As the shout of applause died away, the trembling New Englander asked Frontenac if he would put his answer in writing.

"No," thundered the old Governor, never happier than when fighting, "I will answer your General with my cannon! I shall teach him that a man of my rank"—with covert sneer at Phips' origin, "is not to be summoned in such rude fashion! Let him do his best! I shall do mine!"

It was now the turn of the English to be amazed. This was not the answer they had expected from a fort weakly garrisoned by a hundred men. If they had struck and struck quickly, they might yet have won the day; but all Monday passed in futile arguments and councils of war, and on Tuesday, the 17th, towards night, was heard wild shouting within Quebec walls.



"My faith, Messieurs!" exclaimed one of the French prisoners aboard Phips' ship; "now you have lost your chance! Those {182} are the coureurs de bois from Montreal and the bushrovers of the Pays d'en Haut, eight hundred strong."

The news at last spurred Phips to action. All that night the people of Quebec could hear the English drilling, and shouting "God save King William!" with beat of drum and trumpet calls that set the echoes rolling from Cape Diamond; and on the 18th small boats landed fourteen hundred men to cross the St. Charles River and assault the Lower Town, while the four largest ships took up a position to cannonade the city. It was four in the afternoon before the soldiers had been landed amid peppering bullets from the Le Moyne bushrovers. Only a few cannon shots were fired, and they did no damage but to kill an urchin of the Upper Town.

Firing began in earnest on the morning of October 19. The river was churned to fury and the reverberating echoes set the rocks crashing from Cape Diamond, but it was almost impossible for the English to shoot high enough to damage the upper fort. It was easy for the French to shoot down, and great wounds gaped from the hull of Phips' ship, while his masts went over decks in flame, flag and all. The tide drifted the admiral's flag on shore. The French rowed out, secured the prize, and a jubilant shout roared from Lower Town, to be taken up and echoed and reechoed from the Castle! For two more days bombs roared in midair, plunging through the roofs of houses in Lower Town or ricochetting back harmless from the rock wall below Castle St. Louis. At the St. Charles the land forces were fighting blindly to effect a crossing, but the Le Moyne bushrovers lying in ambush repelled every advance, though Ste. Helene had fallen mortally wounded. On the morning of the 21st the French could hardly believe their senses. The land forces had vanished during the darkness of a rainy night, and ship after ship, sail after sail, was drifting downstream—was it possible?—in retreat. Another week's bombarding would have reduced Quebec to flame and starvation; but another week would have exposed Phips' fleet to wreckage from winter weather, and he had drifted down to Isle Orleans, where the {183} dismantled fleet paused to rig up fresh masts. It was Madame Jolliet who suggested to the Puritan commander an exchange of the prisoners captured at Port Royal with the English from Maine and New Hampshire held in Quebec. She was sent ashore by Phips and the exchange was arranged. Winter gales assailed the English fleet as it passed Anticosti, and what with the wrecked and wounded, Phips' loss totaled not less than a thousand men.



Frontenac had been back in Canada only a year, and in that time he had restored the prestige of French power in America. The Iroquois were glad to sue for peace, and his bitterest enemies, the Jesuits, joined the merrymakers round the bonfires of acclaim kindled in the old Governor's honor as the English retreated, and the joy bells pealed out, and processions surged shouting through the streets of Quebec! From Hudson Bay to the Mississippi, from the St. Lawrence to Lake Superior and the land of the Sioux, French power reigned supreme. Only Port Nelson, high up on the west coast of Hudson Bay, remained unsubdued, draining the furs of the prairie tribes to England away from Quebec. Iberville had captured it in the fall of 1694, at the cost of his brother Chateauguay's life; but when Iberville departed from Hudson Bay, English men-of-war had come out in 1696 and wrested back this most valuable of all the fur posts. It was now determined to drive the English forever from Hudson Bay. Le Moyne d'Iberville was chosen for the task.

April, 1697, Serigny Le Moyne was dispatched from France with five men-of-war to be placed under the command of Iberville at Placentia, Newfoundland, whence he was "to proceed {184} to Hudson Bay and to leave not a vestige of the English in the North." The frigates left Newfoundland July 8. Three weeks later they were crushing through the ice jam of Hudson Straits. Iberville commanded the Pelican with two hundred and fifty men. Bienville, a brother, was on the same ship. Serigny commanded the Palmier, and there were three other frigates, the Profound, the Violent, the Wasp. Ice locked round the fleet at the west end of Hudson Straits, and fog lay so thick there was nothing visible of any ship but the masthead. For eighteen days they lay, crunched and rammed and separated by the ice drive, till on August 25, early in the morning, the fog suddenly lifted. Iberville saw that Serigny's ship had been carried back {185} in the straits. The Wasp and Violent were not to be seen, but straight ahead, locked in the ice, stood the Profound, and beside the French vessel three English frigates, the Hampshire, the Deering, the Hudson's Bay, on their annual voyage to Nelson! A lane of water opened before Iberville. Like a bird the Pelican spread her wings to the wind and fled.



September 3 Iberville sighted Port Nelson, and for two days cruised the offing, scanning the sea for the rest of his fleet. Early on September 5 the sails of three vessels heaved and rose above the watery horizon. Never doubting these were his own ships, Iberville signaled. There was no answer. A sailor scrambled to the masthead and shouted down terrified warning. These were not the French ships! They were the English frigates bearing straight down on the single French vessel commanded by Iberville!

On one side was the enemy's fort, on the other the enemy's fleet coming over the waves before a clipping wind, all sails set. Of Iberville's crew forty men were ill of scurvy. Twenty-five had gone ashore to reconnoiter. He had left one hundred and fifty fighting men. Amid a rush of orders, ropes were stretched across decks for handhold, cannon were unplugged, and the batterymen below decks stripped themselves for the hot work ahead. The soldiers assembled on decks, sword in hand, and the Canadian bushrovers stood to the fore, ready to leap across the enemy's decks.

By nine in the morning the ships were abreast, and roaring cannonades from the English cut the decks of the Pelican to kindling wood and set the masts in flame. At the same instant one fell blast of musketry mowed down forty French; but Iberville's batterymen below decks had now ceased to pour a stream of fire into the English hulls. The odds were three to one, and for four hours the battle raged, the English shifting and sheering to lock in death grapple, Iberville's sharpshooters peppering the decks of the foe.

It had turned bitterly cold. The blood on the decks became ice, and each roll of the sea sent wounded and dead weltering {186} from rail to rail. Such holes had been torn in the hulls of both English and French ships that the gunners below decks were literally looking into each other's smoke-grimmed faces. Suddenly all hands paused. A frantic scream cleft the air. The vessels were careening in a tempestuous sea, for the great ship Hampshire had refused to answer to the wheel, had lurched, had sunk,—sunk swift as lead amid hiss of flames into the roaring sea! Not a soul of her two hundred and fifty men escaped. The frigate Hudson's Bay surrendered and the Deering fled. Iberville was victor.



But a storm now broke in hurricane gusts over the sea. Iberville steered for land, but waves drenched the wheel at every wash, and, driving before the storm, the Pelican floundered in the sands a few miles from Nelson. All lifeboats had been shot away. In such a sea the Canadian canoes were useless. The shattered masts were tied in four-sided racks. To these {187} Iberville had the wounded bound, and the crew plunged for the shore. Eighteen men perished going ashore in the darkness. On land were two feet of snow. No sooner did the French castaways build fires to warm their benumbed limbs than bullets whistled into camp. Governor Bayly of Port Nelson had sent out his sharpshooters. Luckily Iberville's other ships now joined him, and, mustering his forces, the dauntless French leader marched against the fort. Storm had permitted the French to land their cannon undetected. Trenches were cast up, and three times Serigny Le Moyne was sent to demand surrender.



"The French are desperate," he urged. "They must take the fort or perish of want, and if you continue the fight there will be no mercy given."

The Hudson's Bay people capitulated and were permitted to march out with arms, bag and baggage. An English ship carried the refugees home to the Thames.

The rest of Iberville's career is the story of colonizing the Mississippi. He was granted a vast seigniory on the Bay of {188} Chaleur, and in 1699 given a title. On his way from the Louisiana colony to France his ship had paused at Havana. Here Iberville contracted yellow fever and died while yet in the prime of his manhood, July 9, 1706.

After the victory on Hudson Bay the French were supreme in America and Frontenac supreme in New France. The old white-haired veteran of a hundred wars became the idol of Quebec. Friends and enemies, Jesuits and Recollets, paid tribute to his worth. In November of 1698 the Governor passed from this life in Castle St. Louis at the good old age of seventy-eight. He had demonstrated—demonstrated in action so that his enemies acknowledged the fact—that the sterner virtues of the military chieftain go farther towards the making of great nationhood than soft sentiments and religious emotionalism.



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CHAPTER X

FROM 1698 TO 1713

Petty regulations and blue laws—Massacre of Deerfield—Madame Freneuse, the painter lady—"Old Wooden Sword"—Subercase at Port Royal—Paul Mascarene's plight—Court dandies cause naval disaster

While Frontenac was striking terror into the heart of New England with his French Canadian bushrovers, the life of the people went on in the same grooves. Spite of a dozen raids on the Iroquois cantons, there was still danger from the warriors of the Mohawk, but the Iroquois braves had found a new stamping ground. Instead of attacking Canada they now crossed westward to war on the allies of the French, the tribes of the Illinois and the Mississippi; and with them traveled their liege friends, English traders from New York and Pennsylvania and Virginia.

