILLE (Governor of Louisiana, 1732)]
To-day, walking down Palace Hill and turning near the bottom into the Rue St. Vallier, you will find yourself close to the site of the ancient intendancy, where the official ruin of New France began. Here it was that Francois Bigot, the evil genius of Quebec, held corrupt sway in the guise of a royal minister. Here stood, in mordant comment, the Palais de Justice, so wickedly profaned by the last of the intendants. Through several fires and two sieges of later generations parts of this ancient structure persisted in surviving. Only a few years ago the heavier timber still hanging together was called ”The King's Wood-yard.” But nothing now remains of it, and imagination only summons the haunting spirit of this creature of La Pompadour, whose mischievous influence lost Louis XV his colonial empire, and whose infamies sealed the fate of the Bourbons.
Francois Bigot arrived at Quebec in 1748, a year in which the fortunes of New France had reached so low an ebb that nothing but the most loyal administration might now save her. Even then a strong honest man might possibly have weathered the storm already lowering over this New World dominion; but, with pitiable perverseness, every trait in Bigot's character helped it on to ruin. In private life vain, selfish, heartless, extravagant to the point of folly; in public life mercenary and venal beyond shame--such were the characteristics of the man whom Louis's favourite chose to be civil administrator at Quebec, where the patriotic faith and labour of a gallant and high-hearted people were rewarded by plunder, mis-rule, and that neglect which gave them at last into the hands of the conqueror.
[Ill.u.s.tration: DE BOUGAINVILLE (General under Montcalm, 1759)]
On his arrival, the Intendant speedily surrounded himself by sycophants and knaves who joined him in the reckless pursuit of pleasure, and became ready instruments to further his darker designs.
A man of ability, adroitness, and culture, Bigot might have won public favour, but his habits instantly estranged the better people of the colony. The _honnetes gens_, a party which included the great Montcalm, the brave Bougainville, La Corne de St. Luc, M. de Levis, and M. de Saint-Ours, would have nothing to do with him, and he was left in the hands of servile flatterers, ready enough to serve him.
Deschenaux, his _fidus Achates_, was a cobbler's son, whom experience alone had educated and fate and unscrupulousness had advanced. Cadet, his commissary-general, was the gross son of a butcher, and had spent his dissatisfied youth in the pasture-fields of Charlesbourg.
Hughes Pean was the town major of Quebec, but his chief hold on Bigot lay in the beauty of his wife, the charming Angelique des Meloises.
This woman, whose beauty, wit, and _diablerie_ are a subject of popular tradition, possessed a fascination which gave her an influence at the intendancy a.n.a.logous to that exerted at Versailles by her notorious contemporary, La Pompadour.
Ruled by this coterie of dark spirits, Quebec became the scene of a profligacy unparalleled in her history. The Palace, instead of being a hall of justice, was the abode of debauchery and gambling; and the mad revellers, whom a cynical fate had placed at the head of affairs, allowed the s.h.i.+p of state to drift upon the rocks. Even the fine palace within the city gave too little scope for the diversion of the Intendant and his confederates, and, accordingly, a rustic chateau was built near the high hill of Charlesbourg. Here they paused when tired of the chase, and the revels of the mysterious _Maison de la Montagne_ added sad but vivid colouring to the closing decade of French rule.
To-day there is an air of pathetic interest about the picturesque ruin of Chateau Bigot. The high walls are covered with ivy, and its graded walks and beds of flowers have disappeared long since. The immense thickness of the walls has enabled ”Beaumanoir” to elude destroying Time, but only enough now remains to suggest the hapless revels of a bygone day.
These things, however, are of the private sins of Bigot and his _entourage_. Their public malefactions were more flagrant. The Intendant's salary could by no means meet his appalling extravagances, and he therefore robbed the country and the King by falsifying official accounts as they pa.s.sed through his hands. As Intendant it was his duty to supply the needs of those chains of forts by which France held her vast dominion; but while he shamelessly neglected these outposts, he did not fail to debit the royal treasury for supplies which were never forwarded. In this way he and his intriguing friends enriched themselves. They presently adopted another and more contemptible device. Constant hostility towards the British had deprived the farms of their cultivators, and the supply of wheat was greatly reduced throughout the colony. Every day the land grew more distressed, and it was not difficult to foresee a time of famine. Not far from _Le Palais_ stood a huge building which went by the name of the King's Storehouse, and the Intendant resolved to fill this with wheat. He had an ancient precedent in Egyptian history, but his motive was not that of provident Joseph. Fixing the price of grain by an edict, and imposing penalties on those who refused to sell, his agents went through the country gathering up maize and wheat; and when famine came at length, the starving people flocked to the warehouse in Lower Town, and were compelled to buy back their grain at exorbitant prices. They called this warehouse _La Friponne_--the Cheat--and they cursed the name of Bigot who had so deceived them.
[Ill.u.s.tration: RUINS OF CHaTEAU BIGOT]
The interesting legend of _Le Chien d'Or_ has its origin in the mercenary practices of this last Intendant of Quebec. Among the merchants of the city was one Nicholas Jaquin, _dit_ Philibert, whose warehouse stood at the top of Mountain Hill, on the site of the present Post-Office. Philibert was one of the _honnetes gens_, and he devoted his wealth and energy to a commercial battle with _La Friponne_, determined to supply the people with food at low prices.