The English lines grew closer and closer, and their fire more and more destructive.  Desgouttes, the naval commander, withdrew the “Arethuse” from her exposed position, where her fire had greatly annoyed the besiegers.  The shot-holes in her sides were plugged up, and in the dark night of the fourteenth of July she was towed through the obstructions in the mouth of the harbor, and sent to France to report the situation of Louisbourg.  More fortunate than her predecessor, she escaped the English in a fog.  Only five vessels now remained afloat in the harbor, and these were feebly manned, as the greater part of their officers and crews had come ashore, to the number of two thousand, lodging under tents in the town, amid the scarcely suppressed murmurs of the army officers.

On the eighth of July news came that the partisan Boishebert was approaching with four hundred Acadians, Canadians, and Micmacs to attack the English outposts and detachments.  He did little or nothing, however, besides capturing a few stragglers.  On the sixteenth, early in the evening, a party of English, led by Wolfe, dashed forward, drove off a band of French volunteers, seized a rising ground called Hauteur-de-la-Potence, or Gallows Hill, and began to entrench themselves scarcely three hundred yards from the Dauphin’s Bastion.  The town opened on them furiously with grapeshot; but in the intervals of the firing the sound of their picks and spades could plainly be heard.  In the morning they were seen throwing up earth like moles as they burrowed their way forward; and on the twenty-first they opened another parallel, within two hundred yards of the rampart.  Still their sappers pushed on.  Every day they had more guns in position, and on right and left their fire grew hotter.  Their pickets made a lodgment along the foot of the glacis, and fired up the slope at the French in the covered way.

The twenty-first was a memorable day.  In the afternoon a bomb fell on the ship “Celebre” and set her on fire.  An explosion followed.  The few men on board could not save her, and she drifted from her moorings.  The wind blew the flames into the rigging of the “Entreprenant,” and then into that of the “Capricieux.”  At night all three were in full blaze; for when the fire broke out the English batteries turned on them a tempest of shot and shell to prevent it from being extinguished.  The glare of the triple conflagration lighted up the town, the trenches, the harbor, and the surrounding hills, while the burning ships shot off their guns at random as they slowly drifted westward, and grounded at last near the Barachois.  In the morning they were consumed to the water’s edge; and of all the squadron the “Prudent” and the “Bienfaisant” alone were left.