Episode 5 - In Which, the Match Finally Finds the Powder

A neat plan met a messy world. We follow the Empire’s triangular strategy for 1755—Crown Point, Niagara, and Beauséjour—and watch how fog, friction, and human choices bent it into something far larger than a frontier war. It starts at sea, where Admiral Edward Boscawen’s strike against a French convoy near Newfoundland captured troops and sealed orders, guaranteed British control of vital Atlantic routes, and detonated the fiction of peace. That single decision rippled across continents, accelerating privateering, straining diplomacy, and starving New France of reinforcements when it needed them most.

On land, the story splits three ways. Sir William Johnson’s northern push reads like a lesson in improvisation: provincial militias and Mohawk allies under King Hendrick hold fast behind makeshift works at Lake George, blunt Baron Dieskau’s attack, and prove that colonial troops can stand without redcoats. The cost is real—the Covenant Chain frays with Hendrick’s death—and the limits are clear: Crown Point remains French, logistics remain brittle, and diplomacy grows harder. Westward, Governor William Shirley discovers that memoranda cannot conquer rivers. His march toward Fort Niagara collapses into mud, disease, and delay at Oswego. No fort falls, yet a strategic foothold takes shape, forcing France to cover Lake Ontario and seeding the infrastructure future commanders will need.

Far to the east, Colonel Robert Monckton executes the cleanest tactical win of the year at Fort Beauséjour. Artillery, naval support, and seasoned New Englanders reduce the earthworks in days, opening Nova Scotia’s door—and ushering in the Acadian deportation under Governor Charles Lawrence. The result is imperial security along the Atlantic and a lasting moral wound as thousands are scattered, families broken, and communities erased. By winter, Britain has fought a war it refuses to name: accidental victories, painful lessons, and a Navy that quietly globalized the conflict. We connect the dots between fog-bound broadsides and forest skirmishes to show how 1755’s messy beginnings shaped everything that followed.

Listen to unpack the choices, contradictions, and consequences that turned a regional struggle into the Seven Years’ War. If this deep dive sparked new questions, subscribe, share the show with a history-loving friend, and leave a quick review to help others find us.

Chapters

• 0:00 From Braddock’s Defeat To A New Plan
• 4:44 Crown Point, Niagara, And Beaufort Objectives
• 9:55 Boscawen Hunts The French Convoy
• 16:20 Fog, Broadsides, And Diplomatic Outrage
• 23:05 Consequences At Sea And In Canada
• 27:21 Sir William Johnson’s Northern Gamble
• 34:10 Lake George: Ambush And Defense
• 40:30 Aftermath For Iroquois And Provinials
• 44:50 Shirley’s March To Nowhere
• 51:20 Oswego Halt And Strategic Failure

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:17

Hello, and welcome to the History of the Seven Years' War, Episode 5, in which the match finally finds the powder. And as always, I'm your host, Rob Hill. When we had last left the British Empire, its grand adventures into the North American wilderness had ended in smoke, blood, and disbelief. General Edward Braddock lay buried beneath his own road. The Ohio frontier was aflame, and London's fine map of conquest had been rudely annotated by reality. Yet, for all the shock and hand wringing, the Empire was not ready to concede defeat. After all, Braddock's march had only been one arm of a much larger design, and the planners back in Whitehall still believed the rest of their excellent plan could be made to work. The Duke of Cumberland, soldier prince, and architect of the war strategy, insisted that Britain's honor could still be saved. His brother in arms, the ever anxious Duke of Newcastle, agreed, mostly because the alternative was admitting that the entire war effort had been botched before it even began. So the plan remained. The Empire would strike on three new fronts, each meant to erase the humiliation in Pennsylvania and deliver the victories that newspapers and Parliament so desperately needed. First, in the North, Sir William Johnson, the Crown's Indian agent in New York, was to lead a mixed army of colonial provincials and Iroquois allies against Crown Point, the French fortress guarding the southern tip of Lake Champlain. Crown Point controlled the invasion corridor between New York and Canada. Whoever held it held the northern gateway to the continent. Johnson's task was as much diplomatic as military, to rally the Iroquois Confederacy, persuade skeptical New England militias to cooperate, and finally push the French out of the Champlain Valley. A tall order for a man better known for his Mohawk hunting lodge than his battlefield command. Second, to the west, Governor William Shirley of Massachusetts was to ascend the Mohawk and Oswego rivers and capture Fort Niagara. Niagara was the keystone of New France, the hinge between Canada and the Ohio Valley, the fortress that funneled men and supplies down the Great Lakes. If Shirley could take it, the French interior would be cut in half and Braddock's defeat avenged in one stroke. Of course, this required boats, provisions, health, and time, none of which Shirley possessed in abundance. Third, far to the east, Colonel Robert Mocton was to strike at Fort Beauciur, a small French post perched on the marshy Isthmus linking Nova Scotia to the mainland. On paper, it was the easiest of the three targets, a modest fortress defended by a small garrison. In practice, it was the flashpoint of the entire region, home of the Acadian population, whose loyalties were, at best, inconveniently neutral. A quick victory here