as
spiritual they were absolutely subject to priests, acting as spies for
the Quebec plotters.

France, as has been told, retained Cape Breton (Isle Royal) and Prince
Edward Island (Isle St. Jean), and the Treaty of Utrecht had hardly
been signed before plans were drawn on a magnificent scale for a French
fort on Cape Breton to effect a threefold purpose,--to command the sea
towards Boston, to regain Acadia, to protect the approach to the River
St. Lawrence.

The Island of Cape Breton is like a hand with its fingers stuck out in
the sea. The very tip of a long promontory commanding one of the
southern arms of the sea was chosen for the fort that was to be the
strongest in all America. On three sides were the sea, with outlying
islands suitable for powerful batteries and a harbor entrance that was
both narrow and deep. To the rear was impassable muskeg--quaking moss
above water-soaked bog. Two weaknesses only had the fort. There were
hills to right and left from which an enemy might pour destruction
inside the walls, but the royal engineers of France depended on the
outlying island batteries preventing any enemy gaining possession of
these hills. By 1720 walls thirty-six feet thick had encircled {215}
an area of over one hundred acres. Outside the rear wall had been
excavated a ditch forty feet deep and eighty wide. Bristling from the
six bastions of the walls were more than one hundred and eighty heavy
cannon. Besides the two batteries commanding the entrance to the
harbor was an outer Royal Battery of forty cannon directly across the
water from the fort, on the next finger of the island. Twenty years
was the fort in building, costing what in those days was regarded as an
enormous sum of money,--equal to $10,000,000. Such was Louisburg,
impregnable as far as human foresight could judge,--the refuge of
corsairs that preyed on Boston commerce; the haven of the schemers who
intrigued to wean away the Acadians from English rule, the guardian
sentinel of all approach to the St. Lawrence.

"It would be well," wrote the King the very next year after the treaty
was signed, "to attract the Acadians to Cape Breton, but act with
caution." And now twenty years had passed. Some Acadians had gone to
Cape Breton and others to Prince Edward Island; but statecraft judged
the simple Acadian farmer would be more useful where he was,--on the
spot in Acadia, ready to rebel when open war would give the French of
Louisburg a