bare ruins were left to mark its grave when it finally
passed, unheeded and unnamed, into the vast dominions of
the conquering British at the Peace of Paris in 1763.

The Treaty of Utrecht narrowed the whole French sea-coast
of America down to the single island of Cape Breton.
Here, after seven years of official hesitation and maritime
exhaustion, Louisbourg was founded to guard the only
harbour the French thought they had a chance of holding.
A medal was struck to celebrate this last attempt to keep
the one remaining seaway open between Old France and New.
Its legend ran thus: Ludovicoburgum Fundatum et Munitum,
M.DCC.XX ('Louisbourg Founded and Fortified, 1720'). Its
obverse bore the profile of the young Louis XV, whose
statesmen hoped they had now established a French Gibraltar
in America, where French fleets and forts would command
the straits leading into the St Lawrence and threaten
the coast of New England, in much the same way as British
fleets and forts commanded the entrance to the Mediterranean
and threatened the coasts of France and Spain. This hope
seemed flattering enough in time of peace; but it vanished
at each recurrent shock of war, because the Atlantic then
became a hostile desert for the French, while it still
remained a friendly highway for the British.

The first French settlers in Louisbourg came over from
Newfoundland, which had been given up to the British by
the treaty. The fishermen of various nations had frequented
different ports all round these shores for centuries;
and, by the irony of fate, the new French capital of Cape