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PRELIMINARY REPORT ON DAUPHIN BASTION

BY

BERNARD POTHIER

September 9, 1964

(Fortress of Louisbourg Report H B 8)

NOTE:
Presently, the bibliography is not included here.
For these, please consult the original report in the archives of the Fortress of Louisbourg

PARAGRAPH H:

THE SIEGE OF 1745

On 30 April 1745 the British fleet, and transports from New England - some 100 sail in all - assembled in Gabarus Bay near Flat Point. The New England land forces began to disembark on 1/12 May at approximately two miles west of the landward front of fortifications. As they landed their artillery, the New Englanders set to building roads through the brush and swamps which, according to French hopes were to have been an effective supplement to the fortifications. In fact it was thought quite seriously in some official quarters that regular fortifications were superfluous to adequate defense on the landward side.

The besiegers did at length bridge the swamps and began setting up their batteries atop the several hillocks surrounding the town. Two of these batteries were directed at the Dauphin bastion, and in particular at the Dauphin gate where it was hoped the breach would be made. The first, a fascine battery, was situated on the hill known as the "hauteur de Francoeur", beside the "grave de Francoeur". This is the same hill which Franquet in 1751 referred to as the "hauteur du four a chaux" after the limekiln situated there. This battery was some 90 toises or so from the M salient of the covert way in front of the Dauphin bastion. just forward of the tail of the glacis along the harbour.

In 1751, before it was levelled to some degree, the lime kiln hill stood 10 pieds 8 higher than the parapet of the salient of the covert way of the Dauphin bastion, and 2 pouces higher than the parapet of the tenaille of the gate. It is thus easy to imagine some of the damage the 4 or 5 guns of the battery occasioned the gate,
from 18/29 May right up to the capitulation on 15/26 June.

The second and even more destructive battery was situated on the "hauteur de Martissans", from the name of the original grantee of the site. It lay some 300 toises or so from the Dauphin gate, at the North-east corner of the "barrasois de Lasson", over which its guns fired. The New Englanders called it Titcomb's battery, after the commander. The French commander Duchambon claimed the battery mounted five 36 and 42-pounders, and François Bigot, that there were six 36-pounders. One thing we do know is that it featured "divers forty-two pounders which we brought from the Grand battery" (Bradstreet diary). These had been spiked by the French when they abandonned the Battery and unspiked by Vaughan's men.

This paragraph deals with a phase of the history of the Dauphin bastion in terms of the use of the bastion area as a work of defense. It is obvious that the system of fortifications elaborated at Louisbourg was not "regular" in the sense employed by the theorists. This is not a sign of weakness; nearly all fortifications have to adapt to their location. At Louisbourg, however, the site was particularly precarious insofar as it was dominated by a ring of hills situated at close range, all the way back from Black rock to the "hauteur de Martissans". This last, we said, wrought particular havoc on the Dauphin gate and bastion in 1745.

While only two such hills were used to direct fire at the bastion, at least two more were so situated as to be able to do so. These however in 17A9 mounted guns trained rather on the King's bastion: the New Englanders knew the importance of this bastion as the citadel and the last redoubt of the fortress.

This principal disadvantage being established, we may take for granted that the area surrounding Louishourg dictated several well-defined adaptations of the topography of the fortress. Herein lay, for our area of study, the responsibility of Monsieur Verrier, the engineer under whose aegis the bastion, the battery, the covert way, the curtain and the éperon were all built between 1728 and 1737.

The threat then to Louisbourg, at once most obvious an most serious, was its being commanded by so many heights. Under no circumstances must trees, hills, sunken roadways, ditches or buildings be left standing within the range of the heaviest artillery, namely, for the mid-eighteenth century, 1000 to 1200 toises from the outside perimeter of the fortress. Only in this way could the defender hope to offset any surreptitious approach to his fortified position.

