Trustees of the Punahou School and Oahu College - "The Oahu College at the Sandwich Islands"

Will Rogers - "Rogers isms, the Cowboy Philosopher on the Peace Conference"

William Shakespeare - "Othello, the Moor of Venice"

Hippolyte A. Taine - "The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6"

Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2007
This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

Canada: the Empire of the North

A >> Agnes C. Laut >> Canada: the Empire of the North




And though the country is on verge of ruin, though poor people of the
three towns are rioting in the streets for food, old women cursing the
little wizened Intendant with his pimpled face as he rolls past
resplendent in carriage with horses whose harness is a blaze of silver,
the troops threatening to mutiny because they are compelled to use
horse flesh,--though New France is hovering over a volcano of disaster,
they dance to their death, thoughtless as butterflies, gay as children,
these manikin imitators of the French court, who are ruining New France
that they may copy the vices of an Old World playing at kingcraft. The
regular troops are uniformed in white with facings of blue and red and
gold and violet, three-cornered hat, and leather leggings to knee.
What with chapel bells ringing and ringing, and bugle {245} call and
counter call echoing back from Cape Diamond; what with Monsieur Bigot's
prancing horses and Madame Pean's flashy carriage,--Madame Pean of whom
Bigot is so enamored he has sent her husband to some far western post
and passes each evening at her gay receptions,--what with the grounding
of the sentry's arms and the parade of troops, Quebec is a gay place
these years of black ruin, and the gossips have all they can do to keep
track of the amours and the duels and the high personages cultivating
Madame Pean; for cultivated she must be by all who covet place or
power. A word from Madame Pean to Bigot is of more value than a bribe.
Even Montcalm and De Levis attend her revels.

[Illustration: RUINS OF CHATEAU BIGOT]

Twenty people sup with Monsieur Bigot each night, either at the
Intendant's palace down by Charles River, or nine miles out towards
Beauport, where he has built himself the Forest Hermitage, now known as
Chateau Bigot,--a magnificent country manor house of red brick, hidden
away among the hills with the gay shrubberies of French gardens set
down in an American wilderness. Supper over by seven, the guests sit
down to play, and the amount a man may gamble is his social barometer,
whether {246} he lose or win, cheat or steal. If dancing follows
gambling, the rout will not disperse till seven in the morning. What
time is left of the twenty-four hours in a day will be devoted to
public affairs.

Montcalm's salary is only 25,000 francs, or $5,000. To maintain the
dignity of the King, the commander in chief must keep the pace, and he
too gives weekly suppers, with places set for forty people, "whom I
don't know," he writes dejectedly to his wife, "and don't want to know;
and wish that I might spend the evenings quietly in my own chamber."
To Montcalm, who was of noble birth with no shamming, this lowbred
pretense and play at courtcraft became a bore; to his staff of
officers, a source of continual amusement; but De Levis presently falls
victim to a pair of fine eyes possessed by the wife of another man.

War filled the summers, but the winters were given up to social life;
and of all midwinter social gayeties the most important was the
official visit of the Governor and the Intendant to Montreal. By this
time a good road had been cut from Quebec to Montreal along the north
shore, and the sleighs usually set out in January or February. Bigot
added to the occasion all the prestige of a social rout. All the grand
dames and cavaliers of Quebec were invited. Baggage was sent on ahead
with servants to break the way, find quarters for the night, and
prepare meals. After a dinner at the Intendant's palace the sleighs
set out, two horses to each, driven tandem because the sleigh road was
too narrow for a team. Each sleigh held only two occupants, and to the
damage done by fair eyes was added the glow of exhilaration from
driving behind spirited horses in frosty air with the bells of a
hundred carryalls ringing across the snow. At seven was pause for
supper. High play followed till ten. Then early to bed and early to
rise and on the road again by seven in the morning! In Montreal was
one continual round of dinners and dances. Between times, appointments
were made to the military posts and trading stations of the Up-Country.
He who wanted a good post must pay his court to Madame Pean. No wonder
Montcalm breathed a sigh of relief when Lent put a stop to the gayeties
and he could quietly pass his evenings with the Sulpician priests.
{247} To break from Bigot's ring during the war was impossible.
Creatures of his choosing filled the army, handled the supplies,
controlled the Indians; and when the King's reproof became too sharp,
Bigot simply threatened to resign, which wrought consternation, for no
man of ability would attempt to unwind the tangle of Bigot's dishonesty
during a critical war. Montcalm wrote home complaints in cipher. The
French government bided its time, and Bigot tightened his vampire
suckers on the lifeblood of the dying nation. The whole era is a theme
for the allegory of artist or poet.

