who had not yet got a single cannon into position, saw to their surprise a white flag raised on the rampart.  Some officers of the garrison protested against surrender; and Le Loutre, who thought that he had everything to fear at the hands of the victors, exclaimed that it was better to be buried under the ruins of the fort than to give it up; but all was in vain, and the valiant Vannes was sent out to propose terms of capitulation.  They were rejected, and others offered, to the following effect:  the garrison to march out with the honors of war and to be sent to Louisbourg at the charge of the King of England, but not to bear arms in America for the space of six months.  The Acadians to be pardoned the part they had just borne in the defence, “seeing that they had been compelled to take arms on pain of death.”  Confusion reigned all day at Beausejour.  The Acadians went home loaded with plunder.  The French officers were so busy in drinking and pillaging that they could hardly be got away to sign the capitulation.  At the appointed hour, seven in the evening, Scott marched in with a body of provincials, raised the British flag on the ramparts, and saluted it by a general discharge of the French cannon, while Vergor as a last act of hospitality gave a supper to the officers.[259]

[Footnote 258:  Journal of Pichon, cited by Beamish Murdoch.]

[Footnote 259:  On the capture of Beausejour, Memoires sur le Canada, 1749-1760; Pichon, Cape Breton, 318; Journal of Pichon, cited by Murdoch; and the English accounts already mentioned.]

Le Loutre was not to be found; he had escaped in disguise with his box of papers, and fled to Baye Verte to join his brother missionary, Manach.  Thence he made his way to Quebec, where the Bishop received him with reproaches.  He soon embarked for France; but the English captured him on the way, and kept him eight years in Elizabeth Castle, on the Island of Jersey.  Here on one occasion a soldier on guard made a dash at the father, tried to stab him with his bayonet, and was prevented with great difficulty.  He declared that, when he was with his regiment in Acadia, he had fallen into the hands of Le Loutre, and narrowly escaped being scalped alive, the missionary having doomed him to this fate, and with his own hand drawn a knife round his head as a beginning of the operation.  The man swore so fiercely that he would have his revenge, that the officer in command transferred him to another post.[260]

[Footnote 260:  Knox, Campaigns in North America, I. 114, note.  Knox, who was stationed in Nova Scotia, says that Le Loutre left behind him “a most remarkable character for inhumanity.”]

Throughout the siege, the Acadians outside the fort, aided by Indians, had constantly attacked the English, but were always beaten off with loss.  There was an affair of this kind on the morning of the surrender, during which a noted Micmac chief was shot, and being brought into the camp, recounted the losses of his tribe; “after which, and taking a dram or two, he quickly died,” writes Winslow in his Journal.