The government of Canada continued to be a despotism, pure and simple. The Supreme Council, consisting of the governor, the intendant, the bishop, and at different times from three to twelve councilors, stood between the people and the King of France, transmitting the King's will to the people, the people's wants to the King; and the laws enacted by the council ranged all the way from criminal decrees to such petty regulations as a modern city wardman might pass. Laws enacted to meet local needs, but subject to the veto of an absent ruler, who knew absolutely nothing of local needs, exhibited all the absurdities to be expected. The King of France desires the Sovereign Council to discourage the people from using horses, which are supposed to cause laziness, as "it is needful the inhabitants keep up their snowshoe travel so necessary in their wars." "If in two years the numbers of horses do not decrease, they are to be killed for meat." Then comes a law that reflects the presence of the bishop at the governing board. Horses have become the pride of the country beaux, and the gay be-ribboned carrioles are the distraction of the village cure. "Men are forbidden to gallop their horses within a third of a mile from the church on {190} Sundays." New laws, regulations, arrests, are promulgated by the public crier, "crying up and down the highway to sound of trumpet and drum," chest puffed out with self-importance, gold braid enough on the red-coated regalia to overawe the simple habitants. Though the companies holding monopoly over trade yearly change, monopoly is still all-powerful in New France,—so all pervasive that in 1741, in order to prevent smuggling to defraud the Company of the Indies, it is enacted that "people using chintz-covered furniture" must upholster their chairs so that the stamp "La Cie des Indes" will be visible to the inspector. The matter of money is a great trouble to New France. Beaver is coin of the realm on the St. Lawrence, and though this beaver is paid for in French gold, the precious metal almost at once finds its way back to France for goods; so that the colony is without coin. Government cards are issued as coin, but as Europe will not accept card money, the result is that gold still flows from New France, and the colony is flooded with paper money worthless away from Quebec.

As of old, the people may still plead their own cases in lawsuits before the Sovereign Council, but now the privileges of caste and class and feudalism begin to be felt, and it is enacted that gentlemen may plead their own cases before the council only "when wearing their swords." Young men are urged to qualify as notaries. In addition to the title of "Sieur," baronies are created in Canada, foremost among them that of the Le Moynes of Montreal. The feudal seignior now has his coat of arms emblazoned on the church pew where he worships, on his coach door, and on the stone entrance to his mansion. The habitants are compelled to grind their wheat at his mill, to use his great bake oven, to patronize his tannery. The seigniorial mansion itself is taking on more of pomp. Cherry and mahogany furniture have replaced homemade, and the rough-cast walls are now covered with imported tapestries.

Not gently does the Sovereign Council deal with delinquents. In 1735 it is enacted of a man who suicided, "that the corpse be tied to a cart, dragged on a hurdle, head down, face to ground, {191} through the streets of the town, to be hung up by the feet, an object of derision, then cast into the river in default of a cesspool." Criminals who evade punishment by flight are to be hanged in effigy. Montreal citizens are ordered to have their chimneys cleaned every month and their houses provided with ladders. Also "the inhabitants of Montreal must not allow their pigs to run in the street," and they "are forbidden to throw snowballs at each other," and—a regulation which people who know Montreal winters will appreciate—"they are ordered to make paths through the snow before their houses,"—to all of which petty regulations did royalty subscribe sign manual.



The Treaty of Ryswick closed the war between France and England the year before Frontenac died, but it was not known in Canada till 1698. As far as Canada was concerned it was no peace, barely a truce. Each side was to remain in possession of what it held at the time of the treaty, which meant that France retained all Hudson Bay but one small fort. Though the English of Boston had captured Port Royal, they had left {192} no sign of possession but their flag flying over the tenantless barracks. The French returned from the woods, tore the flag down, and again took possession; so that, by the Treaty of Ryswick, Acadia too went back under French rule.

Indeed, matters were worse than before the treaty, for there could be no open war; but when English settlers spreading up from Maine met French traders wandering down from Acadia, there was the inevitable collision, and it was an easy trick for the rivals to stir up the Indians to raid and massacre and indiscriminate butchery. For Indian raids neither country would be responsible to the other. The story belongs to the history of the New England frontier rather than to the record of Canada. It is a part of Canada's past which few French writers tell and all Canadians would fain blot out, but which the government records prove beyond dispute. Indian warfare is not a thing of grandeur at its best, but when it degenerates into the braining of children, the bayoneting of women, the mutilation of old men, it is a horror without parallel; and the amazing thing is that the white men, who painted themselves as Indians and helped to wage this war, were so sure they were doing God's work that they used to kneel and pray before beginning the butchery. To understand it one has to go back to the Middle Ages in imagination. New France was violently Catholic, New England violently Protestant. Bigotry ever looks out through eyes of jaundiced hatred, and in destroying what they thought was a false faith, each side thought itself instrument of God. As for the French governors behind the scenes, who pulled the strings that let loose the helldogs of Indian war, they were but obeying the kingcraft of a royal master, who would use Indian warfare to add to his domain.

"The English have sent us presents to drive the Black Gowns away," declared the Iroquois in 1702 regarding the French Jesuits. "You did well," writes the King of France to his Viceroy in Quebec, "to urge the Abenakis of Acadia to raid the English of Boston." The Treaty of Ryswick became {193} known at Quebec towards the end of 1698. The border warfare of ravage and butchery had begun by 1701, the English giving presents to the Iroquois to attack the French of the Illinois, the French giving presents to the Abenakis to raid the New England borders. Quebec offers a reward of twenty crowns for the scalp of every white man brought from the English settlements. New England retaliates by offering 20 pounds for every Indian prisoner under ten years of age, 40 pounds for every scalp of full-grown Indian. Presently the young noblesse of New France are off to the woods, painted like Indians, leading crews of wild bushrovers on ambuscade and midnight raid and border foray.



"We must keep things stirring towards Boston," declared Vaudreuil, the French governor. Midwinter of 1704 Hertel de Rouville and his four brothers set out on snowshoes with fifty-one bushrovers and two hundred Indians for Massachusetts. Dressed in buckskin, with musket over shoulder and dagger in belt, the forest rangers course up the frozen river beds southward of the St. Lawrence, and on over the height of land towards the Hudson, two hundred and fifty miles through pine woods snow padded and silent as death. Two miles from Deerfield the marchers run short of food. It is the last day of February, and the sun goes down over rolling snowdrifts high as the slab stockades of the little frontier town whose hearth-fire smoke hangs low in the frosty air, curling and clouding and lighting to rainbow colors as the ambushed {194} raiders watch from their forest lairs. Snowshoes are laid aside, packs unstrapped, muskets uncased and primed, belts reefed tighter. Twilight gives place to starlight. Candles on the supper tables of the settlement send long gleams across the snow. Then the villagers hold their family prayers, all unconscious that out there in the woods are the bushrovers on bended knees, uttering prayers of another sort. Lights are put out. The village lies wrapped in sleep. Still Rouville's raiders lie waiting, shivering in the snow, till starlight fades to the gray darkness that precedes dawn. Then the bushrovers rise, and at moccasin pace, noiseless as tigers, skim across the snow, over the drifts, over the tops of the palisades, and have dropped into the town before a soul has awakened. There is no need to tell the rest. It was not war. It was butchery. Children were torn from their mother's breast to be brained on the hearthstone. Women were hacked to pieces. Houses were set on fire, and before the sun had risen thirty-eight persons had been slaughtered, and the French rovers were back on the forest trail, homeward bound with one hundred and six prisoners. Old and young, women of frail health and children barely able to toddle, were hurried along the trail at bayonet point. Those whose strength was unequal to the pace were summarily knocked on the head as they fagged, or failed to ford the ice streams. Twenty-four perished by the way. Of the one hundred and six prisoners scattered as captives among the Indians, not half were ever heard of again. The others were either bought from the Indians by Quebec people, whose pity was touched, or placed round in the convents to be converted to the Catholic faith. These were ultimately redeemed by the government of Massachusetts.

New England's fury over such a raid in time of peace knew no bounds. Yet how were the English to retaliate? To pursue an ambushed Indian along a forest trail was to follow a vanishing phantom.

From earliest times Boston had kept up trade with Port Royal, and of late years Port Royal had been infested with French pirates, who raided Boston shipping. Colonel Ben {195} Church of Long Island, a noted bushfighter, of gunpowder temper and form so stout that his men had always to hoist him over logs in their forest marches, went storming from New York to Boston with a plan to be revenged by raiding Acadia.

Rouville's bushrovers had burned Deerfield the first of March. By May, Church had sailed from Boston with six hundred men on two frigates and half a hundred whaleboats, on vengeance bent. First he stopped at Baron St. Castin's fort in Maine. St. Castin it was who led the Indians against the English of Maine. The baron was absent, but his daughter was captured, with all the servants, and the fort was burned to the ground. Then up Fundy Bay sailed Church, pausing at Passamaquoddy to knock four Frenchmen on the head; pausing at Port Royal to take eight men prisoners, kill cattle, ravage fields; pausing at Basin of Mines to capture forty habitants, burn the church, and cut the dikes, letting the sea in on the crops; pausing at Beaubassin, the head of Fundy Bay, in August, to set the yellow wheat fields in flames! Then he sailed back to Boston with French prisoners enough to insure an exchange for the English held at Quebec.