[Illustration: PARLIAMENT BUILDINGS, OTTAWA]

[Illustration: QUEBEC, CHATEAU FRONTENAC AND THE CITADEL]


Montcalm had arrived in May of 1756. By midsummer he was leading three
thousand French artillerymen across Lake Ontario from Fort Frontenac
(Kingston), to attack the English post on the south side, Oswego.
Inside the fort walls were seven hundred raw English provincials, ill
of scurvy from lack of food. The result need scarcely be told. Seven
hundred ill men behind wooden walls had no chance against three
thousand soldiers in health with heavy artillery. To take the English
by surprise, Montcalm had crossed the lake on August 4 by night. Two
days later all the transport ships had landed the troops and the cannon
had actually been mounted before the English knew of the enemy's
presence. On the east side of the river was Fort Ontario, a barricade
of logs built in the shape of a star, housing an outguard of three
hundred and seventy men. On discovering the French, the sentry spiked
their cannon, threw their powder in the river, and retired at midnight
inside Oswego's walls. Working like beavers, Montcalm's men dragged
twenty cannon to a hill commanding the fort, known as "Fort Rascal"
because the outfort there was useless to the English. Before
Montcalm's cannonade Oswego's walls, plastered with clay and rubble,
fell like the staves of a dry barrel. The English sharpshooters then
hid behind pork barrels placed in three tiers filled with sand; but
Colonel Mercer, their officer, was literally cut in two by a cannon
shot, and the women, cooped up inside the barracks, begged the officers
to avoid Indian massacre by surrender. {248} A white flag was waved.
Including women, something under a thousand English surrendered
themselves prisoners to Montcalm. The Indians fell at once to mad
plunder. Spite of the terms of honorable surrender, the English were
stripped of everything, and only Montcalm's promise of $10,000 worth of
presents to the savages prevented butchery. The victors decamped to
Montreal, well pleased with the campaign of 1756. It need not be told
that there were constant raids and counter raids along the frontier
during the entire year.

Loudon, the English commander, did not arrive in New York till well on
in midsummer of 1756, and he found far different material from the
trained bushfighters in the hands of Montcalm. The English soldiers
were raw provincial recruits, dressed, at best, in buckskin, but for
the most part in the rough homespun which they had worn when they had
left plow and carpenter's bench and fishing boat. While Montcalm was
capturing Oswego, Loudon was licking his rough recruits into shape,
"making men out of mud" for the campaign of 1757. Indeed, it was said
of Loudon, and the saying stuck to him as characteristic of his
campaign, that he resembled the wooden horse figure of a tavern
sign,--always on horseback but never rode forward. Instead of striking
at Lake Champlain or on the Ohio, where the French were aggressors,
Loudon planned to repeat the brilliant capture of Louisburg. July of
1857 found him at Halifax planting vegetable gardens to prevent
scurvy,--"the cabbage campaign" it was derisively called,--and waiting
for Gorham's rangers to reconnoiter Louisburg. Gorham's scouts brought
back word that the French admiral had come in with twenty-four
men-of-war and seven thousand men. To overpower such strength meant a
prolonged siege. It was already August. Loudon sailed back to New
York without firing a gun, while the English fleet, trying to
reconnoiter Louisburg, suffered terrible shipwreck.

[Illustration: THE EARL OF LOUDON]

Montcalm was not the enemy to let the chance of Loudon's absence from
the scene of action pass unimproved. While Loudon is pottering at
Halifax, Montcalm marshals his troops to the {249} number of eight
thousand, including one thousand Indians at Carillon or Ticonderoga,
where Lake George empties into Lake Champlain. Portaging two hundred
and fifty flatboats with as many birch canoes up the river, the French
invade the mountain wilderness of Lake George. Towards the end of
July, Levis leads part of the troops by land up the west shore towards
the English post of Fort William Henry. Montcalm advances on the lake
with the flatboats and canoes, and the rafts with the heavy artillery.
Each night Levis' troops kindle their signal fires on the mountain
slope, and each night Montcalm from the lake signals back with torches.
It needs artist's brush to paint the picture: the forested mountains
green and lonely and silent in the shimmering sunlight of the summer
sky; the lake gold as molten metal in the fire of the setting sun; the
soldiers in their gay uniforms of white and blue, hoisting tent cloths
on oar sweeps for sails as a breeze dimples the waters; the French
voyageurs clad in beaded buckskin chanting some ditty of Old-World fame
to the rhythmic dip of the Indian paddles; the Indians naked, painted
for war, with a glitter in their eyes of a sinister intent which they
have no mind to tell Montcalm; and then, at the south of Lake George,
nestling between the hills and the water, the little palisaded
fort,--Fort William Henry,--with gates fast shut and two thousand
bushfighters behind the walls, weak from an epidemic of smallpox, and,
as usual, so short of provisions that siege means starvation.

