e coast a mile away. Here, with a prodigious
rattling of lowered sails and anchor chains, the crews plunge over the
rolling waves, pontooning a bridge of small boats ashore. By nightfall
the most of the English have landed, and spies report the harbor of
Louisburg alive with torches where the French are sinking ships to
obstruct the entrance and setting fire to fishing stages that might
interfere with cannon aim. The next night, May 1, Vaughan's New
Hampshire boys--raw farmers, shambling in their gait, singing as they
march--swing through the woods along the marsh {217} behind the fort,
and take up a position on a hill to the far side of Louisburg, creating
an enormous bonfire with the French tar and ships' tackling stored
here. The result of this harmless maneuver was simply astounding. It
will be recalled that Louisburg had an outer battery of forty cannon on
this side. The French soldiers holding this battery mistook the
bonfire for the {218} English attacking forces, and under cover of
darkness abandoned the position,--battery, guns, powder and all,--which
the English promptly seized. This was the Royal Battery, which
commanded the harbor and could shell into the very heart of the fort.

[Illustration: WILLIAM PEPPERRELL]

The next thing for the English was to get their heavy guns ashore
through a rolling surf of ice-cold water. For two weeks the men stood
by turns to their necks in the surf, steadying the pontoon gangway as
the great cannon were trundled ashore; and this was the least of their
difficulties. The question was how to get their cannon across the
marsh behind the fort to the hill on the far side. The cannon would
sink from their own weight in such a bog, and either horses or oxen
would flounder to death in a few minutes. Again, the fool-hardy
enthusiasm of the raw levies overcame the difficulty. They built large
stone boats, raft-shaped, such as are used on farms to haul stones over
ground too rough for wagons. Hitching to these, teams of two hundred
men stripped to midwaist, they laboriously hauled the cannon across the
quaking moss to the hills commanding the rear of the fort, bombs and
balls whizzing overhead all the while, fired from the fort bastions.
It was cold, damp spring weather. The men who were not soaked to their
necks in surf and bog were doing picket duty alongshore, sleeping in
their boots. Consequently, in three weeks, half Pepperrell's force
became deadly ill. At this