Denonville was at once more capable and more honest than La Barre, but he had still greater difficulties to contend with. The Iroquois were now quite out of hand, and Dongan, the able Governor of New York, was taking a stronger line than was the wont of most Governors in the English colonies, making a bold bid for the control of the lake region. However, ample reinforcements were sent from France with orders to attack the Five Nations, and in the summer of 1687 the French Governor set out with an overwhelming force against the Senecas. His troops, nearly 3,000 in all, mustered at Irondequoit Bay, halfway along the southern shore of Lake Ontario. From thence a route led southwards to the chief town of the Senecas. Many of the Seneca warriors were out of the country at the time, and the French, advancing in strength, dispersed the savages who remained, reached the town, already burnt and deserted, and after destroying corn and devastating the neighbouring land, returned to the lake. A fort was then built at the further end of the lake, below Niagara,9to command the junction of Lakes Erie and Ontario, as in the previous year a stockade had been constructed on the strait of Detroit, to control the passage from Lake Huron to Lake Erie; after which the Governor returned to Montreal.
9In March of this same year Dongan was urging on the Lords of Trade the building of an English fort at Niagara, or as he called it, Oneigra, 'near the great lake on the way whereby our people go hunting and trading. It is very necessary for our trade and correspondence with the Indians, and for securing our right to the country' (Calendar of State Papers,Colonial, 1685-8, p. 328).
The French, to quote Colden's words,10had 'got nothing but dry blows by this expedition.' Denonville had not done enough. He had enraged the confederate Indians without crippling them. A few months before, with odious treachery, he had ordered some friendly Iroquois to be kidnapped and sent to France to serve in the galleys. The tribesmen of the prisoners neither forgave nor forgot, and in less than twoyears' time they paid the debt. On the island of Montreal, some eight miles above the town to the south-west, at the head of rapids now cut by a canal, and at the lower end of the broad reach of the St. Lawrence—which bears the name of Lake St. Louis—was the settlement of Lachine. At the beginning of August, 1689, at dead of night and under cover of a storm, many hundred Iroquois warriors broke in upon the settlers. Two hundred of the French were butchered there and then. One hundred and twenty were carried off, some to be tortured and burnt almost within sight of their countrymen, others to be gradually done to death in the lodges of the Five Nations. A detachment of eighty French soldiers was also cut to pieces, and outside forts and palisades the country was a scene of death and desolation.
10History of the Five Nations(3rd ed.), vol. i, chap. v, p. 82.
The horrors of Lachine stand out in Canadian history as a kind of Sicilian Vespers or Massacre of St. Bartholomew. The upper part of the colony, Montreal and its neighbourhood, was paralysed with terror, and once more, for a moment, the Iroquois seemed to threaten the very existence of New France. It was not so in fact. Below Three Rivers Canada was safe, and the savages did not, as in old days, parade their triumph beneath the cliffs of Quebec. Meanwhile Denonville had already been recalled, his last act being to order in his panic the evacuation and destruction of Fort Frontenac; and the old Frenchman, after whom that fort had been named, came back in his seventieth year to save and to rule Canada.
Another competent man returned with Frontenac, after a short visit to France—Callières, the Governor of Montreal. He was a strong second in command, and, when Frontenac died, was appointed to succeed him, and carried on his work. The two commanders arrived in the autumn of 1689, to find all in confusion and distress; but Frontenac was not forgotten. His presence gave confidence, and even among theIroquois his name secured respect. It was his habit to see with his own eyes, to take his own line, to act with promptitude and decision. These qualities, when coupled with ten years' previous experience of the colony, were invaluable at a crisis. He might quarrel with Intendants, browbeat Councillors, and denounce Jesuit priests; but to the settlers he gave security, to the adventurous backwoodsmen of the West he was a congenial leader, and to the Indians he was the greatOnontio,whose actions matched his words.
For the time he was not in a position to carry war into the Iroquois country, and the Iroquois would not listen to friendly overtures. He contented himself, therefore, with strengthening the forts and defences of the colony and with issuing proclamations to the wavering tribes of the lakes. It was one thing when La Barre or Denonville spoke, it was another when the words were those of Frontenac. His next step was to intimidate the English allies of the Five Nations, and to send three raiding parties into New England and New York. This was the kind of irregular warfare for which the Canadians were best suited. All three expeditions were successful; and their success, coupled with two defeats of parties of Iroquois on the Ottawa, by Du Luth in 1689 and Nicolas Perrot in 1690, both noted leaders ofcoureurs de bois,gave new heart to Canada. Before the summer of 1690 ended, the Indians of the upper lakes came down in force to trade at Montreal, and the grey-headed Governor-General of New France led the war dance, hatchet in hand, appealing to savages in savage fashion, as only a versatile Frenchman could.
