The besiegers were now threatened by a new danger. We have seen that in the last summer the Sieur Duvivier had attacked Annapolis. Undaunted by ill-luck, he had gone to France to beg for help to attack it again; two thousand men were promised him, and in anticipation of their arrival the governor of Canada sent a body of French and Indians, under the noted partisan Marin, to meet and co-operate with them. Marin was ordered to wait at Les Mines till he heard of the arrival of the troops from France; but he grew impatient, and resolved to attack Annapolis without them. Accordingly, he laid siege to it with the six or seven hundred whites and Indians of his party, aided 127 by the so-called Acadian neutrals. Mascarene, the governor, kept them at bay till the twenty-fourth of May, when, to his surprise, they all disappeared. Duchambon had sent them an order to make all haste to the aid of Louisbourg. As the report of this reached the besiegers, multiplying Marin’s force fourfold, they expected to be attacked by numbers more than equal to those of their own effective men. This wrought a wholesome reform. Order was established in the camp, which was now fenced with palisades and watched by sentinels and scouting-parties. Another tribulation fell upon the general. Shirley had enjoined it upon him to keep in perfect harmony with the naval commander, and the injunction was in accord with Pepperrell’s conciliating temper. Warren was no less earnest than he for the success of the enterprise, lent him ammunition in time of need, and offered every aid in his power, while Pepperrell in letters to Shirley and Newcastle praised his colleague without stint. But in habits and character the two men differed widely. Warren was in the prime of life, and the ardor of youth still burned in him. He was impatient at the slow movement of the siege. Prisoners told him of a squadron expected from Brest, of which the “Vigilant” was the forerunner; and he feared that even if it could not defeat him, it might elude the blockade, and with the help of the continual fogs, get into Louisbourg in spite of him, thus making its capture impossible. Therefore he called a council of his 128 captains on board his flagship, the “Superbe,” and proposed a plan for taking the place without further delay. On the same day he laid it before Pepperrell. It was to the effect that all the King’s ships and provincial cruisers should enter the harbor, after taking on board sixteen hundred of Pepperrell’s men, and attack the town from the water side, while what was left of the army should assault it by land.[138] To accept the proposal would have been to pass over the command to Warren, only about twenty-one hundred of the New England men being fit for service at the time, while of these the general informs Warren that “six hundred are gone in quest of two bodies of French and Indians, who, we are informed, are gathering, one to the eastward, and the other to the westward.”[139]