but wantonly gave chase to a small British privateer which she
encountered near the shore. By skillful maneuvering the smaller
ship led the French frigate out to sea again, and then the
British squadron came up. From five o'clock to ten in the evening
anxious men in Louisbourg watched the fight and saw at last the
Vigilant surrender after losing eighty men. This disaster broke
the spirit of the defenders, who were already short of
ammunition. When they knew that the British were preparing for a
combined assault by land and sea, 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