It was a typical proceeding. French priests turned heathens into Christians, but left them on their savage lines. French hunters lived among Indians, adopting Indian garb and Indian methods; and the great Governor of Canada, who of all others was a ruler of men, led a yelling crowd in their native prelude for war, as sure inself-esteem, as sure in the esteem of his company, as if he were treading a minuet in stately fashion at the Court of Versailles. The English had no such address; but not having it they ran less risk for the future of their kind. They kept the heathen, for the most part, outside their pale. They did little to convert them. They did little to befriend or protect them. But the English race remained stronger and purer in its dour isolation than the assimilated and assimilating Frenchmen of what was then Upper Canada.
Raids and counter raids went on. Of the part which the English took in the fighting, something will be said presently. So far as the struggle was between the French and the Five Nations, the scene of action was either the Ottawa river, or the angle between the Richelieu and the St. Lawrence. Always important, as being the direct trade route from Lake Huron, the Ottawa was more important now, seeing that there was a larger population in Canada than in bygone days dependent on the fur trade, and that since Denonville's abortive expedition against the Senecas, the massacre of Lachine, and the evacuation of Fort Frontenac, the French had lost command of the upper St. Lawrence.
The corner of land lying between Chambly on the Richelieu and Montreal was the old battlefield of French and Iroquois. By this line, before Tracy's expedition of 1666, the Mohawks had raided Canada; by this line, once more, their war-parties came. Below the Three Rivers, at Quebec and in its neighbourhood, there was no fear of the Indians, though there was both apprehension and reality of English invasion, and distress from English blockade of Canadian trade. But in the upper half of the colony, of which Montreal was the centre, there was no security for life or property outside fortifications and stockades.
Some twenty miles below Montreal, on the southern bank of the St. Lawrence, in the troubled belt of land between that river and the Richelieu, was the Seigniory of Verchères.There was on it a fort and a blockhouse, which, in the last week of October, 1692, was the scene of one of the most picturesque episodes in all the annals of border warfare. The Seignior, a military man, was absent, the fort was nearly empty, for the able-bodied men were working in the fields, when the Iroquois came down on the place. The Seignior's daughter, Madeleine de Verchères, a girl of fourteen, took charge of the fort, having for a garrison, over and above women and children, two terrified soldiers, one hired man-servant, one refugee settler, an old man of eighty, and two small boys, her brothers. She gave the command, she placed each at his post, she misled the savages by a show of imaginary force, and watching day and night she held them at bay, until, at the end of a week, a party of soldiers came to her relief from Montreal. Years afterwards the tale of the siege was taken down from her own lips; and her name lives, and deserves to live, in the history of Canada. The girl's heroism is the chief, but not the only, point of the story. That the Mohawks should have prowled round the fort for a week without seriously attempting to take it, and without finding out that it was nearly defenceless, shows how helpless and stupid these noted warriors were when face to face with a fortification. On the other hand, that a post, only twenty miles distant from Montreal, was left for a week without relief, proves how paralysed, or at least how weakened, were the French by a long series of Indian incursions. This was in Frontenac's time; but Frontenac had the English on his hands, and was short of men. Had it been otherwise, there would have been no beleaguering of girls in forts, and Canada would have lost a pretty story.
As it was, the scale soon turned in favour of the French. In dead of winter, at the beginning of 1693, a mixed body of Canadians and Indians broke in upon the Mohawk towns, and, in spite of a somewhat disastrous retreat, inflicted considerable loss on their persistent enemies; while laterin the year, at the bidding of the sturdy old Governor, a strong party ofcoureurs de boiscame down the Ottawa, convoying a long pent-up and most welcome cargo of furs. This 'gave as universal joy to Canada as the arrival of the galleons give in Spain';11and Frontenac was hailed as the father of the people.
11Colden'sHistory of the Five Nations(3rd ed.), vol. i, chap. ix, p. 159.
More soldiers came out from France, and the Iroquois began to lose heart. Many of their warriors had fallen, and not a few, converted by the Jesuits, had settled in Canada, being known to their heathen countrymen as the 'praying Indians.'12From the English colonies little or no help had come, beyond supplies of arms and ammunition. The councils at Albany produced on the English side pretentious speeches, criticism, encouragement, and promises which were never fulfilled; but the words of the Indians were more to the point, 'the whole burden of the war lies on us alone ... we alone cannot continue the war against the French by reason of the recruits they daily receive from the other side the Great Lake.'13They had been faithful to the English alliance, more faithful than the English deserved, and more faithful than any civilized nation would have been under like circumstances; but they tired of fighting singlehanded, and the chain of the covenant began to rust.