would secure Britain's Atlantic flank and eliminate the last French foothold in Acadia. It would also unleash one of the darkest episodes in the war's history. Taken together, the three campaigns represented the Empire's attempt to impose order through geometry, a triangle of offensives closing around New France. Success on all fronts would drive the French north into Canada, reassert British dominance over the interior, and restore the illusion of imperial competence. Each expedition faced its own challenges. The first led on diplomacy, the second on logistics, the third on timing. But to Cumberland and Newcastle, they formed a single symmetrical plan. Four strokes of the same hammer, one official wrote, and Canada must fall. A lovely thought, if hammers behaved the way ministers imagined. In truth, the Empire was improvising. Braddock's defeat had shattered morale, supply lines were in chaos, and the colonies were now wary partners at best. But in London, optimism was a national habit, and failure was merely an invitation to double down. So, as seventeen fifty five marched on, as new armies gathered in the colonies, another front, quieter, farther, but just as decisive, was already opening across the Atlantic. While generals in the colonies were still digging roads and arguing over supply bills, the war's first real battles were being fought far from any frontier. Out on the cold gray edge of the Atlantic, where the line between peace and war was as thin as the morning fog. And the man sailing straight through that fog was Admiral Edward Boscoin, the kind of officer who made diplomats nervous and sailors fiercely loyal. In early 1755, France had quietly begun preparing to send troops to Canada. The colonial governor, the Marquis de Vaudreaux, and his field commander, Baron de Descal, had begged the court for reinforcements. Louis XV, reluctant to spend the money, finally agreed to send three regiments, about three thousand men, under Admiral de Lamotte. They were to sail in a convoy from Brest, carrying muskets, uniforms, engineers, and the latest correspondence assuring the Canadians that Paris still remembered they existed. It was a risky voyage. The British had spies in Brest, and the Admiralty was determined that those reinforcements would never see Quebec. Enter Boscoin. Admiral Edward Boscoin was a fighting sailor of the old school. He joined the Navy at age twelve, fought at Cartagena at sixteen, and by his mid twenties had a reputation for charging enemy ships at full sail and sorting out the paperwork afterwards. His flagship for this expedition was to be the HMS Torbay, a ninety gun brawler whose decks creaked like an old church organ. Bosquin himself was bluff, round faced, and famously irritable. One officer said he spoke as if the quarter deck were a battlefield and the English language a musket. But his men adored him. He paid them promptly, he shared their rum, and fought beside them in the smoke. By the time he was ordered to sea in seventeen fifty five, Bosquin was already a minor celebrity in Britain, and a looming nightmare for the French. The French convoy left Brest in early May under the command of Admiral de Lamotte. It was a complicated operation, more than a dozen ships of war and transport vessels carrying thousands of men and tons of supplies. Lamotte, cautious and old fashioned, tried to avoid detection by splitting his fleet into two groups, one taking the direct route north across the Grand Banks, the other slipping farther south toward the Azores before turning west. Bosquin's orders were blunt intercept and destroy. He sailed from Plymouth in April with eleven ships of the line, his squadron cruising off Newfoundland by June. The fog there was so thick that according to one midshipman, you could hear another ship before you could see your own. Navigation was done by dead reckoning and divine mercy. After weeks of fruitless patrols, the lookout on the Dunkirk spotted sails through the fog on june eighth, seventeen fifty-five, three French men of war lagging behind the main convoy. At peace, at peace. Scarcely had the words left his lips before the guns of the Dunkirk erupted into a violent broadside. Whether Howe had been two faced or Auquis was a fool, is debatable. The results, however, are not. The battle was brief and violent, broadside thunder rolled across the fog. The Alcide fought bravely for nearly an hour, her decks torn and splintered until her mainmast came down. Delize, a modified ship aligned carrying troops and supplies, struck her colors soon after. The Dufon Royale, one of the fastest ships in the French Navy, vanished into the mist, pursued by cannon fire that faded into silence. When the smoke cleared, the British had taken nearly a thousand prisoners, including several hundred regular soldiers and their colonel, along with sealed orders revealing France's plans to reinforce Canada. The captured ships were brought to Halifax, their decks crowded with bewildered Frenchmen, insisting that peace still reigned between their kings. One captured officer, according to legend, tried to hand Boscoin his sword and declared, Sir, you have taken us without a declaration. Bosquin smiled and answered, Then you may keep your sword, for we have not declared your enemies either. The news reached London in July. The Admiralty, in public, feigned shock, but in private, toasted Boscoin's initiative. In Parliament, Hawkes hailed him as the man who had struck the first blow for the Empire. Merchants loved him too. His actions had effectively guaranteed another year of dominance on the Atlantic trade routes. In Paris, the mood was somewhat less festive. The capture of the Assid and the Lise caused an uproar. French newspapers called