No sooner had English sails disappeared over the sea than the French came out of the woods. St. Castin rebuilt his fort in Maine. The local Governor, who had held on with his gates shut and cannon pointed while Church ravaged Port Royal village, now strengthened his walls. Acadia took a breath and went on as before,—a little world in itself, with the pirate ships slipping in and out, loaded to the water line with Boston booty; with the buccaneer Basset throwing his gold round like dust; with the brave soldier Bonaventure losing his head and losing his heart to the painted lady, Widow Freneuse, who came from nobody knew where and lived nobody knew how, and plied her mischief of winning the hearts of other women's husbands. "She must be sent away," thundered the priest from the pulpit, straight at the garrison officer whose heart she dangled as her trophy. "She must be sent away," thundered the King's mandate; but the King was in France, and Madame Freneuse {196} wound her charms the tighter round the hearts of the garrison officers, and bided her time, to the scandal of the parish and impotent rage of the priest. Was she vixen or fool, this fair snake woman with the beautiful face, for whose smile the officers risked death and disgrace? Was she spy or adventuress? She signed herself as "Widow Freneuse," and had applied to the King for a pension as having grown sons fighting in the Indian wars. She will come into this story again, snakelike and soft-spoken, and appealing for pity, and fair to look upon, but leaving a trail of blood and treachery and disgrace where she goes.

The fur trade of Port Royal at this time was controlled by a family ring of La Tours and Charnisays, descendants of the ancient foes; and they lived a life of reckless gayety, spiced with all the excitement of war and privateering and matrimonial intrigue. Such was life inside Port Royal. Outside was the quiet peace of a home-loving, home-staying peasantry. Few of the farmers could read or write. The houses were little square Norman cottages,—"wooden boxes" the commandant called them,—with the inevitable porch shaded by the fruit trees now grown into splendid orchards. By diking out the sea the peasants farmed the marsh lands and saved themselves the trouble of clearing the forests. Trade was carried on with Boston and the West Indies. No card money here! The farmers of Acadia demanded coin in gold from the privateers who called for cargo, and it is said that in time of such raids as Colonel Church's, great quantities of this gold were carried out by night and buried in huge pots,—as much as 5000 louis d'ors (pounds) in one pot,—to be dug up after the raiders had departed. Naturally, as raids grew frequent, men sometimes made the mistake of digging up other men's pots, and one officer lost his reputation over it. All his knowledge of the outside world, of politics, of religion, the Acadian farmer obtained from his parish priest; and the word of the cure was law.

Encouraged by Church's success and stung by the raids of French corsairs from Port Royal, New England set herself seriously to the task of conquering Acadia. Colonel March sailed {197} from Boston with one thousand men and twenty-three transports, and on June 6, 1707, came into Port Royal. Misfortunes began from the first. March's men were the rawest of recruits,—fishermen, farmers, carpenters, turned into soldiers. Unused to military discipline, they resisted command. A French guardhouse stood at the entrance to Port Royal Basin, and fifteen men at once fled to the fort with warning of the English invasion. Consequently, when Colonel March and Colonel Appleton attempted to land their men, they were serenaded by the shots of an ambushed foe. Also French soldiers deserted to the English camp with fabulous stories about the strength of the French under Subercase. These yarns ought to have discredited themselves, but they struck terror to the hearts of March's green fighters. Then came St. Castin from St. John River with bushrovers to help Subercase. To the amazement of the French the English hoisted sail and returned, on June 16, without having fired more than a round of shot. The truth is, March's carpenters and fishermen refused to fight, though reenforcements joined them halfway home and they made a second attempt on Port Royal in August. March returned to Boston heartbroken, for his name had become a byword to the mob, and he was greeted in the streets with shouts of "Old Wooden Sword!"

While Boston was attempting to wreak vengeance on Acadia for the raiders of Quebec, the bushrovers from the St. Lawrence continued to scourge the outlying settlements of New England. To post soldiers on the frontier was useless. Wherever there were guards the raiders simply passed on to some unprotected village, and to have kept soldiers along the line of the whole frontier would have required a standing army. Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, northern New York,—on the frontier of each reigned perpetual terror. And the fiendish work was a paying business to the pagan Indian; for the Christian white men paid well for all scalps, and ransom money could always be extorted for captives. Barely had the Boston raid on Port Royal failed, when Governor de Vaudreuil of Quebec {198} retaliated by turning his raiders loose on Haverhill. The English fleet failed at Port Royal in June. By dawn of Sunday, August 29, Hertel de Rouville had swooped on the English village of Haverhill with one hundred Canadian bushrovers and one hundred and fifty Indians. The story of one raid is the story of all; so this one need not be told. As the raiders were discovered at daylight, the people had a chance to defend themselves, and some of the villagers escaped, the family of one being hidden by a negro nurse under tubs in the cellar. Alarm had been carried to the surrounding settlements, and men rode hot haste in pursuit of the forty prisoners. Hertel de Rouville coolly sent back word, if the pursuers did not desist, all the prisoners would be scalped and left on the roadside. Some fifty English had fallen in the fight, but the French lost fifteen, among them young Jared of Vercheres, brother of the heroine.



The only peace for Massachusetts was the peace that would be a victory, and again New England girded herself to the task of capturing Acadia. It was open war now, for the crowns of England and France were at odds. The troops were commanded by General Francis Nicholson, an English officer who brought out four war ships and four hundred trained marines. There were, besides, thirty-six transports and three thousand provincial troops, clothed and outfitted by Queen Anne of England. Sunday, September 24, 1710, the fleet glides majestically into Port Royal Basin. That night the wind blew a hurricane and the transport Caesar went aground with a crash that smashed her timbers to kindling wood and sent twenty-four men to a watery grave; but General Nicholson gave the raw provincials no time for panic fright. Day dawn, Monday, drums rolling a martial tread, trumpets blowing, bugles setting the echoes flying, flags blowing to the wind in the morning sun, he commanded Colonel Vetch to lead the men ashore. Inside Port Royal's palisades Subercase, the French commander, had less than three hundred men, half that number absolutely naked of clothing, and all short of powder. There were not provisions to last a month; but, game to his soul's marrow, as all the warriors of {199} those early days, Subercase put up a brave fight, sending his bombs singing over the heads of the English troops in a vain attempt to baffle the landing. Nicholson retaliated by moving his bomb ship, light of draught, close to the French fort and pouring a shower of bombs through the roofs of the French fort. Spite of the wreck the night before, by four o'clock Monday afternoon all the English had landed in perfect order and high spirits. Slowly the English forces swung in a circle completely round the fort. Again and again, by daylight and dark, Subercase's naked soldiers rushed, screeching the war whoop, to ambush and stampede the English line; but Nicholson's regulars stood the fire like rocks, and the desperate sortie of the French ended in fifty of Subercase's soldiers deserting en masse to the English. By Friday Nicholson's guns were all mounted in place to bombard the little wooden fort. Subercase was desperate. Women and children from the settlement had crowded into the fort for protection, and were now crazed with fear by the bursting bombs, while the naked soldiers could be kept on the walls only at the sword point of their commanding officers. {200} For two hundred French to have held out longer against three thousand five hundred English would have been madness. Subercase made the presence of the women in Port Royal an excuse to send a messenger with flag of truce across to Nicholson, asking the English to take the women under their protection. Nicholson might well have asked what protection the French raiders had accorded the women of the New England frontiers; but he sent back polite answer that "as he was not warring on women and children" he would receive them in the English camp, meanwhile holding Subercase's messenger prisoner, as he had entered the English camp without warning, eyes unbound. Sunday, October 1, the English bombs again began singing overhead. Subercase sends word he will capitulate if given honorable terms. For a month the parleying continues. Then November 13 the terms are signed on both sides, the English promising to furnish ships to carry the garrison to some French port and pledging protection to the people of the settlement. November 14 the French officers and their ladies come across to the English camp and breakfast in pomp with the English commanders. Seventeen New England captives are hailed forth from Port Royal dungeons, "all in rags, without shirts, shoes, or stockings." On the 16th Nicholson draws his men up in two lines, one on each side of Port Royal gates, and the two hundred French soldiers marched out, saluting Nicholson as they passed to the transports. On the bridge, halfway out, French officers meet the English officers, doff helmets, and present the keys to the fort. For the last time Port Royal changes hands. Henceforth it is English, and in gratitude for the Queen's help Nicholson renamed the place as it is known to-day,—Annapolis. Among the raiders capitulating is the famous bushrover Baron St. Castin of Maine.

When Nicholson returned to Boston all New England went mad with delight. Thanksgiving services were held, joy bells rang day and night for a week, and bonfires blazed on village commons to the gleeful shoutings of rustic soldiers returned to the home settlements glorified heroes.