12The converted Iroquois were settled at Caughnawaga, which was on the south bank of the St. Lawrence, at the Sault St. Louis, and directly opposite Lachine. They were often called Caughnawagas.
13Colden, vol. i, chap. x, p. 176.
In default of active aid from the English, there were two policies open to them—to make terms with the French, and to detach from the French cause the Indian tribes of the lakes. They pursued both policies at once: they invited Frontenac to meet them and the English at Albany; he refused. He refused also to come to a meeting at Onondaga.They then sent a deputation to Quebec in 1694; and Frontenac offered a peace which should include the Indian allies of the French and exclude the English. Two nations of the confederacy were ready to accept these terms; the other three rejected them, and there was no peace. In the meantime the Iroquois intrigued with the Lake Indians, and, attracted by the prospect of English goods, the latter came near exchanging the French alliance for combination with the Five Nations and the English. To prevent this result, Frontenac and his officers had resort to infamous methods. Not only at the forest post of Michillimackinac, but at Montreal itself, the French compelled the wavering Indians to burn Iroquois prisoners to death, in order to make peace impossible, and joined themselves in the torture and butchery. Few worse instances of barbarous policy are recorded in history.
Such means alone would not attain the desired end. Nothing, the Governor knew, would avail except acknowledged mastery over the Five Nations. The most obvious confession of weakness on the French side in Denonville's disastrous time had been the evacuation of Fort Frontenac; and never had Denonville's successor slackened his determination to reoccupy the post, which, if he had arrived in Canada a day or two earlier, would not have been abandoned. The time came in the summer of 1695. A force, secretly and quickly gathered, was sent up from Montreal; the walls of the fort still standing were repaired; and the Iroquois were startled by the news that the post, which they most dreaded, and which most menaced their confederacy, was again manned by a French garrison. Frontenac was just in time. The day after the expedition started, orders came from France that the fort should not be reoccupied; but he refused to recall his troops, and set himself to justify, by further measures, his disobedience to the home Government.
In July, 1696, he set out from Montreal at the head ofover 2,000 men. The military strength of Canada was well represented; there were French soldiers of the line, Canadian militia, and friendly Indians. With the old Governor went his best officers—Callières leading the van of the march, Vaudreuil bringing up the rear. The force reached Fort Frontenac, crossed Lake Ontario, and, landing at the mouth of the Oswego river, worked their way up, by stream and lake and portage, towards the goal of the expedition—Onondaga, the central town and meeting-place of the Five Nations. What had happened before happened again. The Indians retreated into the forest before superior numbers, leaving the French a barren conquest over the smouldering ashes of the native town and the standing corn. The Oneidas' village and maize fields were also laid waste, and then the invaders retraced their steps.
Though the expedition was recorded by the French as a success, Frontenac had done no more than Denonville in his march against the Senecas, and a writer on the English side contemptuously refers to it as 'a kind of heroic dotage'.14The show of force, however, seems to have had the effect of inclining the Iroquois to peace, of proving once more that the French were more active than the English, and that the arm ofOnontiowas longer than that of the Governor of New York. Early in 1698 came news of the Peace of Ryswick. The Five Nations were subjects neither of England nor of France, but both Canada and New York claimed them. Sturdily to the last, Frontenac repelled English pretensions and half-hearted Indian advances; but the hand of death was upon him, and on November 28, 1698, he died at Quebec, in the seventy-eighth year of his age.
14Colden, vol. i, chap. xii, p. 202.
He had rid Canada in a great measure from the scourge of murdering savages. He had humbled the Iroquois to some extent; he had certainly won their respect. How he withstood the English in open warfare, and how heencouraged Frenchmen of his own bold type to explore and to claim the far West, remains to be told. He was a great man for the time and place, great in fearlessness, in self-reliance, in foresight, and in unflinching tenacity of purpose. The element of bombast and arrogance in his character helped him, as it helped other Frenchmen, whose names have lived, in handling native races. As a ruler of wild men, whether coloured or white, he was unsurpassed. The ruthlessness of his policy has left a stain upon his memory; but he gave life and confidence to Canada in time of trouble, and but for him there would have been no future for New France.