{250} Twenty miles southeastward is another English fort,--Fort
Edward,--where General Webb with sixteen hundred men is keeping the
road barred against advance to Albany. Soon as scouts bring word to
Fort William Henry of the advancing French, Lieutenant Monro sends
frantic appeal to Webb for more men; but Webb has already sent all the
men he can spare. If he leaves Fort Edward, the French by a flank
movement through the woods can march on Albany, so Monro unplugs his
seventeen cannon, locks his gates, and bides his fate.

Montcalm follows the same tactics as at Oswego,--brings heavy artillery
against slab walls. For the first week of August, eight hundred of his
men are digging trenches by night to avoid giving target for the fiery
bombs whizzing through the dark from Monro's cannon. By day they lie
hidden in the woods with a cordon of sharpshooters encircling the fort,
Montcalm encamped on the west to prevent help from Sir William Johnson
up the Mohawk, Levis on the southeast to cut off aid from Webb. Monro
sends yet one last appeal for help: two thousand men against eight
thousand,--the odds are eloquent of his need! Montcalm's scouts let
the messenger pass through the lines as if unseen, but they make a
point of catching the return messenger and holding Webb's answer that
he cannot come, till their cannon have torn great wounds in the fort
walls. Then Bougainville blindfold carries Webb's answer to Monro and
demands the surrender of the fort. Monro still has a little
ammunition, still hopes against hope that Johnson or Webb or Loudon
will come to the rescue, and he keeps his big guns singing over the
heads of the French in their trenches till all the cannon have burst
but seven, and there are not ten rounds of shells left. Then Colonel
Young, with a foot shot off, rides out on horseback waving a white
flag. Three hundred English have been killed, as many again are
wounded or ill of smallpox, and to the remaining garrison of sixteen
hundred Montcalm promises safe conduct to General Webb at Fort Edward.
Then the English march out. That night--August 9--the vanquished
English camp with Montcalm's forces. The Indians, meanwhile, ramping
through the fort for plunder, {251} have maddened themselves with
traders' rum! Before daybreak they have butchered all the wounded
lying in the hospital and cut to pieces the men ill of smallpox,--a
crime that brought its own punishment in contagion. Next morning, when
the French guard tried to conduct the disarmed English along the trail
to Fort Edward, the Indians snatched at the clothing, the haversacks,
the tent kit of the marchers. With their swords the French beat back
the drunken horde. In answer, the war hatchets were waved over the
heads of the cowering women. The march became a panic; the panic, a
massacre; and for twenty-four hours such bedlam raged as might have put
fiends to shame. The frenzied Indians would listen to no argument but
blows; and when the English prisoners appealed to the French for
protection, the French dared not offend their savage allies by fighting
to protect the English victims. "Take to the woods," they warned the
men, and the women were quickly huddled back to shelter of the fort.
Of the men, sixty were butchered on the spot and some seven hundred
captured to be held for ransom. The remnant of the English soldiers,
along with the women, were held till the Indian frenzy had spent
itself, then sent to Fort Edward. August 16 a torch was put to the
combustibles of the fort ruins, and as the French boats glided out on
Lake George for the St. Lawrence, explosion after explosion, flame
leaping above flame, proclaimed that of Fort William Henry there would
remain naught but ashes and charred ruins and the skeletons of the
dead. So closed the campaign of 1857 [Transcriber's note: 1757?]. For
three years hand running England had suffered defeat.


The spring of 1758 witnessed a change. The change was the rise to
power of a man who mastered circumstances instead of allowing them to
master him. Such men are the milestones of human progress, whether
heroes, or quiet toilers unknown to the world. The man was Pitt, the
English statesman. Instead of a weak ministry fighting the
machinations of France, it was now Pitt versus Pompadour, the English
patriot against the light woman who ruled the councils of France.

{252} From fighting weakly on the defensive, England sprang into the
position of aggressor all along the line. The French were to be
attacked at all points simultaneously, at Louisburg on the east, at
Ticonderoga or Carillon on Lake Champlain, at Duquesne on the Ohio, at
Frontenac on Lake Ontario, and finally at Quebec itself. London is
recalled as commander in chief. Abercrombie succeeds to the position,
with the brilliant young soldier, Lord Howe, as right-hand man; but
Pitt takes good care that there shall be good chiefs and good
right-hand men at _all_ points. The one mistake is Abercrombie,--"Mrs.
Nabby Crombie" the soldiers called him. He was an indifferent,
negative sort of man; and indifferent, negative sorts of people, by
their dishwater goodness, can sometimes do more harm in critical
positions than the branded criminal. Red tape had forced him on Pitt,
but Pitt trusted to the excellence of the subordinate officers,
especially Lord Howe.