Bascoin a pirate, and the British government a den of thieves. Louis XV's ministers demanded restitution. George II's ministers sent polite apologies and kept the ships. The French ambassador was soon recalled, the British envoys expelled, and the pretense of peace was officially abandoned. One Parisian cartoon depicted Boscoin as a grinning shark in a naval uniform, swallowing merchantmen whole. It wasn't inaccurate. In the months that followed, Britain and France waged a shadow war across the oceans. Privateers seized ships accidentally. Convoys shattered each other across the Caribbean. By the end of the year, the British Navy had captured more than three hundred French vessels, each Caesar accompanied by elaborate diplomatic apologies. In one case, a French captain protested that he had been detained unlawfully. The British commander replied, My orders forbid hostility, but they do not forbid hospitality, and I regret that my hospitality requires you to remain on board. By december seventeen fifty five, both nations were openly mobilizing fleets. Boscoin's incident had turned a colonial frontier conflict into a world crisis. The practical results were immediate. New France's reinforcements were scattered or captured. Of the three thousand troops originally dispatched, fewer than eight hundred reached Quebec. Governor Vaudreau suddenly found himself defending an empire of forests with a handful of regulars and Canadian militia. It was this shortage that forced the French to rely heavily on their native allies, a dependence that shaped every campaign in North America for the next three years. And for Britain, Basquin's preemptive strike offered a dangerous lesson, that boldness could pay off, at least in the short term. The same logic that justified his attack would soon justify full scale invasions, of Louisbourg, of Quebec, and of French colonies half a world away. This year had begun with a naval victory no one could acknowledge and would end with a continental war that no one could control. The war was far from over, the real one was about to begin. And so, while Bosquin's prizes were towed into Halifax and Braddock's ghost lingered on the Monongahela, the other three arms of Cumberland's grand design began their own journeys, from the swamps of Nova Scotia to the lakes of New York. One will stumble, one will stall, and one will succeed, though not in the way anyone expected. If the western expedition under Braddock had been the Empire's attempt to impose order on the wilderness, the northern expedition under Sir William Johnson was his attempt to make friends with it. Where Braddock marched with drums and discipline, Johnson moved with diplomacy, smoke, and improvisation. And for a few brief months in 1755, it almost worked. Sir William Johnson was not, strictly speaking, the kind of man London expected to command an army. He was Irish by birth, colonial by adoption, and fluent in Mohawk. Not just because he'd studied the language, but because he'd lived it. He'd come to New York in the seventeen thirties to manage his uncle's estates in the Mohawk Valley, and had, over time, become something somewhere between a frontier baron and a local chieftain. He traded in furs, settled disputes, married, in the political sense, the legal one, into the Mohawk aristocracy through his partner, Molly Brandt, sister of the future war leader Joseph Brandt, Tyentinega, and earned the Iroquois title Rahiagi, he who does much business. By 1755, Johnson was superintendent of Indian Affairs for the Northern Colonies, a position that required him to maintain the Covenant Chain, the longstanding alliance between the Iroquois Confederacy and the British Crown. He was, in short, the only man in the colonies who could realistically persuade the Hodenassoni to pick a side, and perhaps the only man they would halfway trust to do so. Johnson's target was Fort Saint Frederic, better known to the British as Crown Point, a formidable French stronghold built on the western shores of Lake Champlain. It was not just a fort, it was a statement. Crown Point sat astride the narrow lake corridor linking New France to the Hudson Valley. From there, French raiders could descend toward Albany in days. To the British mind, this was an intolerable situation, like having your front door open and the neighbors armed. If Johnson could seize Crown Point, he could secure the entire northern frontier and open a highway into Canada. It was, on paper, the northern mirror to Braddock's campaign, a quick thrust, a captured fort, and a restored balance of prestige. On paper, it was also simple. In reality, Johnson was about to learn that organizing a provincial army was not so different from herding cats, if the cats demanded back pay and refused to cross rivers on Sundays. Johnson's army was drawn from seven colonies Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. In total, roughly 3,500 men assembled by midsummer. Most were militia or short-term volunteers, armed with a mix of smoothborne muskets and an inherited grievance towards their officers. Only a small handful were true regulars. The rest were farmers in hunting shirts, artisans with borrowed muskets, and teenage recruits who joined for the promise of pay and adventure, or to avoid rest for debt. His most reliable allies were the Mohawk, led by the aging chief King Hendrick de Hugin, a brilliant orator and longtime friend of Johnson's. Hendrick arrived with perhaps two hundred warriors, painted and armed with muskets, bows, and tomahawks, the ranks punctuated by drummers and singers. The sight of Mohawk and New Englanders drilling side by side must have been enough to make the French scouts across the lake question reality. Johnson's expedition began in