Mass graves tell story of failed invasion that helped create Halifax

A monument and plaque in a small park along a busy stretch of highway in Halifax, N.S., mark the centuries-old burial place for as many as 2,000 French soldiers and sailors.

Most people driving past on the Bedford Highway wouldn’t be aware that the quiet patch of roadside parkland was once the final stop in a transatlantic ordeal that unravelled long before it reached these shores.

“They don’t realize what they’re passing by and passing over,” said John Boileau, chair of the Halifax Military Heritage Preservation Society.

The buried men were members of the Duc d’Anville expedition who died here in 1746 without ever facing the enemy in battle.

What was supposed to be France’s bold reclamation of its territories became one of the most tragic chapters in North American naval history.

The ill-fated French expedition also came with some unintended side-effects: the decimation of the local Mi’kmaw population and the eventual founding of Halifax by the British.

In 1745, a force of New England militiamen supported by the British navy captured the Fortress of Louisbourg.

The loss of the fortress was a deep wound to French pride and power.

More practically, it also threatened the French trade route into New France and its lucrative Atlantic fisheries.

France responded by assembling what was, at the time, the largest fleet ever to cross the Atlantic.

Sixty-four ships carrying about 11,000 men were to take back Louisbourg, reclaim Acadia and restore French honour.

The man chosen to lead the mission was Jean-Baptiste Louis Frédéric de la Rochefoucauld, Duc d’Anville, a 39-year-old with little naval experience or training.

“The Duc d’Anville got his position because of patronage, as did many of the officers,” said Boileau. “His cousin was the secretary of state for the navy.”

The fleet left France in June 1746, following a southern route in the hope it would offer better weather.

But what was meant to be a seven-week crossing stretched into a three-month nightmare.

Battered by storms in the Bay of Biscay, off France, the armada sat dead in the water for a month.

Below deck, the cramped quarters reeked of rotting food.

The regime had handed supply contracts to political cronies who provided substandard rations — the biscuits were already crawling with weevils before they even began the crossing.

In the heat of the tropics, their food supply became even more putrid.

Our infantry … is perishing before our eyes, eaten up by scurvy. Our crews … do not fail to have their miserable share of it.– Officer’s letter from the d’Anville expedition, 1746

Typhus, smallpox and scurvy spread through the crowded ships like wildfire. The fleet meant to show French resolve was becoming a morgue.

“As many as 50 bodies a day went over the side,” Boileau said.

By the time they hit the fog of the North Atlantic, the once-proud armada was a ghost fleet, with ships colliding in the gloom and crews too weak to man the rigging.

Ships got scattered. Some turned back to France, but the remaining ships pushed on.

When the remnants of the fleet finally arrived at Sable Island in September, a violent storm delivered yet another blow, dragging even more ships to the bottom.

Of the 64 ships that started the journey, only 16 damaged vessels made it to Chebucto, the harbour where Halifax would eventually be founded.

The remains of the fleet anchored at Birch Cove in the Bedford Basin on Sept. 21.

The sick and dying were taken to shore to recover, but many of them just got worse.

“The shores of the little cove were dotted with hastily dug graves,” Boileau wrote in a historical paper on the expedition.

Boileau estimates between 1,100 and 2,000 French soldiers and sailors were buried at Chebucto.

D’Anville himself died on Sept. 27. He was buried on Georges Island because of his rank. (In 1749, the French disinterred him and moved his remains to Louisbourg.)

But the suffering was not confined to the French. The Mi’kmaq, longtime allies who had gathered at Chebucto expecting reinforcements, instead encountered a fleet ravaged by disease.

In a gesture of friendship, French sailors — who Boileau said were unaware of the danger — gave the Mi’kmaq woollen blankets as gifts.

They were laden with typhus.

The disease, which they called “the black measles,” spread across their traditional territory.

Low estimates of the death toll indicate about 30 per cent of the Mi’kmaw population died of typhus and smallpox, but Boileau maintains it may have been as high as 80 per cent.

Following d’Anville’s death, leadership passed to Commodore Constantin-Louis d’Estourmel.

In a fit of despair or madness as the mission disintegrated, d’Estourmel wounded himself with his own sword. Before his death, he resigned in shame and leadership then fell to a new commander, who decided to use his remaining men to make a last-ditch attempt to capture Annapolis Royal in late October.

But bad weather foiled that plan and the remnants of the fleet set sail for France.

The battered fleet scattered in more storms on the way home, with some coming under attack by the British.

The suffering of those aboard ships separated from the main group was to prove horrific.

According to the journal of one captain, the ration for his ship’s crew was reduced to three ounces of biscuit and salted meat a day.

And while fishing could have solved the food shortage, it was not an option for the crew. A fear of being captured by prowling British patrols meant the crew could not afford to slow down.

Instead, when the food ran out, they hunted rats in the hold. When the rats were gone, the crew demanded their captain butcher five English prisoners captured from a merchant vessel for meat.

The captain spent a night pacing the deck to delay the execution until morning, when a neutral Portuguese ship appeared on the horizon, carrying five sheep that saved the prisoners from the butcher’s knife.

‘A completely pointless exercise,’ says historian

By December, a few ships limped back into French ports. Perhaps 8,000 men had died.

To underline the futility of the expedition, the British traded Louisbourg back to France in exchange for Madras, India, under the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748.

“It ended up being a completely pointless exercise,” Boileau said. “Several thousand deaths of sailors and soldiers, the loss of several ships. A blow to French prestige.”

The failure of the French armada created a power vacuum that convinced the British they needed a more permanent, heavily fortified seat of government than Annapolis Royal.

In 1749, they founded Halifax on the peninsula a few kilometres from the mass graves at Birch Cove, securing the harbour that had cost the French thousands of lives to reach.

Today, a small monument in Centennial Park marks the Duc d’Anville encampment site. It was named a National Historic Site in 1925.

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