Siege of Louisbourg
1745 CE.
Shown on the map at 45.920°, -59.973°.
The siege of Louisbourg was the 1745 capture of the French settlement of Louisbourg on present-day Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, by British North American forces during the War of the Austrian Succession, known as King George's War in the British colonies. The Fortress of Louisbourg was taken with the aid of a British fleet. The northern British colonies regarded Louisbourg, the capital of the French province of Île-Royale, as a menace, calling it the "American Dunkirk" due to its use as a base for privateers. There was regular, intermittent warfare between the French and the Wabanaki Confederacy on one side and the northern New England colonies on the other (See the Northeast Coast Campaigns of 1688, 1703, 1723, 1724). For the French, the Fortress of Louisbourg also protected the chief entrance to Canada, as well as the nearby French fisheries. The French government had spent 25 years in fortifying it, and the cost of its defenses was reckoned at thirty million livres. Although the fortress's construction and layout was acknowledged as having superior seaward defences, a series of low rises behind them made it vulnerable to a land attack.
Text from the Wikipedia article Siege of Louisbourg (1745), licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.