August 1755, moving north from Albany toward the upper Hudson. The march was slow and chaotic, not because of the enemy, but because of the army itself. Provincial troops squabbled over who was in command, what counted as British rations, and whether Connecticut soldiers really had to take orders from New York officers. One officer wrote home that there is much confusion as if all the devils of hell were quartermasters. To keep order, Johnson established a series of supply depots, first at Fort Edward, then called Fort Lyman, and farther north at the head of Lake George, where he halted to build a new post, Fort William Henry. The site was breathtaking, deep water, pine forests, and mountain ridges that glowed gold at sunrise. But it was also exposed, and the French had noticed. Across the lake, the French commander, Baron Ludwig August von Discau, a Saxon soldier of fortune in French service, commanded a mixed force of about three thousand men, seven hundred regulars, fourteen hundred Canadian militia, and around eight hundred native warriors from the Abenaki, Huron, and Nipissing nations. Discau was no fool. He knew the British were numerous, but disorganized. He planned to strike before Johnson's forts were finished, destroying the provincial army and its camp before it could march on Crown Point. It was, in essence, the French version of Braddock's plan, only with less arrogance and a better sense of terrain. On september eighth, seventeen fifty five, Descowe set his trap. Early that morning, a British reconnaissance column of about a thousand provincials under Colonel Ephraim Williams and King Hendrick marched south from Johnson's camp towards Fort Edward. Descow's scouts reported the movement, and the French ambushed them on the forest road between the two forts. The fight was brutal and brief. Williams was killed in the first volley. Hendrick was shot through the chest while rallying his men. The provincials broke and ran, their retreat turning into a panicked rush north toward the main camp. Discow pressed the attack, but the pursuit brought his men straight into Johnson's prepared defenses. At Lake George, the provincials had thrown up a rough barricade of felled trees and wagons, hardly a fortress, but enough to break the momentum of the French advance. As the enemy approached the forest, the British opened fire. What followed was one of the most chaotic, deafening hours of the war. The provincials, hidden behind their logworks, fired steadily and irregularly, a style of fighting they'd learned from frontier war rather than the parade ground. The French regulars tried to deploy in line, found themselves tangled in the underbrush, and paid dearly for it. Discow, leading from the front, was shot three times and captured. By late afternoon, the French retreated, leaving the field, and their commander to Johnson. By the cold math of the day, the Battle of Lake George was a modest success. British casualties numbered around two hundred and sixty killed and wounded, and the French lost about three hundred, including their commander. Crown Point remained in French hands, but Johnson's army had held the field and, for the first time in the war, repelled a major French assault. The news reached London like a gust of fresh air after Braddock's disaster. Newspapers hailed Johnson as the conqueror of the North. Parliament rewarded him with a baronetcy and a five thousand pound prize, the largest personal reward ever given to a colonial commander up to that time. Johnson himself was wounded in the leg and half delirious during the battle. When congratulated on his brilliant tactics, he supposedly replied, If there were any tactics, I was too busy bleeding to notice them. He spent the remainder of the season fortifying his position at Lake George and building Fort William Henry. The same fort, though later entered legend, an infamy, in seventeen fifty seven. Johnson's campaign succeeded less through strategy than through the sheer energy of provincial cooperation. His supply lines stretched from Albany up the Hudson, a route barely navigable by Oxcart. Provisions moved in slow convoys of bateau, flat bottomed river boats, each taking weeks to reach the front. Powder and shot were often damp, bread moldy and uniforms and tatters, but compared to Braddock's disaster, Lake George looked like a triumph of efficiency. Still, even this victory showed the limits of the British war machine in America. Johnson had no cavalry, no siege train, and no support from regular regiments. Every musket ball fired, every barrel of flour delivered, had to be begged from the colonial assemblies. His Iroquois allies, though loyal to him personally, were already wary of future campaigns, their patience for British promises wearing thin. The loss of King Hendrick was devastating, both personally and politically. He had been Johnson's chief link to the Mohawk and the broader Iroquois League. When word reached the Confederacy that Hendrick had died fighting beside the British, reactions were mixed. Respect for his courage, but anger at the folly that led him into it. The Covenant chain, already strained, began to fray. The Iroquois Council in Onondaga sent envoys demanding to know whether the British planned to avenge their fallen chief or simply build forts and forget. Johnson did his best to maintain the alliance, sending condolence gifts and promising justice. For the moment, the peace held, but the emotional center of the Iroquois partnership was gone. In the end, Johnson's northern expedition achieved exactly half its goal. Crown Point remained French, but Lake George remained British. No territory changed hands, yet the psychological balance had shifted. For the first time in the war, colonial