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At Annapolis (Port Royal) Paul Mascarene, a French Huguenot of Boston, has mounted guard with two hundred and fifty New England volunteers. Colonel Vetch is nominally the English governor; but Vetch is in Boston the most of the time, and it is on Mascarene the burden of governing falls. His duties are not light. Palisades have been broken down and must be repaired. Bombs have torn holes in the fort roofs, and all that winter the rain leaks in as through a sieve. The soldier volunteers grumble and mope and sicken. And these are not the least of Paul Mascarene's troubles. French priests minister to the Acadian farmers outside the fort, to the sinister Indians ever lying in ambush, to the French bushrovers under young St. Castin across Fundy Bay on St. John River. Not for love or money can Mascarene buy provisions from the Acadians. Not by threats can he compel them to help mend the breaches in the palisades. The young commandant was only twenty-seven years of age, but he must have guessed whence came the unspoken hostility. The first miserable winter wears slowly past and the winter of 1711 is setting in, with the English garrison even more poverty stricken than the year before, when there drifts into Annapolis Basin, in a birch canoe paddled by a New Brunswick Indian, a white woman with her little son. She has come, she says, from the north side of Fundy Bay, because the French {202} on St. John River are starving. Whether the story be true or false matters little. It was the Widow Freneuse, the snake woman of mischief-making witchery, who had woven her spells round the officers in the days of the French at Port Royal. True or false, her story, added to her smile, excited sympathy, and she was welcomed to the shelter of the fort. It had been almost impossible for the English to obtain trees to repair the walls of the fort, and seventy English soldiers were sent out secretly by night to paddle up the river in a whaleboat for timber. Who conveyed secret warning of this expedition to the French bushraiders outside? No doubt the fair spy, Widow Freneuse, could have told if she would; but five miles from Port Royal, where the river narrowed to a place ever since known as Bloody Brook, a crash of musket shots flared from the woods on each side. Painted Indians, and Frenchmen dressed as Indians, among whom was a son of Widow Freneuse, dashed out. Sixteen English were killed, nine wounded, the rest to a man captured, to be held for ransoms ranging from 10 pounds to 50 pounds. Oddly enough, the very night after the attack, before news of it had come to Annapolis, the Widow Freneuse disappears from the fort. Henceforth Paul Mascarene's men kept guard night and day, and slept in their boots. Ever like a sinister shadow of evil moved St. Castin and his raiders through the Acadian wildwoods.

Only one thing prevented the French recapturing Port Royal at this time. All troops were required to defend Quebec itself from invasion.

Nicholson's success at Port Royal spurred England and her American colonies to a more ambitious project,—to capture Quebec and subjugate Canada. This time Nicholson was to head twenty-five hundred provincial troops by way of Lake Champlain to the St. Lawrence, while a British army of twelve thousand, half soldiers, half marines, on fifteen frigates and forty-six transports, was to sail from Boston for Quebec. The navy was under command of Sir Hovender Walker; the army, of General Jack Hill, a court favorite of Queen Anne's, more noted for {203} his graces than his prowess. The whole expedition is one of the most disgraceful in the annals of English war. The fleet left Boston on July 30, 1711, Nicholson meanwhile waiting encamped on Lake Champlain. Early in August the immense fleet had rounded Sable Island and was off the shores of Anticosti. Though there was no good pilot on board, the two commanders nightly went to bed and slept the sleep of the just. Off Egg Islands, on the night of August 22, there was fog and a strong east wind. Walker evidently thought he was near the south shore, ignorant of the strong undertow of the tide here, which had carried his ships thirty miles off the course. The water was rolling in the lumpy masses of a choppy cross sea when a young captain of the regulars dashed breathlessly into Walker's stateroom and begged him "for the Lord's sake to come on deck, for there are reefs ahead and we shall all be lost!"

With a seaman's laugh at a landsman's fears, the Admiral donned dressing gown and slippers and shuffled up to the decks. A pale moon had broken through the ragged fog wrack, and through the white light they plainly saw mountainous breakers straight ahead. Walker shouted to let the anchor go and drive to the wind. Above the roar of breakers and trample of panic-stricken seamen over decks could be heard the minute guns of the other ships firing for help. Then pitch darkness fell with slant rains in a deluge. The storm abated, but all night long, above the boom of an angry sea, could be heard shrieks and shoutings for help; and by the light of the Admiral's ship could be seen the faces of the dead cast up by the moil of the sea. Before dawn eight transports had suffered shipwreck and one thousand lives were lost.

It was a night to put fear in the hearts of all but very brave men, and neither Walker nor Hill proved man enough to stand firm to the shock. Walker ascribed the loss to the storm and the storm to Providence; and when war council was held three days later Jack Hill, the court dandy, was only too glad of excuse to turn tail and flee to England without firing a gun. Poor old Nicholson, waiting with his provincials up on Lake Champlain, {204} goes into apoplexy with tempests of rage and chagrin, when he hears the news, stamping the ground, tearing off his wig, and shouting, "Rogues! rogues!" He burns his fort and disbands his men.

The Peace of Utrecht in 1713 for the time closed the war. France had been hopelessly defeated in Europe, and the terms were favorable to England.

All of Hudson Bay was to be restored to the English; but—note well—it was not specified where the boundaries were to be between Hudson Bay and Quebec. That boundary dispute came down as a heritage to modern days—thanks to the incompetency and ignorance of the statesmen who arranged the treaty.

Acadia was given to England, but Cape Breton was retained by the French, and—note well—it was not stated whether Acadia included New Brunswick and Maine, as the French formerly contended, or included only the peninsula south of the Bay of Fundy. That boundary dispute, too, came down.

Newfoundland was acknowledged as an English possession, but the French retained the islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon, with fishing privileges on the shores of Newfoundland. That concession, too, has come down to trouble modern days,—thanks to the same defenders of colonial interests.

The Iroquois were acknowledged to be subjects of England, but it was not stated whether that concession included the lands of the Ohio raided and subjugated by the Iroquois; and that vagueness was destined to cost both New France and New England some of its best blood.

It has been stated, and stated many times without dispute, that when England sacrificed the interests of her colonies in boundary settlements, she did so because she was in honor bound to observe the terms of treaties. One is constrained to ask whose ignorance was responsible for the terms of those treaties.

Looking back on the record so far,—both of France and England,—which has spent the more both of substance and of life for defense; the mother countries or the colonies?



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CHAPTER XI

FROM 1713 TO 1755

La Verendrye's adventuring to the West—Adventurers reach Lake Winnipeg—From Assiniboine to Missouri—Intrigue with Indians—The building of Louisburg—The siege of the great fort—Jokes bandied by fighters—Quarrels left unsettled—Beyond the Alleghenies—Washington and Jumonville—Braddock's march—Defeat of Braddock—Abbe Le Loutre—The Acadians—Deportation of French—At Lake Champlain—Dieskau defeated

What with clandestine raids and open wars, it might be thought that the little nation of New France had vent enough for the buoyant energy of its youth. While the population of the English colonies was nearing the million mark, New France had not 60,000 inhabitants by 1759. Yet what had the little nation, whose mainspring was at Quebec, accomplished? Look at the map! Her bushrovers had gone overland to Hudson Bay far north as Nelson. Before 1700 Duluth had forts at Kaministiquia (near modern Fort Williams) on Lake Superior. Radisson, Marquette, Jolliet, and La Salle had blazed a trail to the Mississippi from what is now Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico. By 1701 La Motte Cadillac had built what is now Detroit in order to stop the progress of the English traders up the lakes to Michilimackinac; and by 1727 the Company of the Sioux had forts far west as Lake Pepin. With Quebec as the hub of the wheel, draw spokes across the map of North America. Where do they reach? From Quebec to the Gulf of Mexico, to the Missouri, to the Upper Mississippi, to Lake Superior, to Hudson Bay. Who blazed the way through these far pathless wilds? Nameless wanderers dressed in rags and tatters,—outcasts of society, forest rovers lured by the Unknown as by a siren, soldiers of fortune, penniless, in debt, heartbroken, slandered, persecuted, driven by the demon of their own genius to earth's ends,—and to ruin!

Spite of clandestine raids and open wars, New France was now setting herself to stretch the lines of her discoveries farther westward.

It will be remembered it was at Three Rivers that the Indians of the Up Country paused on their way down the St. Lawrence. {206} From the days of Radisson in 1660 the passion for discovery had been in the very air of Three Rivers. In this little fort was born in 1686 Pierre Gaultier Varennes de La Verendrye, son of a French officer. From childhood the boy's ear must have been accustomed to the uncouth babblings of the half-naked Indians, whose canoes came swarming down the river soon as ice broke up in spring. One can guess that in his play the boy many a time simulated Indian voyageur, bushrover, coming home clad in furs, the envy of the villagers. At fourteen young Pierre had decided that he would be a great explorer, but destiny for the time ruled otherwise. At eighteen he was among the bushraiders of New England. Nineteen found him fighting the English in Newfoundland. Then came the honor coveted by all Canadian boys,—an appointment to the King's army in Europe. Young La Verendrye was among the French forces defeated by the great Marlborough; but the Peace of Utrecht sent him back to Canada, aged twenty-seven, to serve in the far northern fur post of Nepigon, eating his heart out with ambition.

It was here the dreams of his childhood emerged like a commanding destiny. Old Indian chief Ochagach drew maps on birch bark of a trail to the Western Sea. La Verendrye took canoe for Quebec, and, with heart beating to the passion of a secret ambition, laid the drawings before Governor Beauharnois. He came just in the nick of time. English traders were pressing westward. New France lent ready ear for schemes of wider empire. The court could grant no money for discoveries, but it gave La Verendrye permission for a voyage and monopoly in furs over the lands he might discover; but the lands must be found before there would be furs, and here began the mundane worries of La Verendrye's glory.