The hills therefore should have been levelled as an integral phase of the work of fortifying Louisbourg, or failing this, they should have been turned into French gun emplacements. As in so many other areas with which we are familiar, Louisbourg officials were unbelievably lax in applying the principle. As it turned out, the French positions in the town remained defenseless against the English guns once these had been mounted very early in the siege of 1745 on the neighbouring hills. These were frequently more elevated than the town's defenses, and thus literally commanded the latter.

Another serious threat to the Dauphin bastion lay just side the Dauphin gate. All along the south-west side of the harbour had grown since earliest time the settlement known as the faubourg de la Porte Dauphine. Our plans show the early rapid development of this suburb and its fishery. The principle of fortification on the other hand dictated that no building should occur in this entire area, but insofar as Louisbourg was concerned, we have never seen the principle so much as mentioned in the correspondence of the various officials. The area of the fortifications ended with the tail of the glacis. Two days after the successful landing of the New Englanders, on 2/13 May, as the enemy trudged toward Louisbourg through the swamps from their encampment at Flat Point, the French commander sent out men with demolition tools to level all the houses and barns and shanties of the several properties between the Dauphin gate and the Barrachois. Those that couldn't be torn down, and their lumber salvaged for firewood, were burned.

The third drawback, not only of the Dauphin bastion but of the whole of the fortress was the condition of the fortified works themselves in terms of their solidity. It is undeniable that the materials employed in building Louisbourg - fieldstone, the mortar made from locally quarried limestone, the wood were of very poor quality, and this, coupled with the contingencies of climatic conditions along the coast near the town, condemned the
the escarps to constant deterioration, to movement of her embrasures and her parapets, and to rotting of her platforms.

The final serious drawback of the Dauphin bastion as a unit of adequate defense against the attacking army from New England, was the fact that the front of the tenaille of the Dauphin gate was not flanked by any other part of the fortifications. The principle involved is stated as follows:

 Qu'il n'y ait aucune partie de l'enceinte d'une place qui ne soit vue et défendu de quelqu'autre partie" (Diderot et d'alembert, Encyclopaedie, article "fortification").

In the event of a breach at this front (it was no more than four pieds thick) there was no other position from which to cover the front in order to prevent an assault there.

Inside Louisbourg the fortified walls were so weak - and this was the consensus of both Frenchmen and English travellers to Louisbourg - that the concussion caused by the French firing their own guns would cause some part of the wall to fall to the ditch.

On 6/17 May the French began "'barricading" the Dauphin gate. According to François Bigot, Verrier had admitted he had built the gate to be effective only against musket fire. The whole front of the tenaille of the gate (a mere 4 pieds thick) was similarly barricaded. Stone and earth was piled up against the gate, and inside the two guard houses. In 48 hours or so this front was deepened to eighteen (Duchambon) or twenty pieds (Bigot). Of course. when the barricade was built, the 12 crenels mentioned by Bigot were covered by the barricade.

Needless to say, had this barricade not been erected, the New Englanders could have walked into Louisbourg shortly after the Francoeur battery had fired its first shot at the gate, on 18/29 May. On this date this battery had only one 18-pounder mounted (there would eventually be four guns altogether), but its fire was so brisk that the French guns at the bastion were quite unable to draw a bead on it, let alone silence its guns.

Enemy projectiles cut the chains of the drawbridge and rendered it useless. The French then out down the bridge itself. The very next day, 19/30 May, Dachambon ordered the evacuation of the powder stores to a safer area. It should be interesting to find out if this was a necessary precaution, for a powder-magazine belonged in a bastion, and should have been built to withstand all the furor of any degree of 18th century cannonading, By this time, however, the embrasures on the flank were quite destroyed.

The French attempted to counter the fire from the English battery by opening by night two embrasures on the face of the bastion. Their guns fired on the night of 30 May / 10 June, and the very next day Titcomb's battery, raised on 20/31 May, silenced them.