soldiers had fought and won without the help, or interference, of regulars. The victory proved that provincial armies, disdained by Braddock, were capable of standing their ground. And though Johns' name would soon be overshadowed by new generals, his work laid the foundation for Britain's future victories along the lakes. The French, meanwhile, withdrew north to Ticonderoga and fortified it heavily. The stage was set for the next chapter of the war in the north, one that would return to these same waters again and again in the years ahead. Johnson's camp at Lake George was still unfinished when the snow began to fall, but his reputation was secure. He had fought, bled, and somehow won, which in 1755, was much more than most British generals could claim. Next, we turned west, where Governor Shirley's grand march toward Niagara met its own kind of defeat, not in battle, but in mud, disease, and time. While Johnson's ragged provincials were building their forts beside the clearer waters of Lake George, a very different kind of army was struggling westward through the mud and mosquitoes of upstate New York. Its commander was not a soldier of fortune like Disgau, nor a colonial adventurer like Johnson. He was a lawyer, methodical, patient, and unfortunately for everyone involved, convinced that paperwork could conquer geography. William Shirley, Governor of Massachusetts, was perhaps the most powerful civilian in British North America, and certainly the most ambitious. He had been in the colonies since 1731, over two decades, he had become the archetype of the Imperial Administrator, fluent in law, shrewd in politics, and hopelessly optimistic about what committees could accomplish. He had already tasted military command once before, during King George's war, when he helped organize the capture of Louisbourg from the French. The victory had made him briefly famous, and he never quite recovered from the memory. So, when the Duke of Cumberland looked for a reliable man to command one of the Northern Prongs in seventeen fifty five, Shirley eagerly volunteered. And London, perhaps remembering Louisburg, said yes. There was just one small issue. Louisburg had been a siege of a coastal fortress, supplied by sea and protected by ships. The march to Fort Niagara was five hundred miles of wilderness, rivers, and disease. But Shirley being a man of reason, was sure that with the proper memoranda everything would fall into place. The French post of Fort Niagara was the linchpin of New France's Western Empire. It stood at the mouth of the Niagara, where Lake Erie spilled into Lake Ontario, the crucial bottleneck between the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence. From there, French traders, troops, and missionaries radiated into the Ohio Valley and beyond. As long as Niaga remained in French hands, Britain could never truly control the interior. The Duke of Cumberland's directive was simple enough seize it. But to get there, Shirley would have to move an army up the Mohawk River, portage around the carrying place at Rome, descend to the Oswego River to Lake Ontario, and then cross that immense lake in open boats. It was a logistical nightmare even before the first supply chest was loaded. Shirley began his preparations in the spring of seventeen fifty five while Braddock was still alive and Johnson's provincials were still cutting trees. He gathered roughly twenty five hundred men, mostly Massachusetts and New York provincials, bolstered by a few companies of British regulars from the fiftieth and fifty first regiments, technically under his sons, William Jr. and Francis Shirley. You can already imagine how that looked to his contemporaries. Pay and provisioning again fell to the colonies. Massachusetts voted forty thousand dollars in paper money, New York added another twenty thousand, and both promptly began arguing about reimbursement. Quartermasters requisitioned barrels of salt pork, hardtack, powder and rum, and then realized there was no wagons or roads to carry them. By June, Shirley's army was less an army than a small moving town, soldiers, carpenters, settlers, ox teams, and a river fleet of hundreds of bateaux, thus flat bottomed river boats, used to haul supplies up along the Mohawk. The Mohawk River was beautiful, but it was no highway. Its banks alternated between steep gorges and bogs, its currents swift, and its mosquitoes legendary. Soldiers pulled and dragged their boats upriver, often making no more than five miles a day. Every few miles came another portage, hauling boats and barrels around rapids and falls. Oxen died by the dozens, provisions spoiled, and the further they went, the more wilderness pressed in, deep forests, lonely trading posts, and occasional burnt out homesteads left by earlier French raids. One Massachusetts officer wrote home, We have traveled three hundred miles, sir, and are yet in the king's domains, but not, I think, in his care. By July, Shirley's main force reached the great carrying place, modern Rome, New York, where the Mohawk River ended and the Oswego began. Here they built Fort Bull and Fort Williams, small wooden outposts meant to secure the route. The forts would later become tragic footnotes, poorly garrisoned, poorly supplied, and eventually destroyed by the French. After two months of slow advance, Shirley finally reached Oswego, a small British trading post on the southern shore of Lake Ontario. Here, he was supposed to rendezvous with his supply ships from Albany, rebuild his strength, and launch the assault on Niagara. Instead, he found chaos. The fort's walls were half rotted, its powder magazines damp, and its garrison down to half rations. Storms had delayed the supplies flotilla, and the few boats