Episode Details

In 1745, an army of New England farmers, fishermen, and shopkeepers — not one of them a trained soldier — sailed six hundred miles north to do the impossible: take Louisbourg, the strongest fortress in North America, the Gibraltar of the North. They had no horses, almost no siege guns, and no idea what they were doing. What they had was a merchant for a general, a fortress rotting from a mutiny within, and a willingness to harness themselves two hundred to a cannon and drag it through a bottomless bog. This is the story of the most astonishing colonial victory of the age — told from inside it, through the diaries of the men who waded ashore in the freezing surf, unspiked the enemy’s own guns, failed bloodily in the dark at the Island Battery, and then died by the hundreds, “like rotten sheep,” holding the prize through a brutal winter. And it is the story of what came after: a king’s bargain at a table in Europe that handed the whole thing back — and planted a grievance in New England that never quite went away.