Louisburg first!

No more dillydallying and delay "to plant cabbages!" The thing is to
reach Louisburg before the French have entered the harbor. Men-of-war
are stationed to intercept the French vessels coming from the
Mediterranean, and before winter has passed Admiral Boscawen has sailed
for America with one hundred and fifty vessels, including forty
men-of-war, frigates, and transports carrying twelve thousand men.
General Amherst is to command the land forces, and with Amherst is
Brigadier James Wolfe, age thirty-one, a tall, slim, fragile man, whose
delicate frame is tenanted by a lion spirit; or, to change the
comparison, by a motive power too strong for the weak body that held
it. By May the fleet is in Halifax. By June Amherst has joined
Boscawen, and the ships beat out for Louisburg through heavy fog, with
a sea that boils over the reefs in angry surf.

Louisburg was in worse condition than during the siege of 1745. The
broken walls have been repaired, but the filling is false,--sand grit.
Its population is some four thousand, of whom three thousand eight
hundred are the garrison. On the ships lying in the harbor are three
thousand marines, a defensive force, in all, {253} of six thousand
eight hundred. On walls and in bastions are some four hundred and
fifty heavy guns, cannon, and mortars. Imagine a triangle with the
base to the west, the two sides running out to sea on the east. The
fort is at the apex. The wall of the base line is protected by a
marsh. On the northeast side is the harbor protected by reefs and
three batteries. Along the south side, Drucourt, the French commander,
has stationed two thousand men at three different points where landing
is possible, to construct batteries behind barricades of logs.

[Illustration: BOSCAWEN]

Fog had concealed the approach of the English, but such a ground swell
was raging over the reefs as threatened any ship with instant
destruction. For a week Amherst and Wolfe and Lawrence row up and down
through the roiling mist and raging surf and singing winds to take
stock of the situation. With those batteries at the landing places
there is only one thing to do,--cannonade them, hold their attention in
a life-and-death fight while the English soldiers scramble through the
surf for the shore. From sunrise to sundown of the 8th furious
cannonading set the green seas churning and tore up the French
barricades as by hurricane. At sunset the firing ceased, and three
detachments of troops launched out in whaleboats at three in the
morning, two of the detachments to make a feint of landing, while Wolfe
with the other division was to run through the surf for the shore at
Freshwater Cove. The French were not deceived. They let Wolfe
approach within range, when the log barricade flashed to flame with a
thousand sharpshooters. Wolfe had foreseen the snare and had waved his
{254} troops off when he noticed that two boat loads were rowing ashore
through a tremendous surf under shelter of a rocky point. Quickly he
signaled the other boats to follow. In a trice the boats had smashed
to kindling on the reefs, but the men were wading ashore, muskets held
high over head, powder pouches in teeth, and rushed with bayonets
leveled against the French, who had dashed from cover to prevent the
landing. This unexpected landing had cut the French off from
Louisburg. Retreating in panic, they abandoned their batteries and
fifty dead. The English had lost one hundred and nine in the surf. It
is said that Wolfe scrambled from the water like a drowned rat and led
the rush with no other weapon in hand but his cane.

[Illustration: THE SIEGE OF LOUISBURG (From a contemporary print)]

