Stephen Williams, the preacher whose sermons had comforted Crafts in his trouble, was a son of Rev. John Williams, captured by the Indians at Deerfield in 1704, and was now minister of Long Meadow, Massachusetts. He had joined the anti-papal crusade as one of its chaplains, and passed for a man of ability,--a point on which those 149 who read his diary will probably have doubts. The lot of the army chaplains was of the hardest. A pestilence had fallen upon Louisbourg, and turned the fortress into a hospital. “After we got into the town,” says the sarcastic Dr. Douglas, whose pleasure it is to put everything in its worst light, “a sordid indolence or sloth, for want of discipline, induced putrid fevers and dysenteries, which at length in August became contagious, and the people died like rotten sheep.” From fourteen to twenty-seven were buried every day in the cemetery behind the town, outside the Maurepas Gate, by the old lime-kiln on Rochefort Point; and the forgotten bones of above five hundred New England men lie there to this day under the coarse, neglected grass. The chaplain’s diary is little but a dismal record of sickness, death, sermons, funerals, and prayers with the dying ten times a day. “Prayed at Hospital;--Prayed at Citadel;--Preached at Grand Batery;--Visited Capt. [illegible], very sick;--One of Capt.----’s company dy^d.--Am but poorly myself, but able to keep about.” Now and then there is a momentary change of note, as when he writes: “July 29^{th}. One of ye Captains of ye men of war caind a soldier who struck ye capt. again. A great tumult. Swords were drawn; no life lost, but great uneasiness is caused.” Or when he sets down the “say” of some Briton, apparently a naval officer, “that he had tho’t ye New England men were Cowards--but now he tho’t yt if they had a pick axe & spade, they w’d dig ye way 150 to Hell & storm it.”[167] Williams was sorely smitten with homesickness, but he sturdily kept his post, in spite of grievous yearnings for family and flock. The pestilence slowly abated, till at length the burying-parties that passed the Maurepas Gate counted only three or four a day. At the end of January five hundred and sixty-one men had died, eleven hundred were on the sick list, and about one thousand fit for duty.[168] The promised regiments from Gibraltar had not come. Could the French have struck then, Louisbourg might have changed hands again. The Gibraltar regiments had arrived so late upon that rude coast that they turned southward to the milder shores of Virginia, spent the winter there, and did not appear at Louisbourg till April. They brought with them a commission for Warren as governor of the fortress. He made a speech of thanks to the New England garrison, now reduced to less than nineteen hundred men, sick and well, and they sailed at last for home, Louisbourg being now thought safe from any attempt of France.