194 THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



event, written by Montcalm, Bourlamaque, Bougainville, Bigot, 

 Vaudreuil, etc. 



This material has already been carefully gone over. It is the 

 good fortune of Canada that her history under the French regime 

 has been written by one who is perhaps the greatest historian produced 

 by North America, Francis Parkman. The brilliance of his style has 

 sometimes caused dullards to doubt the solidity of his learning. Hav- 

 ing had occasion more than once to go into all the material available 

 for the study of some small incident narrated by Parkman, I have in- 

 variably found that he had left practically nothing unread and that 

 his brilliance wells up from a rich spring of knowledge and of study. 



Yet there is a sense in which even Parkman is inadequate. Com- 

 pare his two volumes on "Montcalm and Wolfe" with the more recent 

 volumes on " England in the Seven Years' War" by Mr. Julian Corbett; 

 it is at once apparent that one was written before, the other after 

 Admiral Mahan had produced his series of works on Sea Power, 

 which have done so much to revolutionize and to widen our conceptions 

 of military history. Not indeed that Captain Mahan discovered, 

 or would claim to have discovered, the doctrine of sea power. His 

 own chapters show that that doctrine was thoroughly known to the 

 great Pitt or to the English Admiralty in the struggle with Napoleon. 

 But before Captain Mahan, knowledge of the doctrine was the privilege 

 of a few statesmen, denied to historians. It is indeed true that belief 

 in the importance of sea power may be pushed too far. We must not 

 let Wolfe and Montcalm fall too far into the shade of the Admirals 

 of the fleet. Yet after giving full credit to the rival Generals, the fact 

 remains that in reading Parkman we feel a gap which must be filled 

 in by later 'writers. 



The same is true of such an incident as the capture of Oswego 

 by Montcalm in 1756. The details of the siege have been given 

 by Parkman, or with equal vividness and greater detail by M. Chapais, 

 but the importance in the siege of the control of Lake Ontario by 

 the French has yet to be brought into relief. 



Oswego was garrisoned by about 1,600 men, mainly regulars, 

 under the command of Colonel Mercer. During the winter of 1755-6 

 these had suffered terribly from scurvy 1 , but the British were fully 

 alive to the importance of the post, and in the spring of 1756 had sent 



1 On 4th January, 1757, the Earl of London enclosed to the Secretary of State 

 an account of the siege by Captain John Vickers of Shirley's (50th) regiment. It 

 has been quoted in part by Parkman, but he has omitted one sentence, which I 

 must give: "When I left Oswego the garrison were pretty healthy, as it consisted 

 mostly of recruits just come out, the men that composed the garrison in the winter 

 being mostly dead." 