that had arrived were leaking badly. Lake Ontario itself was a treacherous expanse, prone to sudden gales that could scatter fleets and sink unbalast boats within minutes. Shirley waited. And waited. Each week brought new letters from Johnson at Lake George, cheerful but not helpful, and new rumors from the West about French reinforcements. The men fell sick with dysentery and malaria. The mosquitoes were said to be as large as sparrows. By mid-August, Shirley's scouts reported that Fort Niagara was heavily garrisoned and very well supplied. To proceed without artillery or fresh provisions would be suicide. He reluctantly ordered the expedition to halt and fortify Oswego instead. For the next two months, the Niagara campaign existed mostly in reports and imagination. Shirley wrote dispatches to London full of optimism. We have established a fine post upon the lake from whence future operations may be undertaken with security, which was bureaucratic code for we're not dead yet. In private letters, however, he admitted the truth. The lateness of the season, the decay of our stores, and the infirmity of the troops have put it beyond possibility to proceed. By October, disease and desertion had reduced his force to fewer than fifteen hundred men. Winter was closing in, and the army supply line, stretched two hundred miles back to Albany, could not sustain it. Shirley ordered his main body to retreat east, leaving a small garrison to hold Oswego. It was the end of the expedition that had never begun. From a military standpoint, Shirley's Niagara campaign was an absolute failure. No battle was fought, no ground was gained. However, from a logistical and strategic view, it created something that had not existed before, a permanent British foothold on Lake Ontario. Fort Oswego, though modest, would serve as the launching point for future campaigns under Loudoun, M. Burcrombie, and Amherst. It also forced the French to divert men and resources to defend Niagara, buying Britain time to recover from Braddock's loss. Still, Shirley's reputation suffered. Back in London, Cumberland and Newcastle, embarrassed by Braddock and desperate for scapegoats, began whispering that Shirley was better suited for accounts than arms. Within a year he would be quietly replaced by the Earl of Loudoun. Among the rank and file, Shirley's march became legendary for its miseries. Soldiers joked that they had conquered mosquitoes, mud, and melancholy. In one diary, a Massachusetts militiaman described the endless work. We built forts for the sake of building forts, marched for the sake of marching, and ate what the Lord and the quartermaster permitted. Yet buried in the paperwork of failure were hints of something larger. The very idea of coordinating troops from multiple colonies across hundreds of miles, or building roads, bridges, and depots had required a level of cooperation the colonies had never attempted before. It was, in a strange way, a rehearsal of something bigger, a dress rehearsal for a continental war, and eventually for Union. Governor Shirley never reached Fort Niagara, but the road he carved, the forts he built, and the failures he endured would all matter in the years ahead. His soldiers went home sick, his reports went home polished, and the Empire moved on to the next prong of its grand design. Because while Shirley was mired in the western swamps, another commander, Colonel Robert Mocton, was fighting a very different kind of war in the cold marshes of Acadia. While Johnson's provincials were digging in at Lake George, and Shirley's army was sinking into the mud near Aswego, a colder, sharper war was being fought far to the east, in the fog drenched marshes of Acadia. Here, on the edge of the North Atlantic, Colonel Robert Mocton waged one of the most efficient campaigns of seventeen fifty five, and one of the more tragic. Acadia was the oldest European foothold in North America, first French, then English, then French again, depending on who happened to sail by with more ships that year. By 1755, it was a land of tidal rivers and salt marshes, of quiet villages and Catholic churches surrounded by dikes built to hold back the Bay of Fundy's massive tides. Its people, the Acadians, were French speaking farmers, devoutly Catholic, and nominally subjects of the British Crown. But nominally was the key word. Since the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, Britain had ruled Nova Scotia, but the Acadians had never fully accepted British authority. They refused to swear unconditional oaths of loyalty, preferring neutrality between Britain and France, a stance that might have worked in peacetime, but with political suicide and war. The Duke of Cumberland ordered his seventeen fifty five offenses, he insisted that Britain could not afford to leave any French nests along its flank. And so, while Braddock marched west and surely slogged north, the Eastern Prong, led by Colonel Robert Mocden, prepared to strike at Fort Beauciur. Mocton was a professional soldier, a steady, competent officer with none of Braddock's vanity or Johnson's charisma. He had served in Nova Scotia before, knew the terrain, and understood the delicate balance between Acadians, Mi'kmaq, and British settlers. He was also under no illusions. Unlike the grandiose visions of Niagara and Crown Point, Beauci was a small, practical target, an isolated French outpost at the choke point of the Chignecto Isthus where the peninsula of Nova Scotia joins the mainland. The fort's garrison numbered perhaps one hundred and sixty regulars and three hundred militia, commanded by Louis DuPont de DuVier. The fort itself was more a bastion of dirt and sod than of stone. Five bastions, a dry moat, and timber barracks perched