wait for the ice to break up in Gabarus Bay, near Louisbourg,
where they intended to land. Here, on April 30, the great fleet
appeared. A watcher in Louisbourg counted ninety-six ships
standing off shore. With little opposition from the French the
amazing army landed at Freshwater Cove.

Then began an astonishing siege. The commander of the New England
forces, William Pepperrell, was a Maine trader, who dealt in a
little of everything, fish, groceries, lumber, ships, land.
Though innocent of military science, he was firm and tactful. A
British officer with strict military ideas could not, perhaps,
have led that strange army with success. Pepperrell knew that he
had good fighting material; he knew, too, how to handle it. In
his army of some four thousand men there was probably not one
officer with a regular training. Few of his force had proper
equipment, but nearly all his men were handy on a ship as well as
on land. In Louisbourg were about two thousand defenders, of whom
only five or six hundred were French regulars. These professional
soldiers watched with contempt not untouched with apprehension
the breaches of military precedent in the operations of the
besiegers. Men harnessed like horses dragged guns through
morasses into position, exposed themselves recklessly, and showed
the skill, initiative, and resolution which we have now come to
consider the dominant qualities of the Yankee. In time Warren
arrived with a British squadron and then the French were puzzled
anew. They could not understand the relations between the fleet
and the army, which seemed to them to belong to different
nations. The New Englanders appeared to be under a Governor who
was something like an independent monarch. He had drawn up
elaborate plans for his army, comical in their apparent disregard