His deeds and his character bore fruit immediately after his death. At the invitation of his successor, Callières, a general meeting of all the Indian tribes was held at Montreal, in 1701, to which the Iroquois condescended to send representatives. Peace was made; and the French, whom the Five Nations had brought to the brink of ruin, emerged from the contest as acknowledged arbitrators between the native races of North America.
Thus, with the close of the seventeenth century, came in effect the close of the life-and-death struggle between the Five Nation Indians and the Canadian settlers. What were the causes which brought the Iroquois to terms? The first and most potent was loss of numbers. Continual bloodshed had reduced the male population of the confederates by half;15and mixture by adoption, it may well be supposed, had brought some alloy into the old fighting breed. When white men meet coloured men in war, there is always the same tale to tell. The white men suffer reverses, as long as they are a handful, and until the native race has lost a certain proportion of its warriors. Then strength, and knowledge, and discipline prevail; and the issue is no longer in doubt. But no other coloured race in the history of colonization fought with Europeans, man for man, like the Iroquois, and neversubmitting, treated sullenly as equals only when the white race were absolutely superior in numbers. Big battalions in the end usually determine the course of history. They certainly decided the fate of North America. Numerical strength turned the scale in favour of the French, as against the Iroquois. It subsequently turned the scale in favour of the English, as against the French.
15See Parkman'sCount Frontenac, last page, note.
The second cause which influenced the Iroquois was Frontenac's personality. In dealing with him the Indians dealt, and knew that they dealt, with a man who in the greatest straits would never give way an inch. There was no compromise in his policy. He meant to be master; the savages knew it, and respected him accordingly. He did not live to complete his work, and it was not thoroughly completed; but he lived long enough to cripple the Five Nations, and after his time their strength declined.
A third cause was the failure of the English. They missed their opportunities. The path of English colonization has been strewn with lost opportunities. The end has been achieved in most cases, and in most parts of the world; but it has been achieved only after long years of toil, expense, and loss of life, which a little foresight might well have avoided. There was no Frontenac on the English side, no man who went in advance of his Government, who framed and forced a strong policy. One Governor of New York, the Irishman Dongan, was active and determined, but those who came after did little. The element of compromise in the English character, and in the policy of the English Government, made itself felt. Colony was jealous of colony, petty legislatures wrangled, and farmers resented being called to fight instead of sowing or harvesting their crops. Over and above all, whether as friends or as foes, the Frenchmen stretched out their right hands to the native races of North America; the English lived their lives apart, and for the time they paid the penalty.
Thus the Five Nations made peace with the French at Montreal. At the very same time, at Albany,16they gave the English a title to the lake regions. In the year 1686, by Denonville's orders, Du Luth, with a party ofcoureurs de bois,established a French outpost on the strait (Detroit) between Lakes Huron and Erie,17his object being to prevent the fur trade of the upper lakes passing down that way to the Iroquois country, and thence to the English market at Albany. The post was not maintained; but some years afterwards a more permanent occupation took place. Frontenac had died; but he left behind him men trained in his school, keen on a forward policy, on holding in the interests of France and in their own the passes of the West. Such a man was La Mothe Cadillac, who in 1694 had been sent to take command at Michillimackinac. He urged upon the French Government the importance of controlling the outlet from Lake Huron to Lake Erie, and, having obtained their consent, was the founder of the city of Detroit. He began the work in July, 1701, but before his expedition actually reached the place, the Five Nations took alarm, recognizing that Detroit, like Fort Frontenac, would limit their range and endanger their power.
16The great meeting at Montreal was held on Aug. 4, 1701. The deed of cession referred to in the text was dated July 19, 1701.
17Seeabove.
They sent representatives of all their nations to Albany, and there, on July 19, 1701, ceded to the King of England their 'beaver hunting-ground,' retaining for themselves the right of free hunting. The deed was of the most formal character, attested by the totem marks of all the Five Nations.18It is an interesting document, setting forth that the Iroquois had already subjected themselves and their lands 'on this side of Cataraqui (Ontario) lake wholly to the Crown ofEngland,' and conveying to the King a wide area to the north of the lake, which the Five Nations claimed as their hunting-ground in right of conquest. The tract was estimated at 800 miles in length by 400 in breadth, extending on the north to Lake Superior, on the west to Chicago, and it specifically included Detroit,19the French designs on which were stated as the reason for making the cession. A white man's hand must have drawn the deed. It gave away the Iroquois entirely. Hitherto they had stubbornly rejected any English claim to sovereignty. Brother the Governor of New York had been, but not father, and no allegiance had been offered to the King of England; but in the conveyance William III figured as 'the great lord and master' of the Five Nations, and on paper the acknowledgement of British sovereignty was complete.