above the Mississaugash River. It was defensible, but not against a determined siege. Mocton's force, about two thousand strong, included seventeen hundred New England provincials under Colonel John Winslow, supported by Royal Navy vessels and artillery detachments. Among the New Englanders were veterans of the seventeen forty five Louisborg expedition, tough men, but no strangers to the killing of civilians if ordered. In early june seventeen fifty five, Mockin's flotilla of transports and warships left Boston, rounded the rocky coast of Nova Scotia, and landed at Chignecto Bay, near present day Sackville, New Brunswick. The landscape was treacherous, flooded marshes, fog so thick you could lose a regiment in it, and tides that rose sixty feet in a matter of hours. The army had to haul guns across mud flats and tidal creeks, building corduroy roads out of logs to move the siege train forward. Soldiers joked that their shoes lasted a day, their tempers half that. By mid-June, Mocten had his guns in position, barely six hundred yards from the French walls. He opened fire, and within hours the fort's fragile earthworks began to crumble. DuVier's militia started to desert, many of them local Acadians, who had been coerced into service and now begged to surrender. After a few days of bombardment, the French garrison capitulated. The siege of the fort had lasted only five days. By the standards of this war, it was almost bloodless, barely two dozen casualties on each side. It was tactically the cleanest victory of the year. And then came the aftermath. While Beau Sejour was taken, the British now controlled all of Nova Scotia. Governor Charles Lawrence, overseeing the colony from Halifax, saw the victory as an opportunity, or rather as a pretext. The Acadians, he argued, could not be trusted to remain neutral. They were too French in speech, too Catholic in faith, and too numerous for comfort. Their land lay at the heart of the Empire's new frontier. And so Lawrence decided on a solution removal. Beginning in august seventeen fifty five, British and New England troops, including many of Moctan's, began rounding up Acadian families across the province. At Grand Prix, at Pisiquid, at Annapolis Royale, soldiers read a formal proclamation. The king required their lands and livestock. They themselves were to be removed from the province. Houses were burned to prevent potential return. Churches were emptied and torched. Men were marched to the coast and forced into transports, often without knowing where they were going. Women and children followed, sometimes separated in the confusion. Over the next year, more than six thousand Acadians were deported. Some went to the British colonies along the American coast, where they were treated as unwelcome refugees. Others were shipped to Britain or France, hundreds died of disease and starvation. A few escaped into the forests or fled north to French Canada, where they became known as the Cajun's ancestors, Les Acadiens de Ranges, the disordered ones. It was, in every sense, an ethnic cleansing, bureaucratic, methodical, and merciless. While Mocten himself did not design the policy, his victory made it possible. From London's point of view, Mocten's expedition was the one unqualified success of seventeen fifty five. Bous captured, Acadia pacified, Frontier secured. Cumberland congratulated him personally. Newspapers called him the man who had finally broken the French line in America. But among those who had seen the deportations firsthand, there was little pride. Even Mocton's second in command, John Winslow, a veteran Puritan soldier, kept a journal that grew increasingly uneasy. On september fifth, seventeen fifty five, he supervised the expulsion at Grand Prix, he wrote It is with great grief that I see these poor innocent people in great distress and know not what to do for them. That line poor innocent people in great distress remains one of the most haunting sentences in the entire war. The capture of Beaux gave Britain complete control over the Atlantic approaches to Canada. The French lost their forward base for raids into New England. Halifax became a secure naval port, and the British Navy could now dominate the Gulf of St. Lawrence. In cold military terms, Mocton's campaign was a triumph of coordination, army, navy, and provincial troops working together for once. It showed that, under the right conditions, British arms could succeed in North America. But it also revealed the darker side of empire, that conquest and cleansing could be two sides of the same policy. By the winter of seventeen fifty five, Moton's men had returned to Halifax, their ships filled not with spoils, but weeping families. The governor's reports spoke of a troublesome but necessary measure, while soldiers' letters home spoke only of a misery beyond words. The Achaean expulsion would reverberate for decades. Those who escaped to Louisiana became Cajuns, preserving their dialect, faith, and music far from their ancestral marshes. Those who stayed behind were solely absorbed or erased. Those who planned it, Cumberland, Lawrence, and Mocten, saw their careers rise, their consciences rarely troubled in public. Magden himself would go on to fight at Louisburg in seventeen fifty eight and later in Quebec, where he was wounded leading Wolf Center on the plains of Abraham. He lived long enough to retire comfortably, his reputation intact, a professional who did his duty. But among the ruins of Beauchur, the echoes of what he set in motion remained. The Northern Prong had survived by accident, the western had stalled by exhaustion, and the eastern had triumphed through tragedy. Of the four great offenses planned in seventeen fifty five, only mocked and