Louisburg

Louisburg, a port on the south-east coast of Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, 27 miles S.E. of Sydney. It is now inhabited only by a few fishermen; but there are the ruins of the old town, which under the French had a large export trade in cod, and was the strongest fortress in North America, until taken by the English in 1758. It had already been captured by the New England colonists and an English squadron in 1745, and restored in 1748; now its fortifications, which had been thirty years in building and cost over a million sterling, were demolished, and it gradually sank into ruin.