18A certified copy in manuscript sent home at the time may be seen at the Record Office, and a printed copy is included in the New York documents.
19Spoken of in the deed in one place as 'Tiengsachrondio alias Fort de Tret.'
It was a piece of parchment only, and as such and no more the Iroquois probably regarded it; but it embodied a small element of fact. These hardheaded, hardhanded Indians were gradually being worn down by the white men on either side, owing such measure of independence as they still retained not so much to their own fighting strength as to the constant enmity between Great Britain and France. When war broke out again, after Queen Anne's accession, they remained for the most part neutral; what they had claimed and conveyed as their hunting-ground passed more and more under French control, while, as the result of Marlborough's victories on the other side of the Atlantic, their own land and its cantons was awarded to Great Britain in 1713 by the Treaty of Utrecht.20
20Clause xv of the Treaty of Utrecht ran as follows: 'The subjects of France inhabiting Canada, and others, shall hereafter give no hinderance or molestation to the Five Nations or Cantons of Indians subject to the dominion of Great Britain nor to the other natives of America who are friends to the same.'
FRENCH ANDENGLISH DOWN TO THEPEACE OFUTRECHT
FRENCH ANDENGLISH DOWN TO THEPEACE OFUTRECHT
Down to the date of the Treaty of Utrecht, the Iroquois formed the first line of the foes of Canada. Behind them were the English.
After Quebec had been in 1632 given back to France, the English on the Atlantic coast, and the French on the St. Lawrence, for many years came little into contact with each other. In Acadia the two nations overlapped, with results which are told elsewhere, and it was the same in Newfoundland; but the French colonists at Quebec and the English colonists at Boston or in Virginia were far apart. We read of an English traveller finding his way, in 1640, from the coast of Maine, up the Kennebec river and by the Chaudière, to Quebec, his journey being noted as an explorer's feat with an ultimate design of reaching the North Sea; while a few years later, in 1647-51, the same route became better known, and was taken by French emissaries of peace to the New England states.
Negotiations were then on foot, at the instance of Winthrop, Governor of Massachusetts, for a treaty of commerce between the English and French colonies in North America, and it was suggested that they should keep peace with each other even in the event of war in Europe between the respective mother countries.1Such a treatymight have been made and kept, if there had been no native question; but each side had Indian friends and Indian foes, and could not afford to alienate the one or add to the number of the other. The French wanted New England support against the Iroquois, and with the Iroquois the New Englanders had no quarrel. Thus the friendly overtures between the two parties came to nothing; but Frenchmen on the river of Canada and Englishmen by the open sea went their own ways, having no direct dealings with each other in war or peace.
1A like sensible policy was pursued in the little island of St. Kitts, when first colonized by French and English. They agreed to keep the peace whether or not France and Great Britain were at war. See vol. ii of this series, chap. iv, p. 135. See also Kingsford'sHistory of Canada,vol. ii, p. 426.
A change came when the English, in 1664, took possession of New York. They too had now a river—the Hudson—which carried them inland; they became neighbours and friends of the Five Nations; and their natural line of expansion was in the direction of the St. Lawrence and the great lakes. From this time onward collision between French and English was inevitable, and it was equally inevitable that the colony of New York should be the central point of the contest.
Before the Dutchmen on Manhattan Island and in the valley of the Hudson became subjects of the British Crown, they had themselves absorbed the Swedish colonists on the Delaware. The result, therefore, of New York becoming a British province was to link together the British colonies on the Atlantic seaboard. It has been said above that English colonization in North America was more compact and more continuous than French. In other words, though the English colonists many times outnumbered the French, they were less dispersed through the wilderness. But the compactness and continuity was comparative only. Continuity of English colonization meant little more than that the lands claimed by one colony were coterminous with those claimed by the next, and that no other European nation could planta settlement between the Alleghanies and the sea without committing a trespass and fighting for its place. There was no continuity of what would now be called effective occupation. Colony was divided from colony by many miles of forest and backwood. Separately they were planted. Their surroundings, their traditions, their interests were all distinct. Sprung in the main from one stock, and speaking one language, they had little else in common. They had not even the bond of a common religious creed.
