flask of brandy to feign being drunk and reel up to the
walls. The Indian reached the fort unchallenged, climbed
into an embrasure, and found the whole place deserted.
Vaughan followed at once; and a young volunteer, shinning
up the flag-pole, made his own red coat fast to the top.
This defiance was immediately answered by a random salvo
from Louisbourg, less than a mile across the harbour.

Vaughan's next move was to write a dispatch to Pepperrell:
'May it please your Honour to be informed that by the
Grace of God and the courage of 13 Men I entered the
Royal Battery about 9 o' the clock and am waiting for a
reinforcement and a flag.' He had hardly sent this off
before he was attacked by four boats from Louisbourg.
Quite undaunted, however, he stood out on the open beach
with his thirteen men and kept them all at bay till the
reinforcement and the flag arrived with Bradstreet, who
was afterwards to win distinction as the captor of Fort
Frontenac during the great campaign of 1759.

This disgraceful abandonment and this dramatic capture
of the Royal Battery marked the first and most decisive
turning-point in the fortunes of the siege. The French
were dismayed, the British were elated; and both the
dismay and the elation grew as time wore on, because
everything seemed to conspire against the French and in
favour of the British. Even the elements, as the anonymous
Habitant de Louisbourg complains in his wonderfully candid
diary, seemed to have taken sides. There had never been
so fine a spring for naval operations. But this was the