French-Canadian Fortress Returns to Life
In February 1760, Prime Minister William Pitt the Elder wrote to his senior general in America, Jeffrey Amherst, that one of hardest-won possessions most recently taken from France—the great fortress of Louisbourg on the rocky coast of what the French called Ile Royale and the British called Cape Breton Island—should "be most effectually and most entirely demolished." Within the year, Pitt's orders were carried out, and the walls, bastions, and gun emplacements that made Louisbourg one of the most formidable fortifications in the Western Hemisphere were leveled. In time, the town that once had been enclosed by those walls and sheltered thousands of inhabitants was abandoned, and for two centuries what had been a key strategic post in the great colonial rivalry between Great Britain and France lay forgotten and buried.
