20 men each. The grand total, at the beginning of the
expedition, could not, therefore, have been less than
8,000 men, of all sorts put together--over 4,000 American
Provincial militia, over 1,000 men of the Royal Navy,
quite 1,000 men aboard the Provincial fighting vessels,
and at least 2,000 more as crews to work the transports.

May 1, the first Sunday the Provincials spent at Canso,
was a day of great and multifarious activity, both sacred
and profane. Parson Moody, the same who had taken the
war-path with his iconoclastic hatchet, delivered a
tremendous philippic from the text, 'Thy people shall be
willing in the day of Thy power.' Luckily for his
congregation he had the voice of a Stentor, as there were
several mundane competitors in an adjoining field, each
bawling the word of command at the full pitch of his
lungs. A conscientious diarist, though full of sabbatarian
zeal, was fain to admit that 'Severall sorts of Busnesses
was a-Going on: Sum a-Exercising, Sum a-Hearing o' the
Preaching.'

On May 5 Warren sailed into Canso. The Provincials thought
the date of his arrival a very happy omen, as it fell on
what was then, according to the Old Style calendar, St
George's Day, April 23. After a conference with Pepperrell
he hurried off to begin the blockade of Louisbourg. A
week later, May 21, the transports joined him there, and
landed their militiamen for one of the most eccentric
sieges ever known.