Montreal merchants outfitted him, but that meant debt; and his little party of fifty grizzled woodrovers set out with their ninety-foot birch canoes from Montreal on June 8, 1731. Three sons were in his party and a nephew, Jemmeraie, from the Sioux country of the west. Every foot westward had been consecrated by heroism to set the pulse of red-blooded men jumping. There {207} was the seigniory of La Chine, named in derision of La Salle's project to find a path to China. There was the Long Sault, where Dollard had fought the Iroquois. There were the pink granite islands of Georgian Bay, where the Jesuits had led their harried Hurons. There was Michilimackinac, with the brawl of its vice and brandy and lawless traders from the woods, where La Motte Cadillac ruled before going to found Detroit. Seventy-eight days from Montreal, there were the pictured rocks of Lake Superior, purple and silent and deep as ocean, which Radisson had coasted on his way to the Mississippi. Then La Verendrye came to Duluth's old stamping ground—Kaministiquia.



The home-bound boats were just leaving the fur posts for the St. Lawrence. Frosts had already stripped the trees of foliage, and winter would presently lock all avenues of retreat in six months' ice. La Verendrye's men began to doubt the wisdom of chasing a will-o'-the-wisp to an unknown Western Sea. The explorer sent half the party forward with his nephew Jemmeraie and his son Jean, while he himself remained at Kaministiquia with the mutineers to forage for provisions. {208} Winter found Jemmeraie's men on the Minnesota side of Rainy Lake, where they built Fort Pierre and drove a rich trade in furs with the encamped Crees. In summer of 1732 came La Verendrye, his men in gayest apparel marching before the awe-struck Crees with bugle blowing and flags flying. Then white men and Crees advanced in canoes to the Lake of the Woods, coasting from island to island through the shadowy defiles of the sylvan rocks along the Minnesota shore to the northwest angle. Here a second winter witnessed the building of a second post, Fort St. Charles, with four rows of fifteen-foot palisades and thatched-roofed log cabins. The Western Sea seemed far as ever,—like the rainbow of the child, ever fleeing as pursued,—and La Verendrye's merchant partners were beginning to curse him for a rainbow chaser. He had been away three years, and there were no profits. Suspicious that he might be defrauding them by private trade or sacrificing their interests to his own ambitions, they failed to send forward provisions for this year. La Verendrye was in debt to his men for three years' wages, in debt to his partners for three years' provisions. To fail now he dared not. Go forward he could not, so he hurried down to Montreal, where he prevailed on the merchants to continue supplies by the simple argument that, if they stopped now, there would be total loss.

Young Jean La Verendrye and Jemmeraie have meanwhile descended Winnipeg River's white fret of waterfalls to Winnipeg Lake, where they build Fort Maurepas, near modern Alexander,—and wait. Fishing failed. The hunt failed. The winter of 1735-1736 proved of such terrible severity that famine stalked through the western woods. La Verendrye's three forts were reduced to diet of skins, moccasin soup, and dog meat. In desperation Jemmeraie set out with a few voyageurs to meet the returning commander, but privation had undermined his strength. He died on the way and was buried in his hunter's blanket beside an unknown stream between Lake Winnipeg and the Lake of the Woods. Accompanied by the priest Aulneau, young Jean de La Verendrye decided to rush canoes down from the Lake of the Woods to Michilimackinac for food and powder. A furious pace was {209} to be kept all the way to Lake Superior. The voyageurs had risen early one morning in June, and after paddling some miles through the mist had landed to breakfast when a band of marauding Sioux fell on them with a shout. The priest Aulneau fell pierced in the head by a stone-pointed arrow. Young Jean La Verendrye was literally hacked to pieces. Not a man of the seventeen French escaped, and Massacre Island became a place of ill omen to the French from that day. At last came the belated supplies, and by February of 1737 La Verendrye had moved his main forces west to Lake Winnipeg. This was no Western Sea, though the wind whipped the lake like a tide,—which explained the Indian legend of an inland ocean. Though it was no Western Sea, it was a new empire for France. The bourne of the Unknown still fled like the rainbow, and La Verendrye still pursued.



Down to Quebec for more supplies with tales of a vast Beyond Land! Back to Lake Winnipeg by September of 1738 with canoes gliding up the muddy current of Red River for the Unknown Land of the Assiniboines; past Nettley Creek, then known as Massacre Creek or Murderers' River, from the Sioux having slain the encamped wives and children of the Cree who had gone to Hudson Bay with their furs; between the wooded banks of what are now East and West Selkirk, flat to left, high to right; tracking up the Rapids of St. Andrews, thick oak woods to east, {210} rippling prairie russet in the autumn rolling to the west,—La Verendrye and his voyageurs came to the forks of Red River and the Assiniboine, or what is now known as the city of Winnipeg. Where the two rivers met on the flats to the west were the high scaffoldings of an ancient Cree graveyard, bizarre and eerie and ghostlike between the voyageurs and the setting sun. On the high river bank of what is now known as Assiniboine Avenue gleamed the white skin of ten Cree tepees, where two war chiefs waited to meet La Verendrye. Drawing up their canoes near where the bridge now spans between St. Boniface and Winnipeg, the voyageurs came ashore.

It was a fair scene that greeted them, such a scene as any westerner may witness to-day of a warm September night when the sun hangs low like a blood-red shield, and the evening breeze touches the rustling grasses of the prairie beyond the city to the waves of an ocean. It was not the Western Sea, but it was a Sea of Prairie. It was a New World, unbounded by hill or forest, spacious as the very airs of heaven, fenced only by the blue dip of a shimmering horizon. It was a world, though La Verendrye knew it not, five times larger than New France, half as big as all Europe. He had discovered the Canadian Northwest.

One can guess how the tired wanderers at rest beneath the uptilted canoes that night wondered whither their quest would lead them over the fire-dyed horizon where the sun was sinking as over a sea. The Cree chiefs told them of other lands and other peoples to the south, "who trade with a people who dwelt on the great waters beyond the mountains of the setting sun,"—the Spaniards.

Leaving men to knock up a trading post near the suburb now known as Fort Rouge, La Verendrye, on September 26, steers his canoes up the shallow Assiniboine far as what is now known as Portage La Prairie, where a trail leads overland to the Saskatchewan and so down to the English traders of Hudson Bay. But this is not the trail to the Western Sea; La Verendrye's quest is set towards those people "who live on the great waters to the south."

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Fort de La Reine is built at the Portage of the Prairie, and October 18, to beat of drum, with flag flying, La Verendrye marches forth with fifty-two men towards Souris River for the land of the Mandanes on the Missouri. December 3 he is welcomed to the Mandane villages; but here is no Western Sea, only the broad current of the Missouri rolling turbulent and muddy southward towards the Mississippi; but the Mandanes tell of a people to the far west, "who live on the great waters bitter for drinking, who dress in armor and dwell in stone houses." These must be the Spaniards. La Verendrye's quest has become a receding phantom. Leaving men to learn the Missouri dialects, La Verendrye marched in the teeth of mid-winter storms back to the Portage of the Prairie on the Assiniboine. Of that march, space forbids to tell. A blizzard raged, driving the fine snows into eyes and skin like hot salt. When the marchers camped at night they had to bury themselves in snow to keep from freezing. Drifts covered all landmarks. The men lost their bearings, doubled back on their own tracks, were frost-bitten, buffeted by the storm, and short of food. Christmas {212} was passed in the camps of wandering Assiniboines, and February 10, 1739, the fifty men staggered, weak and starving, back to the Portage of the Prairie.

The wanderings of La Verendrye and his sons for the next few years led southwestward far as the Rockies in the region of Montana, northwestward far as the Bow River branch of the Saskatchewan. Meanwhile, all La Verendrye's property had been seized by his creditors. Jealous rivals were clamoring for possession of his fur posts. The King had conferred on him the Order of the Cross of St. Louis, but eighteen years of exposure and worry had broken the explorer's health. On the eve of setting out again for the west he died suddenly on the 6th of December, 1749, at Montreal.

Look again at the map! The spokes of the wheel running out from Quebec extend to the Gulf of Mexico on the south, to the Rockies on the west, to Hudson Bay on the north. And the population of New France does not yet number 60,000 people. Is it any wonder French Canadians look back on these days as the Golden Age?

And while the bushrovers of Canada are pushing their way through the wilderness westward, there come slashing, tramping, swearing, stamping through the mountainous wilds of West and East Siberia the Cossack soldiers of Peter the Great, led by the Dane, Vitus Bering, bound on discovery to the west coast of America. La Verendrye's men have crossed only half a continent. Bering's Russians cross the width of two continents, seven thousand miles, then launch their crazily planked ships over unknown northern seas for America. From 1729 to August of 1742 toil the Russian sea voyagers. Their story is not part of Canada's history. Suffice to say, December of 1741 finds the Russian crews cast away on two desert islands of Bering Sea west of Alaska, now known as the Commander Islands. Half the crew of seventy-seven perish of starvation and scurvy. Bering himself lies dying in a sandpit, with the earth spread over him for warmth. Outside the sand holes, {213} where the Russians crouch, scream hurricane gales and white billows and myriad sea birds. The ships have been wrecked. The Russians are on an unknown island. Day dawn, December 8, lying half buried in the sand, Bering breathes his last. On rafts made of wreckage the remnant of his crew find way back to Asia, but they have discovered a trail across the sea to a new land. Fur hunters are moving from the east, westward. Fur hunters are moving from the west, eastward. These two tides will meet and clash at a later era.

The Treaty of Utrecht had stopped open war, but that did not prevent the bushrovers from raiding the border lands of Maine, of Massachusetts, of New York. The story of one raid is the story of all, and several have already been related. Now comes a half century of petty war that raged on the border lands from Saratoga and Northfield to Maine and New Brunswick. The story of these "little wars," as the French called them, belongs more to the history of the United States than Canada.