Within each single colony there was division still. Settlements and homesteads were often far from one another, and political or religious dissensions supplemented geographical separation. New York was an instance in point. Alone among the colonies, it had a good waterway for any distance inland; but there was little community of interest between the settlers at Albany or Schenectady, and the seaport at Manhattan Island, except so far as the latter commanded the import and export trade of the Hudson valley. The settlers at the mouth of the Hudson were merchants and seafaring men. The settlers inland were farmers, landholders, and traders with the Indians. The former were exposed to attack by sea, but recked little of the French in Canada or their Indian allies. The latter had nothing to fear from a hostile fleet, but were constantly in danger from an inroad from Canada. Then there were feuds of race and religion. The English overpowered the Dutch, and with the English came in the rule of the Duke of York, Roman Catholic influence, and a policy too often dictated by France.
The Revolution, which turned out the Stuarts in England, was followed by a rising in New York. There was a cleavage, not so much on lines of race, as on those of politics and religion. The extreme Protestants and Republicans, whose stronghold was in and about the town of New York, rose against the existing system, which was upheld by the moremoderate and aristocratic section of the population, who were stronger up country, and were supported by such men as Schuyler, the chief magistrate of Albany. Jacob Leisler, a German, led the revolutionary party, and in 1689, backed by the militia, he deposed the Lieutenant-Governor and took the government into his own hands. He played the part of Cromwell for two years until, in 1691, regular troops were sent out from England, when he was deserted by his followers, imprisoned, and hanged; and the ordinary methods of colonial government were resumed.
Colony being thus divided from colony, and the one colony which directly abutted on Canada being divided against itself, it was long before the English made any headway against the French on the St. Lawrence. At almost any given date the French had a larger number of regular troops available, supported by Canadian rangers, whose life was spent in border warfare—the whole being under one Governor, who was, as has been seen, invariably a man of considerable military experience. On the sea the English could more than hold their own, but the sea-route from New York or Boston to Quebec was long and troublesome. If such an expedition was taken in hand, there could be no secrecy and no speed in the matter. There was gathering of ships and transports; discussions as to the quota of each colony; selection of a leader because he was a good neighbour or a popular citizen, rather than for any naval or military capacity. There was sailing round the coast, taking Acadia on the way, and finally arrival before Quebec after men and ships had dropped off and the French had been forewarned and forearmed. Thus down to the date of the Treaty of Utrecht English efforts against the French in Canada amounted to little more than giving arms and supplies to the Five Nations, making occasional counter raids by land, and still more occasional demonstrations by sea.
It will be remembered2that in February, 1666, the French commander, Courcelles, on his bold midwinter expedition against the Mohawks, strayed from his route, and found himself near Corlaer or Schenectady, where he learnt that the English had become masters of New York, and that there was an English garrison at Albany. This was the first intrusion of the French into the Hudson valley. Tracy's expedition against the Mohawk towns later in the same year gave Colonel Nicolls, the first English Governor of New York, occasion to invite the New England colonies to join him in attacking the French. They refused, fearing that, if they sided with the Iroquois, they would be exposed to attack from the Abenakis, who were on their borders, and who were friends of the French, foes of the Five Nations. Some twenty years then passed without open rupture. New York was retaken by the Dutch and regained by the English. The colonization of Canada went on. The Iroquois remained comparatively quiet, and in Frontenac's first term of administration western exploration and western trade began to determine French policy in Canada and English policy in New York.
2Seeabove.
In 1683, after Frontenac had come to Canada for the first time and gone again, New York was given in the Irish Catholic, Thomas Dongan, a Governor of strength and foresight. In the following year, at a conference held at Albany, at which Lord Howard of Effingham, the Governor of Virginia, was present, the alliance between the English and the Five Nations was formally confirmed; and, assured of English aid and protection, the Iroquois turned their strength against Canada. Though there was peace between Great Britain and France in James II's time, the relations between New York and Canada were the reverse of friendly. The French knew that the Five Nations were backed by the English. Dongan on his part was resolved that thetrade of the West should not be left exclusively in French hands. Angry letters passed between him and Denonville, English and Dutch traders on the lakes were intercepted by the Canadians, and a party from Montreal captured and looted three English trading posts on Hudson Bay. In 1688 Dongan was recalled, and in the following year news reached the American colonies of the Revolution in England.
The expulsion of the Stuarts and the accession of William III to the throne of Great Britain meant war with France; and at this critical moment Frontenac came back to Canada. He came back with a plan, devised by Callières and approved by the King, for attacking New York by land and sea. A stillborn scheme it proved, through untoward delays, but its conception indicated that New York was recognized by the French Government and its advisers as the key of the position in North America. While plans were being laid by the French for the invasion of New York the Iroquois invaded Canada, and the massacre of Lachine faced Frontenac on his return in 1689. Next year he sent out against the English colonies the three expeditions which have been already mentioned.3
3Seeabove.
