Last week, I posted photos on my blog of the Prince Edward Battery. This coastal battery, located to the west of the downtown of Charlottetown was built in the mid-19th century to guard the harbour against invaders--Americans, particularly, but perhaps also French. Nothing of course happened, and in 1905 when British forces left the Island the Battery was added to Charlottetown's Victoria Park.
There really is no military history of note on Prince Edward Island proper. There is, in the downtown, a monument to the few Island dead in the 1900 Boer War Battle of Paardeberg, and of course there's a much more prominent cenotaph in the front of Province House to the dead of the two world wars and the Korean War. In terms of actual military events on the Island, excluding occasional civil unrest the most recent military event on the Island I am aware of is the 1775 raid of Charlottetown made by the Marblehead privateers on behalf of the Continental Congress. Probably the most substantial campaign was Britain's Ile Saint-Jean Campaign of fall 1758, when Britain suppressed the French and continued the task of ethnically cleansing Acadians from the Maritimes.
The challenge is simple: Make Prince Edward Island, the island province cradled by the waves, the locus of a military conflict of some kind more recent than the 18th century. This is a difficult task but it can be achieved. The Ile Saint-Jean Campaign occurred in the Seven Years War, at a time when the Maritimes, the entire estuary of the Saint Lawrence, was divided between the rival British and French empires. Could we keep the French empire, or a descendant, going? Might this Britain instead find itself opposed to the Americans? Could this even be a local uprising?
Fellow fans of AH, I pass the discussion over to you.
There really is no military history of note on Prince Edward Island proper. There is, in the downtown, a monument to the few Island dead in the 1900 Boer War Battle of Paardeberg, and of course there's a much more prominent cenotaph in the front of Province House to the dead of the two world wars and the Korean War. In terms of actual military events on the Island, excluding occasional civil unrest the most recent military event on the Island I am aware of is the 1775 raid of Charlottetown made by the Marblehead privateers on behalf of the Continental Congress. Probably the most substantial campaign was Britain's Ile Saint-Jean Campaign of fall 1758, when Britain suppressed the French and continued the task of ethnically cleansing Acadians from the Maritimes.
The challenge is simple: Make Prince Edward Island, the island province cradled by the waves, the locus of a military conflict of some kind more recent than the 18th century. This is a difficult task but it can be achieved. The Ile Saint-Jean Campaign occurred in the Seven Years War, at a time when the Maritimes, the entire estuary of the Saint Lawrence, was divided between the rival British and French empires. Could we keep the French empire, or a descendant, going? Might this Britain instead find itself opposed to the Americans? Could this even be a local uprising?
Fellow fans of AH, I pass the discussion over to you.