Nor did the Peace of Utrecht stop the double dealing and intrigue by which European rulers sought to use bigoted missionaries and ignorant Indians as pawns in the game of statecraft.

"Sentiments of opposition to the English in Acadia must be secretly fostered," commanded the King of France in 1715, two years after Acadia had been deeded over to England. "The King is pleased with the efforts of Pere Rasle to induce the Indians not to allow the English to settle on their lands," runs the royal dispatch of 1721 regarding the border massacres of Maine. "Advise the missionaries in Acadia to do nothing that may serve as a pretext for sending them out of the country, but have them induce the Indians to organize enterprises against the English," command the royal instructions of 1744. "The Indians," writes the Canadian Governor, "can be depended on to bring in the scalps of the English as long as we furnish ammunition. This is the opinion of the missionary, M. Le Loutre." Again, from the Governor of New France: "If the settlers of {214} Acadia hesitate to rise against their English masters, we can employ threats of the Indians and force. It is inconceivable that the English would try to remove these people. Letters from M. Le Loutre report that his Indians have intercepted dispatches of the English officers. M. Le Loutre will keep us informed of everything in Acadia. We have furnished him with secret signals to our ships, which will tell us of every movement on the part of the enemy."

Of all the hotbeds of intrigue, Acadia, from its position, had become the worst. Here was a population of French farmers, which in half a century had increased to 12,000, held in subjection by an English garrison at Annapolis of less than two hundred soldiers so destitute they had neither shoes nor stockings, coats nor bedding. The French were guaranteed in the Treaty of Utrecht the freedom and privileges of their religion by the English; but in matters temporal as well as spiritual they were absolutely subject to priests, acting as spies for the Quebec plotters.

France, as has been told, retained Cape Breton (Isle Royal) and Prince Edward Island (Isle St. Jean), and the Treaty of Utrecht had hardly been signed before plans were drawn on a magnificent scale for a French fort on Cape Breton to effect a threefold purpose,—to command the sea towards Boston, to regain Acadia, to protect the approach to the River St. Lawrence.

The Island of Cape Breton is like a hand with its fingers stuck out in the sea. The very tip of a long promontory commanding one of the southern arms of the sea was chosen for the fort that was to be the strongest in all America. On three sides were the sea, with outlying islands suitable for powerful batteries and a harbor entrance that was both narrow and deep. To the rear was impassable muskeg—quaking moss above water-soaked bog. Two weaknesses only had the fort. There were hills to right and left from which an enemy might pour destruction inside the walls, but the royal engineers of France depended on the outlying island batteries preventing any enemy gaining possession of these hills. By 1720 walls thirty-six feet thick had encircled {215} an area of over one hundred acres. Outside the rear wall had been excavated a ditch forty feet deep and eighty wide. Bristling from the six bastions of the walls were more than one hundred and eighty heavy cannon. Besides the two batteries commanding the entrance to the harbor was an outer Royal Battery of forty cannon directly across the water from the fort, on the next finger of the island. Twenty years was the fort in building, costing what in those days was regarded as an enormous sum of money,—equal to $10,000,000. Such was Louisburg, impregnable as far as human foresight could judge,—the refuge of corsairs that preyed on Boston commerce; the haven of the schemers who intrigued to wean away the Acadians from English rule, the guardian sentinel of all approach to the St. Lawrence.

"It would be well," wrote the King the very next year after the treaty was signed, "to attract the Acadians to Cape Breton, but act with caution." And now twenty years had passed. Some Acadians had gone to Cape Breton and others to Prince Edward Island; but statecraft judged the simple Acadian farmer would be more useful where he was,—on the spot in Acadia, ready to rebel when open war would give the French of Louisburg a chance to invade.

Late in 1744 Europe breaks into that flame of war known as the Austrian Succession. Before either Quebec or Boston knows of open war, Louisburg has word of it and sends her rangers burning fishing towns and battering at the rotten palisades of Annapolis (Port Royal). Port Royal is commanded by that same Paul Mascarene of former wars, grown old in service. The French bid him save himself by surrender before their fleet comes. Though Mascarene has less than a hundred men, the weather is in his favor. It is September. Winter will drive the invaders home, so he sends back word that he will bide his time till the hostile fleet comes. As for the Abbe Le Loutre, let the treacherous priest beware how he brings his murderous Indians within range of the fort guns! Meanwhile the Acadian habitants are threatened with death if they do not rise to aid the {216} French, but they too bide their time, for if they rebel and fail, that too means death; and "the Neutrals" refuse to stir till the invaders, from lack of provisions, are forced to decamp, and the Abbe Le Loutre, with his black hat drawn down over his eyes, vanishes into forest with his crew of painted warriors.

News of the war and of the ravaging of Acadian fishing towns set Massachusetts in flame. To Boston, above all New England towns, was Louisburg a constant danger. The thing seemed absolute stark madness,—the thoughtless daring of foolhardy enthusiasts,—but it is ever enthusiasm which accomplishes the impossible; and April 30, 1745, after only seven weeks of preparation, an English fleet of sixty-eight ships—some accounts say ninety, including the whalers and transports gathered along the coast towns—sails into Gabarus Bay, behind Louisburg, where the waters have barely cleared of ice. William Pepperrell, a merchant, commands the four thousand raw levies of provincial troops, the most of whom have never stepped to martial music before in their lives. Admiral Warren has come up from West India waters with his men-of-war to command the united fleets. Early Monday morning, against a shore wind, the boats are tacking to land, when the alarm bells begin ringing and ringing at Louisburg and a force of one hundred and fifty men dashes downshore for Flat Cove to prevent the landing. Pepperrell out-tricks the enemy by leaving only a few boats to make a feint of landing at the Cove, while he swings his main fleet inshore round a bend in the coast a mile away. Here, with a prodigious rattling of lowered sails and anchor chains, the crews plunge over the rolling waves, pontooning a bridge of small boats ashore. By nightfall the most of the English have landed, and spies report the harbor of Louisburg alive with torches where the French are sinking ships to obstruct the entrance and setting fire to fishing stages that might interfere with cannon aim. The next night, May 1, Vaughan's New Hampshire boys—raw farmers, shambling in their gait, singing as they march—swing through the woods along the marsh {217} behind the fort, and take up a position on a hill to the far side of Louisburg, creating an enormous bonfire with the French tar and ships' tackling stored here. The result of this harmless maneuver was simply astounding. It will be recalled that Louisburg had an outer battery of forty cannon on this side. The French soldiers holding this battery mistook the bonfire for the {218} English attacking forces, and under cover of darkness abandoned the position,—battery, guns, powder and all,—which the English promptly seized. This was the Royal Battery, which commanded the harbor and could shell into the very heart of the fort.



The next thing for the English was to get their heavy guns ashore through a rolling surf of ice-cold water. For two weeks the men stood by turns to their necks in the surf, steadying the pontoon gangway as the great cannon were trundled ashore; and this was the least of their difficulties. The question was how to get their cannon across the marsh behind the fort to the hill on the far side. The cannon would sink from their own weight in such a bog, and either horses or oxen would flounder to death in a few minutes. Again, the fool-hardy enthusiasm of the raw levies overcame the difficulty. They built large stone boats, raft-shaped, such as are used on farms to haul stones over ground too rough for wagons. Hitching to these, teams of two hundred men stripped to midwaist, they laboriously hauled the cannon across the quaking moss to the hills commanding the rear of the fort, bombs and balls whizzing overhead all the while, fired from the fort bastions. It was cold, damp spring weather. The men who were not soaked to their necks in surf and bog were doing picket duty alongshore, sleeping in their boots. Consequently, in three weeks, half Pepperrell's force became deadly ill. At this time, within two days, occurred both a cheering success and a disheartening rebuff. A French man-of-war with seventy cannon and six hundred men was seen entering Louisburg. As if in panic fright, one of the small English ships fled. The French ship pursued. In a trice she was surrounded by the English fleet and captured. The flight of the little vessel had been a trick. A few days later four hundred English in whaleboats attempted the mad project of attacking the Island Battery at the harbor entrance. The boats set out about midnight with muffled oars, but a wind rose, setting a tremendous surf lashing the rocks, and yet the invaders might have succeeded but for a piece of rashness. A hundred men had gained the shore when, with the thoughtlessness of schoolboys, they uttered a jubilant yell. {219} Instantly, porthole, platform, gallery, belched death through the darkness. The story is told that a raw New England lad was in the act of climbing the French flagstaff to hang out his own red coat as English flag when a Swiss guard hacked him to pieces. The boats not yet ashore were sunk by the blaze of cannon. A few escaped back in the darkness, but by daylight over one hundred English had been captured. Cannon, mortars, and musketoons were mounted to command the fort inside the walls, and a continuous rain of fire began from the hills. In vain Duchambon, the French commander, waited for reenforcements from Canada. Convent, hospital, barracks, all the houses of the town, were peppered by bombs till there was not a roof intact in the place. The soldiers, of whom there were barely two thousand, were ready to mutiny. The citizens besought Duchambon to surrender. Provisions ran out. Looking down from the tops of the walls, cracking jokes with the English across the ditch, the French soldiers counted more than a thousand scaling ladders ready for hand-to-hand assault, and a host of barrels filled with mud behind which the English sharpshooters crouched. It had just been arranged between Warren and Pepperrell that the {220} former should attack by sea while the latter assaulted by land, when on June 16 the French capitulated. How the New England enthusiasts ran rampant through the abandoned French fort need not be told. How Parson Moody, famous for his long prayers, hewed down images in the Catholic chapel till he was breathless and then came to the officers' state dinner so exhausted that when asked to pronounce blessing he could only mutter, "Good Lord, we have so much to thank Thee for, time is too short; we must leave it to eternity. Amen"; how the New Englanders, unused to French wines, drank themselves torpid on the stores of the fort cellar; how the French the next year made superhuman effort to regain Louisburg, only to have a magnificent fleet of one hundred and fifty sail wrecked on Sable Island, Duke d'Anville, the commander, dying of heartbreak on his ship anchored near Halifax, his successor killing himself with his own sword,—cannot be told here. Louisburg was the prize of the war, and England threw the prize away by giving it back to France in the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748. The English government paid back the colonies for their outlay, but of all the rich French pirate ships loaded with booty, captured at Louisburg by leaving the French flag flying, not a penny's worth went to the provincial troops. Warren's seamen received all the loot.