The first started from Montreal in depth of winter, following the familiar route of the Richelieu and Lake Champlain, and intending to strike a blow at Albany. The men were picked for the work, Frenchmen and Indians, about 250 in all, led by the best of Canadian rangers, such as Le Moyne d'Iberville and his brothers. They toiled through ice and snow, and, turning off from the path to Albany, in the darkness of a winter's night they fell upon the Dutch settlement of Schenectady. It was the time of Leisler's movement, when New York was in the throes of revolution. The village was unguarded, its gates were open, its inmates were asleep. A blockhouse manned by eight or nine militiamen fromConnecticut was stormed, and the scene was one of helpless massacre.
The second party, smaller in number, consisting of some fifty French and Abenaki Indians, left Three Rivers towards the end of January, and near the end of March made a night attack on the settlement of Salmon Falls, on the borders of New Hampshire and Maine. Again the English, sleeping and unprepared, were murdered in their beds, and the murderers, making good their retreat, joined forces with the third and strongest party, which had set out from Quebec to attack the settlement of Falmouth at Casco Bay. Falmouth stood where the town of Portland in Maine now stands. There was a fort at the place—Fort Loyal—into which the outlying settlers gathered with their families when the attacking force of four or five hundred men appeared. After a short defence the commander, Sylvanus Davies by name, surrendered on solemn promise, according to his own circumstantial account, of quarter and freedom for the whole company. The terms were immediately broken, and all the English were massacred or carried into captivity.
Thus three separate raids on the English colonies, sent out under Frontenac's orders in the year 1690, were all successful. They were well devised, and carried out with skill, courage, and determination. The English and Dutch settlers, on their side, showed the greatest negligence and little stubbornness or competence in self-defence. The immediate result was to invigorate the French and their Indian allies; but the causes of their momentary success were the causes of their ultimate failure; and even at the moment these marauding exploits threatened new danger to Canada. The French succeeded because, leagued with savages, they in all things likened themselves to their companions, they habited themselves in Indian dress, their warriors were ferocious as Indian warriors, their priests hounded on to blood. They succeeded because their trade was war not peace,because they were roving adventurers who had only their lives to lose, ravening among quiet men of substance who had homes and wives and children to be plundered and slain. It was as certain that in course of time the cause of the English colonists would prevail, as that the Highland clans, who in Scotland marauded their southern neighbours, would eventually be broken, or that the Five Nations themselves, if left to fight alone, would eventually go down before the settled life of Canada.
On this occasion three blows were struck, nearly at the same time, at three separate points in a long undefended line. The adoption of this policy by the French, and still more the fact of its success, in reality tended to remove the one great obstacle to British supremacy in North America. When Sylvanus Davies, taken at Fort Loyal and carried prisoner to Quebec, asked Frontenac the reason for the savage raid on the Casco Bay settlement, he was told that it was reprisal for the support given to the Iroquois by New York. His rejoinder, which was to the effect that New England should not be called upon to answer for the doings of New York, showed how little community of sentiment or interest existed in the English colonies. The one great source of weakness to the English cause, the greatest source of strength to the French, was the disunion of the English colonies and their indifference to each other. Consolidation could come only through partnership in suffering, and pressure from a common foe. This was the lesson which Frontenac taught, when his border ruffians carried havoc from the head waters of the Hudson to the sea-coast of Maine.
The lesson was never fully learnt as long as the Atlantic colonies were British possessions and Canada was French; but for a time the French outrages produced some semblance of common action on the other side; and at a conference held at Albany, in 1690, it was resolved to attack Canada by land and sea. The land expedition, taking the routeof Lake Champlain, was a failure, ending in a small raid on the French settlement of La Prairie; and the main effort was made by sea. On sea the New Englanders showed the way, led by the men of Massachusetts.
The 'Bostonnais,' as the French called them, were dangerous foes of Canada. Puritans, Republicans, sea-fighters, sea-traders, they were all that the Canadians were not. They were strong in numbers too. At the end of the seventeenth century, Boston was a town of some 7,000 inhabitants, and the population of the whole colony was estimated at not far short of 50,000, against less than 15,000 French in Canada. At the very time that the French and Indian raid on Casco Bay took place, a fleet of seven or eight ships with 700 men on board sailed from Boston for Acadia, took possession of Port Royal with other French settlements on the Acadian coast, and returned in little more than a month's time with prisoners, booty, and renown.
