“Sir Charles Hardy and I,” he wrote to his father, “are preparing to rob the fishermen of their nets and burn their huts.  When that great exploit is at an end, I return to Louisbourg, and thence to England.”  Having finished the work, he wrote to Amherst:  “Your orders were carried into execution.  We have done a great deal of mischief, and spread the terror of His Majesty’s arms through the Gulf, but have added nothing to the reputation of them.”  The destruction of property was great; yet, as Knox writes, “he would not suffer the least barbarity to be committed upon the persons of the wretched inhabitants."[596]

[Footnote 596:  “Les Anglais ont tres-bien traites les prisonniers qu’ils ont faits dans cette partie” [Gaspe, etc]. Vaudreuil au Ministre, 4 Nov. 1758.]

He returned to Louisbourg, and sailed for England to recruit his shattered health for greater conflicts.

NOTE.  Four long and minute French diaries of the siege of Louisbourg are before me.  The first, that of Drucour, covers a hundred and six folio pages, and contains his correspondence with Amherst, Boscawen, and Desgouttes.  The second is that of the naval captain Tourville, commander of the ship “Capricieux,” and covers fifty pages.  The third is by an officer of the garrison whose name does not appear.  The fourth, of about a hundred pages, is by another officer of the garrison, and is also anonymous.  It is an excellent record of what passed each day, and of the changing conditions, moral and physical, of the besieged.  These four Journals, though clearly independent of each other, agree in nearly all essential particulars.  I have also numerous letters from the principal officers, military, naval, and civil, engaged in the defence,—­Drucour, Desgouttes, Houlliere, Beaussier, Marolles, Tourville, Courserac, Franquet, Villejouin, Prevost, and Querdisien.  These, with various other documents relating to the siege, were copied from the originals in the Archives de la Marine.  Among printed authorities on the French side may be mentioned Pichon, Lettres et Memoires pour servir a l’Histoire du Cap-Breton, and the Campaign of Louisbourg, by the Chevalier Johnstone, a Scotch Jacobite serving under Drucour.

The chief authorities on the English side are the official Journal of Amherst, printed in the London Magazine and in other contemporary periodicals, and also in Mante, History of the Late War; five letters from Amherst to Pitt, written during the siege (Public Record Office); an excellent private Journal called An Authentic Account of the Reduction of Louisbourg, by a Spectator, parts of which have been copied verbatim by Entick without acknowledgement; the admirable Journal of Captain John Knox, which contains numerous letters and orders relating to the siege; and the correspondence of Wolfe contained in his Life by Wright.  Before me is the Diary of a captain or subaltern in the army of Amherst at Louisbourg, found in the garret of an old house at Windsor, Nova Scotia, on an estate belonging in 1760 to Chief Justice Deschamps.  I owe the use of it to the kindness of George Wiggins, Esq., of Windsor, N.S.  Mante gives an excellent plan of the siege operations, and another will be found in Jefferys, Natural and Civil History of French Dominions in North America.