In our first episode, we introduce the Lost World of Cape Breton podcast series. We also follow John Montresor, an engineer in the British army, overland from Louisbourg to the shores of the Bras d’Or Lakes as he embarks on an “inland scout” in the months following the fall of Cape Breton Island to the British.

Music:

Les Zorvenants – Cela m’y Réjouit

Les Habitants – En Roulant ma Bouteille

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

– “The Montresor Journals,” John Montresor, p. 188 – 192

– Sauriol, M (2004). Voyage en hyver et sur les glaces de Chédiäque à Québec. Cap-aux-Diamants, (78), 43-43

– The Cultural Landscape of 18th Century Louisbourg – Margaret Fortier. 1983

– “Carte des environs de Louisbourg avec la rivière, partie du grand lac et le chemin de Myré” – Pierre-Jérôme Boucher, Bibliothèque Nationale de France

TRANSCRIPT

The culture of Cape Breton Island, located in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, is an amalgam – the mixing together of traditions and backgrounds over the course of the last two hundred years. For those of us who were born and raised in Cape Breton, chances are that we descend from the English, Gaels, Acadians or Mi’kmaq who first called Cape Breton “home” so very long ago, and who over the generations have left their own unique mark on the cultural fabric of the island. These cultures have survived in some form or another in Cape Breton for one very simple reason: people. People to remember, promote and preserve the identity of their culture.

But truth be told, if we’re going to discuss culture in Cape Breton, we need to address an anomaly that simply doesn’t fit with our modern-day interpretation of what Cape Breton Island is: Louisbourg, or as the locals call it, Lewisburg, and the Colony of Île Royale. To visit the Fortress of Louisbourg National Historic Site today is to step into a reality so distant from our own that for many it might as well have never existed at all. In our own backyard (literally for some Cape Bretoners) three nations marched onto the boggy meadows beneath the walls of the fortress and toward their destinies – the French toward revolution, the British toward empire, and the Americans toward independence. Why is it so difficult to define the cultural impact that the Fortress of Louisbourg (and by extension the French Colony of Île Royale) has had on Cape Breton? The answer is simple: there is no one left on Cape Breton Island to “culturally” remember Louisbourg and what happened during the years that Cape Breton Island was a colony of France.

Welcome to the Lost World of Cape Breton podcast series. It’s the goal of this project to delve into the world of early 18th century Cape Breton Island when it was known as “The Colony of Île Royale”. Through personal journals, memoirs and correspondence from the 18th century, we will reconstruct the lives of people long gone, walk the roads that no longer exist, and re-tell events from a reality so very different from the one that the people of Cape Breton now know.

In a time when people generally didn’t travel more than thirty miles from their homes, John Montresor, an engineer in the British Army and later Chief Engineer in America during the American War of Independence, saw more of the North American continent than many of us who live in North America have today. From the colonial frontier of the Appalachian Mountains to the cobblestone streets of New France and then to the bustling city centres of the American colonies, Montresor seems to have always had a front-row view to history in the making.  His career spanned three tumultuous decades, beginning in the 1750s and ending in the 1770s, and carried him into some of the defining moments of American and Canadian history. Miriam Touba writing for the New York Historical Society aptly describes his “everywhere footprints.” 

Montresor was born the 22nd of April 1736 to James Gabriel Montresor (also an engineer in the British Army) and Mary Haswell in Gibraltar. Before arriving in America with his father, he had spent some time both in Menorca and England, receiving his education in London. It was soon after his arrival in America that he joined the disastrous expedition to Fort Duquesne in 1755, later dubbed “Braddock’s Defeat”, so beginning twenty or so years of travelling in the British Army.

Throughout the span of his travels, Montresor kept his pen and paper close, preserving his movements and escapades across the land. Despite the passing centuries, a good chunk of his writings still exist in the form of the Montresor Journals, allowing readers to take an episodic glimpse of the past in all its vivid realness. It’s in his earlier journal entries that we actually find him at the second siege of Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island in the spring and summer of 1758, serving as a practicing engineer working on the British siegeworks just outside the fortress walls. His journal entries go on to depict a fairly routine and ordinary 18th century-style siege, culminating in the capture of Louisbourg and the colony of Île Royale.

It’s his next journal entry, however, that peaks our interest. Montresor states: “Journal of a Rout from Louisbourg to Lake Labrador taken with a pocket Compass and THE Distances Computed with what remarks and observations that could be obtained at that season, as it was winter and the snow nearly five feet in depth: 1759 March 27th – One officer – 26 Rangers, 3 private men of the 45th Regiment were detached from the Garrison…to proceed on an Inland Scout, directing to Lake Labrador, from thence to a Point La Jeunesse…so to cross the lake again to La Badick bearing North from thence, where there is a small straggling settlement, near the Saw Mill River, to bring in what French (Acadians) we could find inhabiting those parts.” And so Montresor sets out on this inland scout with the goal of crossing the Bras d’Or lakes, taking notes on everything he sees and allowing us to peer into the landscape and infrastructure of rural Cape Breton some 250 years ago. 

