they made
terms and surrendered on the 17th of June, after the siege had lasted
for seven weeks. The garrison marched out with the honors of war, to be
transported to France, together with such of the civilian population as
wished to go.

The British squadron then sailed into the harbor. Pepperrell's strange
army, ragged and war-worn after the long siege, entered the town by the
south gate. They had fought as crusaders, for to many of them Catholic
Louisbourg was a stronghold of Satan. Whitfield, the great English
evangelist, then in New England, had given them a motto--Nil desperandum
Christo duce. There is a story that one of the English chaplains, old
Parson Moody, a man of about seventy, had brought with him from Boston
an axe and was soon found using it to hew down the altar and images in
the church at Louisbourg. If the story is true, it does something to
explain the belief of the French in the savagery of their opponents who
would so treat things which their enemies held to be most sacred. The
French had met this fanaticism with a savagery equally intense and
directed not against things but against the flesh of men. An inhabitant
of Louisbourg during the siege describes the dauntless bravery of the
Indian allies of the French during the siege: "Full of hatred for the
English whose ferocity they abhor, they destroy all upon whom they can
lay hands." He does not have even a word of censure for the savages who
tortured and killed in cold blood a party of some twenty English who had
been induced to surrender on promise of life. The French declared that
not they but the savages were responsible for such barbarities, and the
English retorted that the French must control their allies. Feeling on
such things was naturally bitter on both sides and did much to decide
that the war between the two nations should be to the death.

The fall of Louisbourg brought great exultation to the English colonies.
It was a unique event, the first prolonged and successful siege that
had as yet taken place north of Mexico. An odd chance of war had decreed
that untrained soldiers should win a success so prodigious. New England,
it is true, had incurred a heavy expenditure, and her men, having done
so much, naturally imagined that they had done everything, and talked
as if the siege was wholly their triumph. They were, of course, greatly
aided by the fleet under Warren, and the achievement was a joint
triumph of army and navy. New England a