Chronicles of Canada Volume 08 - Great Fortress: A Chronicle of Louisbourg 1720-1760

William Wood, born in 1864 and dead in 1947, was a Canadian soldier and historian who wrote extensively on the military history of Canada. He contributed several volumes to the Chronicles of Canada, a series of short books intended to give general readers a connected account of the country’s past. This is Volume 8 of the series, published in 1915, and it is devoted to Louisbourg between 1720 and 1760.

The book belongs to early modern history. The fortress was taken by New England troops in 1745, handed back to France three years later, and captured again in 1758, after which its walls were demolished. Wood’s central argument is that Louisbourg was far more than an isolated stronghold: it was a necessary link in the chain of posts that connected France with America by way of the Atlantic. Losing it, he argues, affected the whole question of overseas dominion, and the chapter titles, which speak of the last sea link with France, its loss and its recovery, trace that story.

As a work of its time, it reflects the viewpoint of an English-speaking Canadian historian a century ago, and later scholarship has added detail and altered emphasis. The strength of the book is its clear narrative and its attention to the sea and the coast.

The recording has five chapters, read by four LibriVox volunteers, and lasts about two hours and forty-five minutes. It is worth hearing for anyone interested in the contest between Britain and France in North America, or in how a fortress could shape the history of a continent.