The party sets out from Louisbourg on the grand chemin de Miré, or what this podcast will call the Great Mira Road, a well-built road constructed in the 1730s by French engineers that ran from Louisbourg out to the Mira River, linking the many property owners in that area to the colony’s capital. With over 25 bridges and at least ten feet wide, this road was a critical piece of infrastructure for 18th century Cape Breton. It allowed movement to and from the interior of the island for hunters, land owners, millers and also for couriers bringing official correspondence between Canada and Île Royale. Interestingly, parts of the Great Mira Road have survived down to our day, although some areas have become overgrown and inundated over the centuries. They pass by “Four Mile House”, through an area known as Cabinet Planchi, then by “Portic’s Farm” and onward past present-day Twelve Mile Lake to Lac à Lertie, settling into a barn “which was built by Jean Lertie*, from whom the Lake is named as also the Lake adjacent to the House,” where they camp overnight. No doubt this was actually Joseph Lartigue’s property, a member of Louisbourg’s Superior Council and judge in Louisbourg’s only bailiff court, located somewhere in the vicinity of today’s Fiddler’s Lake on the Gabarus Highway.  It’s sobering to imagine what life must’ve been like living fifteen-or so miles into the middle of an empty forest, your nearest neighbours living many miles in either direction. 

The party is awakened the next morning by a storm, a mixture of snow and sleet, making their passage over the five feet of snow that had already fallen through the winter that much more difficult. As they continue their approach to the Mira River, Montresor describes passing through the burnt-out villages of Rouillé and the Village des allemands in his journal:. 28th…Marched thro’ the remains of a village called Village d’almagne, burnt down, this spot was generally called by the French, Les Deserts the land being open, free from trees…These houses were built with logs and Plas- tered, with small Enclosures picketted in and parallel to the Road. This village is terminated by the saw mill Creek that runs out from the Pond into the Lake Miray after crossing the Bridge commences another village called by the French village de Rouler (burnt)…situated on the ascent of …Devils Mountain. Both villages had been the ambitious plan of the Count de Raymond, Louisbourg’s eccentric governor from 1751-1753 who was determined to settle soldiers on the Mira to supply Louisbourg with grain. Some of the most questionable men from the garrison took him up on his offer, and he named the village after the French Minister of the Marine, Rouillé. Village des allemands on the other hand was settled by a group of German migrants from the Palatine and Ruhr regions of Germany, giving us an idea of Cape Breton’s diversity during this period. It seems that both villages, likely some thirty houses in total, were burned to avoid them being used by the British during the spring of 1758. Although there is no neighbourhood that corresponds to the location of these two villages today, the modern-day French Village Lake gives us a hint as to where they were actually situated.

Montresor and the scouting party then cross the frozen Mira River on foot, truly beginning their trek out of civilization and into the deep unexplored interior of Cape Breton. Not far away, a furnished house sits abandoned, slowly filling with snow. Here they make use of another one of Count de Raymond’s ambitious plans, the chemin Raymond or Raymond’s Road, a communication trail that ran close to fifteen miles from the north shore of the Mira across the Bras d’Or Mountains to the shores of the Bras d’Or lakes, ending in the vicinity of modern day Big Pond or Ben Eoin. A cross with the words Chemin Raymond inscribed on it had been built every 12 miles along the road, presumably as a distance marker, and Montresor notes the first of the markers were installed on the north shore of the river. Along with the Rouillé Road (which ran from modern-day Baddeck to Sainte Anne’s) and a portage road cleared in Saint Peter’s, it allowed quick communication between the three principal settlements of Cape Breton Island, but they were highly criticized at the time for being strategically flawed. 

Two days later, having climbed the Bras d’Or Mountains, Montresor makes record of their party standing at the summit, looking down onto the Bras d’Or lakes only a quarter of a mile away. Having stopped no doubt to rest for a bit, Montresor takes the time to mark in his journal the location of a grave they had discovered atop the summit: “Monsieur Lavu de Jambon, Engineer employed making the road to St Anns.”

Who was this engineer? It’s doubtful anyone today knows. Where is the exact location of his grave? Again, no one really can say. It’s likely that the brief notation Montresor gives us about this grave is the only record of this man’s existence we have today. This little passage in Montresor’s journal is so very interesting because it helps us grasp what happens when the human elements of a society are interrupted by upheaval. Entire lives slip through the cracks and are forgotten – entire histories disappear.

In the end, John Montresor never did complete his inland scout to the Saw Mill River – the ice had thawed too much to be able to safely cross the lakes, and so he returned to Louisbourg. It could be said that the most successful thing he did during this week of travelling to the interior of Cape Breton Island was leave for us a small glimpse into a community whose stories people can no longer tell. Much like Montresor and his scouting party, it was in that era that many of the cultural histories of the French in Île Royale came to a dead end. [END]