To land the guns through the jostling sea was the next task. It was
done, as in 1745, by a pontoon bridge of small boats, but the work took
till the 29th of June. Wolfe, meanwhile, has marched with twelve
hundred men round to the rear of the marsh and comes so suddenly on the
Grand and Lighthouse Batteries, which defend the harbor, that the
French abandon them to retreat within the walls. This gives the
English such control of the harbor entrance that Drucourt, the French
commander, sinks six of his ships across the channel to bar out
Boscawen's fleet, the masts of the sunken, vessels sticking above the
water. Amherst's men are working like demons, building a road for the
cannon across the marsh and trenching up to the back wall; but they
work only at night and are undiscovered by the French till the 9th of
July. Then the French rush out with a whoop to drive them off, but the
English already have their guns mounted, and Drucourt's men are glad to
dash for shelter behind the cracking walls. It now became a game of
cannon play pure and simple. Boscawen from harbor front hurls his
whistling bombs overhead, to crash through roofs inside the walls.
Wolfe from the Lighthouse Battery throws shells and flaming
combustibles straight into the midst of the remaining French fleet. At
last, on July 21st, masts, sails, tar ropes, take fire in a terrible
conflagration, and three of the fleet burn to the water line with
terrific explosions of their powder magazines; then the flames hiss out
above {255} the rocking hulls. Only two ships are left to the French,
and the deep bomb-proof casemates inside the fort between outer and
inner walls, where the families and the wounded have been sheltered,
are now in flame. Amherst loads his shells with combustibles and pours
one continuous rain of fiery death on the doomed fort. The houses,
which are of logs, flame like kindling wood, and now the timber work of
the stone bastions is burning from bombs hurtling through the roofs.
The walls crash down in masses. The scared surgeons, all bloody from
amputating shattered limbs, no longer stand in safety above their
operating tables. It is said that Madame Drucourt, the Governor's
wife, actually stayed on the walls to encourage the soldiers, with her
own hands fired some of the great guns, and, when the overworked
surgeons flagged from terror and lack of sleep, it was Madame Drucourt
who attended to the wounded. Drucourt is for holding out to the death,
until one dark night the English row into the harbor and capture his
two last ships. Then Drucourt asks for terms, July 26; but the terms
are stern,--utter surrender,--and Drucourt would have fought till every
man fell from the walls, had not one of the civil officers rushed after
the commander's messenger carrying {256} the refusal, and shouted
across the ditches to the English: "We accept! We surrender! We
accept your terms!"

Counting soldiers, marines, and townspeople, in all five thousand
French pass over to Amherst, to be carried prisoners on Boscawen's
fleet to England. Wolfe was for proceeding at once to Quebec, but
Amherst considered the season too late and determined to complete the
work where he was. One detachment goes to receive the surrender of
Isle St. John, henceforth known as Prince Edward Island. Another
division proceeds up St. John River, New Brunswick, burning all
settlements that refuse unconditional surrender. Wolfe's grenadiers
are sent to reduce Gaspe and Miramichi and northern New Brunswick. And
now, lest blundering statecraft for a second time return the captured
fort to France, Amherst and Boscawen order the complete disarmament and
destruction of Louisburg. What cannon cannot be removed are tumbled
into the marsh or upset into the sea. The stones from the walls are
carried away to Halifax. By 1760, of Louisburg, the glory of New
France, the pride of America, there remains not a vestige but grassed
slopes overgrown by nettles, ditches with rank growth of weeds, stone
piles where the wild vines grow, and an inner yard where the cows of
the fisher folk pasture.

Not a poor beginning for the campaign of 1758, though bad enough news
has come from Major General Abercrombie, which was the real explanation
of Amherst's refusal to push on to Quebec.

Abercrombie, with fifteen thousand men, the pick of the regulars and
provincials, had launched out on Lake George on the 5th of July with
over one thousand boats, to descend the lake northward to the French
fort of Carillon or Ticonderoga. Again, it would require artist's
brush to paint the scene. Rogers' Rangers, dressed in buckskin, led
the way in birch canoes. Lord Howe was there, dressed like a
bushfighter; and with bagpipes setting the echoes ringing amid the
lonely mountains, were the Highland regiments in their tartan plaids.
Flags floated from the prow of every boat. Each battalion had its own
regimental {257} band. Scarcely a breath dimpled the waters of the
lake, and the sun shone without a cloud. Little wonder those who
passed through the fiery Aceldama that was to come, afterwards looked
back on this scene as the fairest in their lives.

[Illustration: AMHERST]

Montcalm had only arrived at Ticonderoga on June 30th. There was no
doubting the news. His bushrovers brought in word that the English
were advancing in such multitudes their boats literally covered the
lake. It looked as if the fate of Fort William Henry were to be
reversed. Montcalm never dreamed of Abercrombie attacking without
artillery. To stay cooped up in the fort would invite destruction.
Therefore Montcalm ordered his men out to construct a circular
breastwork from the River of the Chutes on the southeast, which empties
Lake George, round towards Lake Champlain on the northwest. Huge trees
were felled, pile on pile, top-most branches spiked and pointed
outwards. Behind these Montcalm intrenched his four thousand men,
lying in lines three deep, with grenadiers in reserve behind to step up
as the foremost lines fell. At a cannon signal from the fort the men
were to rise to their places, but not to fire till the English were
entangled in the brushwood. It was blisteringly hot weather. It is
said that the troops took off their heavy three-cornered hats and lay
in their shirt sleeves, hand on musket, speaking no word, but waiting.

Copyright (c) 2007. topboookz.com. All rights reserved.