Like all preceding treaties, the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle left unsettled the boundaries between New France and New England. In Acadia, in New York, on the Ohio, collisions were bound to come.

In Acadia the English send their officers to the Isthmus of Chignecto to establish a fort near the bounds of what are now Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. The priestly spy, Louis Joseph Le Loutre, leads his wild Micmac savages through the farm settlement round the English fort, setting fire to houses putting a torch even to the church, and so compelling the habitants of the boundary to come over to the French and take sides. The treaty has restored Louisburg to the French, but the very {221} next year England sends out Edward Cornwallis with two thousand settlers to establish the English fort now known as Halifax. By 1752 there are four thousand people at the new fort, though the Indian raiders miss no occasion to shoot down wayfarers and farmers; and the French Governor at Quebec continues his bribes—as much as eight hundred dollars a year to a man—to stir up hostility to the English and prevent the Acadian farmers taking the oath of fidelity to England. So much for the peace treaty in Acadia. It was not peace; it was farce.



In New York state matters were worse. The Iroquois had been acknowledged allies of the English, and before 1730 the English fort at Oswego had been built at the southeast corner of Lake Ontario to catch the fur trade of the northern tribes coming down the lakes to New France, and to hold the Iroquois' friendship. Also, as French traders pass up the lake to Fort Frontenac (Kingston) and Niagara with their national flag flying from the prow of canoe and flatboat, chance bullets from the {222} English fort ricochet across the advancing prows, and soldiers on the galleries inside Fort Oswego take bets on whether they can hit the French flag. Prompt as a gamester, New France checkmates this move. Peter Schuyler has been settling English farmers round Lake Champlain. At Crown Point, long known as Scalp Point, where the lake narrows and portage runs across to Lake George and the Mohawk land, the French in 1731 erect a strong fort. As for the English traders at Fort Oswego catching the tribes from the north, New France counterchecks that by sending Portneuf in April of 1749, only a year after the peace, to the Toronto portage where the Indians come from the Upper Lakes by way of Lake Simcoe. What is now known as Toronto is named Rouille, after a French minister; and as if this were not checkmate enough to the English advancing westward, the Sulpician priest from Montreal, Abbe Picquet, zealously builds a fort straight north of Oswego, on the south side of the St. Lawrence, to keep the Iroquois loyal to France. Picquet calls his fort "Presentation." His enemies call it "Picquet's Folly." It is known to-day as Ogdensburg. Look at the map. France's frontier line is guarded by forts that stand like sentinels at the gateways of all waters leading to the interior,—Ogdensburg, Kingston, Toronto, Niagara, Detroit, Michilimackinac, and La Verendrye's string of forts far west as the Rockies. New York's frontier line is guarded by one fort only,—Oswego. Here too, as in Acadia, the peace is a farce.



But it was in the valley of the Ohio where the greatest struggle over boundaries took place. One year after the peace, Celoron de Bienville is sent in July, 1749, to take possession of the {223} Ohio for France. France claims right to this region by virtue of La Salle's explorations sixty years previously, and of all those French bushrangers who have roved the wilds from the Great Lakes to Louisiana. Small token did France take of La Salle's exploits while he lived, but great store do her statesmen set by his voyages now that he has been sixty years dead. "But pause!" commands the English Governor of Virginia. "Since time immemorial have our traders wandered over the Great Smoky Mountains, over the Cumberlands, over the Alleghenies, down the Tennessee and the Kanawha and the Monongahela and the Ohio to the Mississippi." As a matter of fact, one Major General Wood had in 1670 and 1674 sent his men overland, if not so far as the Mississippi, then certainly as far as the Ohio and the valley of the Mississippi. But Wood was a private adventurer. For years his exploit had been forgotten. No record of it remained but an account written by his men, Batts and Hallam. The French declared the record was a myth, and it has, in fact, been so regarded by the most of historians. Yet, curiously enough, ranging through some old family papers of the Hudson's Bay Company in the Public Records, London, I found with Wood's own signature his record of the trip across the mountains to the Indians of the Ohio and the Mississippi. It is probable that the {224} English cared quite as much for claims founded on La Salle's voyage as the French cared for claims founded on the horseback trip of Major General Wood's men. The fact remained: here were the English traders from Virginia pressing northward by way of the Ohio; here were the French adventurers pressing south by way of the Ohio. As in Acadia and New York, peace or no peace, a clash was inevitable.



Duquesne has come out governor of Canada, and by 1753 has dispatched a thousand men into the Ohio valley, who blaze a trail through the wilderness and string a line of forts from Presqu' Isle (Erie) on Lake Erie southward to Fort Duquesne at the junction of the Allegheny and Monongahela, where Pittsburg stands to-day.

One December night at Fort Le Boeuf, on the trail to the Ohio, the French commandant was surprised to see a slim youth of twenty years ride out of the rain-drenched, leafless woods, followed by four or five whites and Indians with a string of belled pack-horses. The young gentleman introduces himself with great formality, though he must use an interpreter, for he does not speak French. He is Major George Washington, sent by Governor Dinwiddie of Virginia to know why the French have been seizing the fur posts of English traders in this region. The French commander, Saint Pierre, receives the young Virginian courteously, plies master and men with such lavish hospitality that Washington has much trouble to keep his drunk Indians from deserting, and dismisses his visitor with the smooth but bootless response that as France and England are at peace he cannot answer Governor Dinwiddie's message till he has heard from the Governor of Canada, Marquis Duquesne. Not much satisfaction for emissaries who had forded ice-rafted rivers and had tramped the drifted forests for three hundred miles.



By January of 1754 Washington is back in Virginia. By May he is on the trail again, blazing a path through the wilderness down the Monongahela towards the French fort; for what purpose one may guess, though these were times of piping peace. Come {225} an old Indian chief and an English bushwhacker one morning with word that fifty French raiders are on the trail ten miles away; for what purpose one may guess, spite of peace. Instantly Washington sends half a hundred Virginia frontiersmen out scouting. They find no trace of raiders, but the old chief picks up the trail of the ambushed French. Here they had broken branches going through the woods; there a moccasin track punctures the spongy mold; here leaves have been scattered to hide camp ashes. At midnight, with the rain slashing through the forest black as pitch, Washington sets out with forty men, following his Indian guide. Through the dark they feel rather than follow the trail, and it is a slow but an easy trick to those acquainted with wildwood travel. Leave the path by as much as a foot length and the foliage lashes you back, or the windfall trips you up, or the punky path becomes punctured beneath moccasin tread. By day dawn, misty and gray in the May woods, the English are at the Indian camp and march forward escorted by the redskins, single file, silent as ghosts, alert as tigers. Raindrip swashes on the buckskin coats. Muskets are loaded and carefully cased from the wet. The old chief stops suddenly . . . and points! There lie the French in a rock ravine sheltered by the woods like a cave. The next instant the French had leaped up with a whoop. Washington shouted "Fire!" When the smoke of the musket crash cleared, ten French lay dead, among them their officer, Jumonville; {226} and twenty-two others surrendered. No need to dispute whether Washington was justified in firing on thirty bush rovers in time of peace! The bushrovers had already seized English forts and were even now scouring the country for English traders. For a week their scouts had followed Washington as spies.

Expecting instant retaliation from Fort Duquesne, Washington retreated swiftly to his camping place at Great Meadows and cast up a log barricade known as Fort Necessity. A few days later comes a company of regular troops. By July 1 he has some four hundred men, but at Fort Duquesne are fourteen hundred French. The French wait only for orders from Quebec, then march nine hundred bushrovers against Washington. July 3, towards midday, they burst from the woods whooping and yelling. Washington chose to meet them on the open ground, but the French were pouring a cross fire over the meadow; and to compel them to attack in the open, Washington drew his men behind the barricade. By nightfall the Virginians were out of powder. Twelve had been killed and forty-three were wounded. Before midnight the French beat a parley. All they desired was that the English evacuate the fort. To fight longer would have risked the extermination of Washington's troops. Terms of honorable surrender were granted, and the next day—the day which Washington was to make immortal, July 4—the English retreated from Fort Necessity. Such was the peace in the Ohio valley.

Though the peace is still continued, England dispatches in 1755 two regiments of the line under Major General Braddock to protect Virginia, along with a fleet of twelve men-of-war under Admiral Boscawen. France keeps up the farce by sending out Baron Dieskau with three thousand soldiers and Admiral La Motte with eighteen ships. Coasting off Newfoundland, the English encounter three of the French ships that have gone astray in the fog. "Is it peace or war?" shout the French across decks. "Peace," answers a voice from the English deck; and instantaneously a hurricane cannonade rakes the decks of the French, killing eighty. Two of the French ships surrendered. The other escaped through the fog. Such was the peace!