The first fruits of the fire from Titcomb's battery, on 22 May /2 June, had badly battered the flanked angle of the Dauphin bastion, and destroyed the stone guérite. Three days later, the éperon and the wall of the horseshoe battery were beaten down, and their embrasures destroyed. Those of the éperon were restored several times during the siege with stone and sandbags.

The French raised two guns at the Dauphin gate tenaille, but they were promptly put out of operation by English fire on 25 May 5 June. According to an English source, the French opened fire from nine other guns planted on the walls near the Dauphin gate. Our French sources do not mention these guns, and were the information accurate, I should expect the French to make some mention of so rare and precious achievement.

As the situation continued to deteriorate to a degree that offered the defenders little hope of amelioration, the French girded themselves for an assault at the breach which at the Dauphin gate could not be very long wanting. Verrier ordered an entrenchment built across the bastion to the rear of the Dauphin gate, from the quay to the face of the bastion. After several nights of dusk-to-dawn labour, this was finished on 24 May/4 June.

On the very day the fortress capitulated on 15/26 June, the works were inspected by the engineer, and his report revealed that a breach was "practicable" on the front of the Dauphin gate and guardhouses, that this front was not flanked from any quarter. This wrote off the possibility of a prolonged defense of the breach, save by direct musket fire from atop the fallen masonry along the whole front. The guns at the barbette battery at the flanked angle had been silenced as had those planted on the face of the bastion, those which served the short-lived earth-and-sod embrasures built on the tenaille, and those of the éperon. An English diarist wrote only three guns, at the battery, could be serviced. M. de Ste-Marie, the commander of  the artillery, in his report on 15/26 June, claimed the near-total destruction of the battery and its embrasures prevented any use of its guns, even if the guns themselves were operational.

Thus following the reports of Verrier and de Ste-Marie, on 15/26 June the fortress surrendered, and the day following the New Englanders marched into Louisbourg. Apart from the several other considerations - the morale of the regular military forces, and their numbers, the supply of munitions and foodstuffs, the quality of cannons and muskets, considerations of safety for the several hundreds women and children and other non-combatants - from the single point of view of the fortifications, the siege was judged to be no longer
tenable insofar as (1) a breach had been made by the attacking forces (and this at the Dauphin bastion) and, (2) this breach was not flanked by any other part of the fortifications.

Having ventured that the low morale of the regular garrison of Louisbourg was a probable factor in the New England victory, without actually drawing any conclusion, it may be of significance that as regards the Dauphin bastion area all significant defense action during the siege was achieved by units of the militia under the Port Captain Morpain. It was they who levelled the faubourg de la Porte Dauphine, who barricaded the Dauphin gate front, and finally, who built the retrenchment behind the breach in the last days of the resistance.

The evidence does not lend itself at this stage to concluding whether or not the breach in the French defenses at the Dauphin bastion was defensible, or whether the enemy could even be held at bay until their supplies ran out. The French officials, writing, to their Minister after the campaign, had one pre-eminent concern: each sought to justify his own conduct in the eyes of his superior. Thus, their views suggest the defenses were quite inadequate, that the garrison had held out to the last, and had endured inhuman privations in doing so, etc.

The English diaries and the official reports suggest invariably the strong pre-conceived impression that the French stronghold was much more formidable than it actually was.

At the surrender, the Dauphin bastion area lay in ruins, the front of the tenaille, and part of the curtain, were but a pile of rubble, the ditches overflowed with the product of battered masonry, the embrasures hastily set up on the face of the bastion, the two on the curtain, those on the battery and éperon were destroyed, as were their guns. The two latter works were virtually demolished.

On the other hand the barracks building in the gorge was standing and habitable, the powder magazine required but minor repairs, and the two guard houses under the tenaille, despite their vulnerable position were not at all beyond excellent repair, as we shall see.

From Bastide, in 1746, we learn that the covert way was "in pretty good roder" generally. The masonry walls of the counterscarp and the parapet of the covert way however were badly deteriorated, and the whole covert way needed a new palisade, none of which items were seen to during the British occupation to 1749.

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