succeeded, and it left the deepest scar. As winter fell over the Empire, Britain's generals congratulated themselves on partial victories and buried their failures in official dispatches. However, the French were far from finished, and the war that had begun in the forests and rivers of North America was about to ignite the wider world. By the winter of seventeen fifty five, the British Empire had managed to fight a war without admitting it was at war. From the forests of Pennsylvania to the harbors of Newfoundland, the king's forces had been killing Frenchmen for nearly a year, and no one in London had yet had the courtesy to say it out loud. What had begun as the Duke of Cumberland's grand design for continental dominance, four prongs of conquest to secure North America, had turned into something much larger, stranger, and far less under control. The Empire had set out to solve its colonial problems. Instead, it had stumbled into the first global war in modern history. On land, the record was mixed, disastrously so. Braddock's army lay in its shallow grave beneath the Monongahela. Shirley's expedition collapsed in the swamps of the Mohawk. Johnson's provincials had fought the French to a standstill by accident more than design, and Mocton's regiments had won a perfect victory that history would remember as a tragedy. But at sea, the Empire had done something new, and dangerously bold. Before the first musket cracked in the American backwoods, Admiral Edward Bosquin had already fired the opening shots of a war no one would name. His capture of the Alcide and the Lise of Newfoundland had crippled French reinforcements to Canada, but it had also shattered the illusion of peace. London pretended it was a defensive action. Paris called it piracy. Neither side declared war, but both began fighting one. And so, as Johnson's provincials were building forts in the woods, and Shirley's men were building roads to nowhere, Bosquin's sailors were already rewriting the rules of engagement. The Empire had moved from brinksmanship to open hostility, just without the paperwork. It was, in retrospect, the most consequential decision of the year. The Royal Navy's guns had turned a colonial conflict into an Atlantic one. Every shot Bosquin fired across the fog would echo, in the Caribbean, in the Mediterranean, in the Indian Ocean, and in the Straits of Malacca. The British Empire had loosed a storm that could no longer be contained to one continent. Across all fronts, the same contradictions emerged. Britain's soldiers were brave but poorly led. Its commanders were ambitious but unimaginative. Its victories were either accidental or appalling. And yet, the Empire survived. In seventeen fifty five, that survival came not from superior generalship or divine favour, but from sheer institutional stubbornness. The Empire could lose men, forts, and moral credibility, but never its capacity to double down. Every setback only seemed to convince London that victory was one more requisition order away. Meanwhile, the colonies learned different lessons. They had seen that the British generals could fail, that provincial troops could fight, that the wilderness respected improvisation more than parade ground precision. The space between Imperial Command and Colonial Neity, something subtle had begun to shift. A sense, faint but growing, that perhaps they were not just subjects, but partners, that the Empire's mistakes might, one day, become their opportunities. As the year closed, fleets gathered in Brest and Toulon. In London, ministers talked of diplomacy. In reality, they were drafting mobilization orders. By the spring of seventeen fifty six, the war that had begun with George Washington's muskets at Jomville Glen and Boscoin's broadsides off Newfoundland would stretch from Cilicia to Senegal. France would send its best general, Louis Joseph de Montcalm, to Canada. Britain would send its least inspiring administrator, Lord Louden, to fix what Braddock and Shirley had broken. Neither man would get quite what he wanted, but by then the name of the conflict would finally match its reality. The Seven Years War, a struggle that would redraw the map of the world, and eventually the idea of empire itself. Seventeen fifty five was a year of beginnings disguised as disasters. Its battles were small, its outcomes messy, its victories morally gray. But from those fragments a pattern emerged, one of improvisation, of connection, of unintended consequences. An admiral's skirmish in the fog could change the fate of an army in the woods. A fort's fall in Nova Scotia could alter the politics of Europe, and a few thousand miles of Atlantic Ocean could no longer contain the ambitions of either crown. Next time, on the history of the Seven Years War, the war leaves the colonies behind, and we move to Europe, where the kings and their ministers redraw their alliances, Prussia takes the stage, and Britain and France finally declare the war they've already been fighting for a year. Because if seventeen fifty five was the year of plans and blunders, seventeen fifty six will be the year that the world catches on fire. If you've been enjoying the history of the Seven Years War, please consider leaving a rating or a review on iTunes or Spotify or wherever you listen to us. We'd love to hear from you. Also, make sure to subscribe so you get notifications whenever I remember to upload a new episode. It helps new listeners find the show and helps this historian justify spending it another evening knee deep in 18th century logistics, maps, my episode notes and outlines, all to deliver the occasional naval broadside of sarcasm and grape shot. So, until next time, I'm your host, Rob Hill, and thank you all so much for listening.