{227} So began the famous Seven Years' War; and Major General Braddock, in session with the colonial governors, plans the campaign that is to crush New France's pretensions south of the Great Lakes. Acadia, Lake Champlain, the Ohio,—these are to be the theaters of the contest.



Braddock himself, accompanied by Washington, marches with twenty-two hundred men over the Alleghenies along the old trail of the Monongahela against Fort Duquesne. Of Braddock, the least said the better. A gambler, full of arrogant contempt towards all people and things that were not British, hail-fellow-well-met to his boon companions, heartless towards all outside the pale of his own pride, a blustering bully yet dogged, and withal a gentleman after the standard of the age, he was neither better nor worse than the times in which he lived. Of Braddock's men, fifteen hundred were British regulars, the rest Virginian bushfighters; and the redcoat troops held such contempt towards the buckskin frontiersmen that friction arose from the first about the relative rank of regulars and provincials. From the time they set out, the troops had been retarded by countless delays. There was trouble buying up supplies of beef cattle {228} among the frontiersmen. Scouts scoured the country for horses and wagons to haul the great guns and heavy artillery. Braddock's high mightiness would take no advice from colonials about single-file march on a bush trail and swift raids to elude ambushed foes. Everything proceeded slowly, ponderously, with the system and routine of an English guardroom. Scouts to the fore and on both flanks, three hundred bushwhackers went ahead widening the bridle path to a twelve-foot road for the wagons; and along this road moved the troops, five and six abreast, the red coats agleam through the forest foliage, drums rolling, flags flying, steps keeping time as if on parade, Braddock and his officers mounted on spirited horses, the heavy artillery and supply wagons lagging far behind in a winding line.



What happened has been told times without number in story and history. It was what the despised colonials feared and any bushranger could have predicted. July 9, in stifling heat, the marchers had come to a loop in the Monongahela River. Braddock thought to avoid the loop by fording twice. He was now within eight miles of Fort Duquesne—the modern Pittsburg. Though Indian raiders had scalped some wanderers from the trail and insolent messages had been occasionally found scrawled in French on birch trees, not a Frenchman had been seen on the march. The advance guard had crossed the second ford about midday when the road makers at a little opening beyond the river saw a white man clothed in buckskin, but wearing an officer's badge, dash out of the woods to the fore, wave his hat, . . . and disappear. A moment later the well-known war whoop of the French bushrovers tore the air to tatters; and bullets rained from ambushed foes in a sheet of fire. In vain the English drums rolled . . . and rolled . . . and soldiers shouted, "The King! God save the King!" One officer tried to rally his men to rush the woods, but they were shot down by a torrent of bullets from an unseen foe. The Virginian bushfighters alone knew how to meet such an emergency. Jumping from tree to tree for shelter like Indians dancing sideways to avoid the enemy's aim, they had broken from rank to fight in bushman fashion when Braddock {229} came galloping furiously from the rear and ordered them back in line. What use was military rank with an invisible foe? As well shoot air as an unseen Indian! Again the Virginians broke rank, and the regulars, huddled together like cattle in the shambles, fired blindly and succeeded only in hitting their own provincial troops. Braddock stormed and swore and rode like a fury incarnate, roaring orders which no one could hear, much less obey. Five horses were shot under him and the dauntless commander had mounted a fresh one when the big guns came plunging forward; but the artillery on which Braddock had pinned his faith only plowed pits in the forest mold. Of eighty officers, sixty had fallen and a like proportion of men. Braddock ordered a retreat. The march became a panic, the panic frenzied terror, the men who had stood so stolidly under withering fire now dashing in headlong flight from the second to the first ford and back over the trail, breathless as if pursued by demons! Artillery, cattle, supplies, dispatch boxes,—all were abandoned. Washington's clothes had been riddled by bullets, but he had escaped injury. Braddock reeled from his horse mortally wounded, to be carried {230} back on a litter to that scene of Washington's surrender the year before. Four days later the English general died there. Of the English troops, more than a thousand lay dead, blistering in the July sun, maimed and scalped by the Indians. Braddock was buried in his soldier's coat beside the trail, all signs of the grave effaced to prevent vandalism.



Of all the losses the most serious were the dispatch boxes; for they contained the English plans of campaign from Acadia to Niagara, and were carried back to Fort Duquesne, where they put the French on guard. The jubilant joy at the French fort need not be described. When he heard of the English advance, Contrecoeur, the commander, had been cooped up with less than one thousand men, half of whom were Indians. Had Braddock once reached Fort Duquesne, he could have starved it into surrender without firing a gun, or shelled it into kindling wood with his heavy artillery. Beaujeu, an officer under Contrecoeur, had volunteered to go out and meet the English. "My son, my son, will you walk into the arms of death?" demanded the Indian chiefs. "My fathers, will you allow me to go alone?" answered Beaujeu; and out he sallied with six hundred picked men. It was Beaujeu whom Braddock's men had seen dash out and wave his hat. The brave Frenchman fell, shot at the first {231} volley from the English, and his Indian friends avenged his death by roasting thirty English prisoners alive.

The Isthmus of Chignecto, or the boundary between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, was the scene of the border-land fights in Acadia. To narrate half the forays, raids, and ambuscades would require a volume. Fights as gallant as Dollard's at the Sault waged from Beausejour, the French fort north of the boundary, to Grand Pre and Annapolis, where the English were stationed. After the founding of Halifax the Abbe Le Loutre, whose false, foolish counsels had so often endangered the habitant farmer, moved from his mission in the center of Acadia up to Beausejour on the New Brunswick side. Here he could be seen with his Indians toiling like a demon over the trenches, when Monckton, the English general, came on June 1, 1855, with the British fleet, to land his forces at Fort Lawrence, the English post on the south side. Colonel Lawrence was now English governor of Acadia, and he had decided with Monckton that once and for all the French of Acadia must be subjugated. The French of Beausejour had in all less than fifteen hundred men, half of whom were simple Acadian farmers forced into unwilling service by the priest's threats of Indian raid in this world and damnation in the next. Day dawn of June 4 the bugles blew to arms and the English forces, some four thousand, had marched to the south shore of the Missaguash River, when the French on the north side uttered a whoop and emitted a clatter of shots. Black-hatted, sinister, tireless, the priest could be seen urging his Indians on. The English brought up three field cannon and under protection of their scattering fire laid a pontoon bridge. Crossing the river, they marched within a mile of the fort. That night the sky was alight with flame; for Vergor, the French commander, and Abbe Le Loutre set fire to all houses outside the fort walls. In a few days the English cannon had been placed in a circle round the fort, and set such strange music humming in the ears of the besieged that the Acadian farmers deserted and the priest nervously thought of flight. Louisburg {232} could send no aid, and still the bombs kept bursting through the roofs of the fort houses. One morning a bomb crashed through the roof of the breakfast room, killing six officers on the spot; and the French at once hung out the white flag; but when the English troops marched in on June 16, at seven in the evening, Le Loutre had fled overland through the forests of New Brunswick for Quebec.

There scant welcome awaited the renegade priest. The French governors had been willing to use him as their tool at a price ($800 a year), but when the tool failed of its purpose they cast him aside. Le Loutre sailed for France, but his ship was captured by an English cruiser and he was imprisoned for eight years on the island of Jersey.



Meanwhile, how was fate dealing with the Acadian farmers? Ever since the Treaty of Utrecht they had been afraid to take the oath of unqualified loyalty to England, lest New France, or rather Abbe Le Loutre, let loose the hounds of Indian massacre on their peaceful settlements. Besides, had not the priest assured them year in and year out that France would recover Acadia and put to the sword those habitants who had forsworn France? And they had been equally afraid to side with the French, for in case of failure the burden of punishment would fall on them alone. For almost half a century they had been known as Neutrals. Of their population of 12,000, 3000 had been lured away to Prince Edward Island and Cape Breton. When Cornwallis had founded Halifax he had intended to wait only till the English were firmly established, when he would demand an oath of unqualified allegiance from {233} the Acadians. They, on their part, were willing to take the oath with one proviso,—that they should never be required to take up arms against the French; or they would have been willing to leave Acadia, as the Treaty of Utrecht had provided, in case they did not take the oath of allegiance. But in the early days of English possession the English governors were not willing they should leave. If the Acadians had migrated, it would simply have strengthened the French in Cape Breton and Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick. Obstructions had been created that prevented the supply of transports to move the Acadians. The years had drifted on, and a new generation had grown up, knowing nothing of treaty rights, but only that the French were threatening them on one side if they did not rise against England, and the English on the other side if they did not take oath of unqualified allegiance. Cornwallis had long since left Halifax, and Lawrence, the English governor, while loyal to a fault, was, like Braddock, that type of English understrapper who has wrought such irreparable injury to English prestige purely from lack of sympathetic insight with colonial conditions. For years before he had become governor, Lawrence's days had been embittered by the intrigues of the French with the Acadian farmers. He had been in Halifax when the Abbe Le Loutre's Indian brigands had raided and slain as many as thirty workmen at a time near the English fort. He had been at the Isthmus of Chignecto that fatal morning when some Indians dressed in the suits of French officers waved a white flag and lured Captain Howe of the English fort across stream, where they shot him under flag of truce in cold blood.