Pierre Audubon was engaged by the French Government to transport the necessities of war to Cape Breton Island in 1757, when the world-wide struggle between France and Great Britain for supremacy in the New World was at hand. The French were determined at all hazards to hold their great fortress of Louisburg, which had been taken by the English but again restored to the French not many years before. This was the strongest and most costly fortress on the American continent, as well as a great center for the valuable trade in salted fish. By a coincidence, or possibly out of compliment to his wife, Pierre's ship bore the name of _La Marianne_, and when he sailed from his home port of Les Sables d'Olonne on April 15, 1757, he took with him his own son, Jean, as cabin-boy, when the lad was but thirteen years old. In the following May Great Britain threw down the gauntlet to France, and the terrific seven years' struggle began. The great fortress of Louisburg fell in the following year to the English fleet, and was left a heap of ruins. His father's ship, the _Mary Ann_, was involved, and young Jean Audubon, who thus began his fighting career at fourteen, was wounded in the left leg and made a prisoner. With many of his compatriots he was taken to England, landing on November 14, 1758, where he remained in captivity for five years; he was released but a short time before the treaty of peace was signed at Paris, February 10, 1763. Apart from her interests in the West Indies, France was stripped at this time of all her vast possessions in America, save only the two little islands of Saint Pierre and Miquelon. Whether Pierre Audubon shared the fate of his son we are unable to say, for at this point he drops out of our records and we do not hear of him again. It is certain that he never made another voyage with Jean, who returned to his native town with his passion for the sea unabated, and at nineteen reëntered the merchant marine as a novice. His next voyage, on the ship _La Caille_, Captain Pigeon, was to execute a governmental commission at the Island of Miquelon. Five golden years of his youth had been spent in captivity; if productive of nothing else they had given him a knowledge of the English tongue, but they had also engendered bitter hatred of the English race, a feeling which his son confessed to have shared in his youthful days.[19]