The commander of the expedition was William Phipps, a typical product of the seaboard colonies. Starting as a New England ship-carpenter, he had turned rover and buccaneer; and finding a sunken Spanish treasure-ship, had won himself riches and a knighthood. He was brave, not too scrupulous or cleanhanded, a good seaman, and a patriotic man. He was well fitted for irregular warfare on a small scale, but his capacity was limited, and he did not rise to the level of greatness. After his success in Acadia, Phipps seemed obviously the man to achieve the conquest of Canada.
Sixty years had passed since David Kirke took Quebec. A better leader than Phipps, he had had an easy task in starving out an infant settlement. The interval had been for Quebec a time of comparative peace. Sheltered on the land side by Three Rivers, Montreal, and the military outposts of the Richelieu, the town was practically safe from the Iroquois, while civil wars and Stuart Kings in England prevented invasion from the sea. One year and anotherthe furs which came down the river, or the supplies which were brought from France, were intercepted; but in the main the capital of New France enjoyed security and peace. It had grown, but was a very small town still, ill fortified, except by nature, and, if fortune and skill had combined, might well have been taken. But in 1690 there was no luck and little skill on the attacking side. The land campaign, which was to have kept Frontenac and his best troops at Montreal, failed just in time to enable all the available French forces to concentrate at Quebec. England, when asked by Massachusetts to help the expedition by arms and ammunition, sent nothing; and, while the appeal was being made, valuable time was lost. Phipps was at first too leisurely and afterwards too impatient to succeed, and wind and weather befriended the Frenchmen in Quebec.
It was the ninth of August when the New England commander sailed from Nantucket with thirty-four ships, and soldiers and sailors to the number of 2,200 men. It was the sixteenth of October when he anchored before Quebec. He sent a pompous summons to surrender, which provoked an insulting reply, and then prepared to land his troops below the town, to attack it in rear, while his ships opened fire in front. It was a hopeless enterprise. The night after the English fleet appeared, strong reinforcements came in from Montreal, and Frontenac had at his disposal not far short of 3,000 fighting men. On the eighteenth, the New England levies were landed on the Beauport shore, having the river St. Charles between them and Quebec. They were between 1,200 and 1,300 in number, commanded by Major Walley. Short of food and supplies, sickening in the wet weather, out-numbered by disciplined troops and Canadian rangers, who fought under cover and with the advantage of the ground, they could do nothing but prove themselves brave and stubborn men. Phipps on shipboard gave them no support, wasting his ammunition in a wild and useless cannonadeagainst the face of the cliff and the walls of the upper town; and in ten days time all the men were re-embarked and the ships set sail for home.
So ended in complete failure the attempt of Massachusetts to take Quebec. Yet it was a bold and masterful effort on the part of one undeveloped English colony. It had in it the elements of strength, and under different conditions might have earned success. As it was, the citizen soldiers and sailors of Boston, led by an ex-ship-carpenter, faced Count Frontenac and all the trained strength of New France, their retreat was unmolested, and their failure was hailed as a miraculous deliverance for Quebec.4
4Phipps, before he made his attack, was told by French prisoners of the path up the cliff above the town, by which Wolfe subsequently took Quebec; but he preferred to attack from Beauport.
Phipps had not proved himself to be a great commander. He failed too as Governor of Massachusetts, to which post he was appointed in the following year; but he had the merit of dogged determination to fight the French in Canada; and, had he lived longer, he might again have tried his hand at besieging Quebec. A few weeks after his repulse and return to Boston, he sailed to England to urge upon the home Government an active policy against New France, and that policy he continued to advocate until he died, in 1695, at the early age of forty-four.
On either side, the true line of defence was to carry war into the enemy's country. It was thus that Frontenac defended Canada. It was by constant raids that the Iroquois maintained their position; and the counsel which those astute savages gave to their English friends was to combine and attack Quebec. 'Strike at Quebec,' urged Phipps on the English Government; 'strike at Boston and New York' was the advice which the leaders of Canada one after another tendered to King Louis. No help had been sent from England to the late expedition against Quebec, but Phipps'subsequent representations led to an English fleet being dispatched to the West Indies in the winter of 1692, under command of Admiral Wheeler. The ships were intended to take Martinique, then to go on to Boston, and embarking a force of New Englanders under Phipps to sail for Quebec. Again there was a failure. Wheeler lost more than half his soldiers and sailors in the West Indies from yellow fever; and, when he reached Boston in midsummer of 1693, bringing the sickness with him, the Massachusetts Government decided that it was hopeless to attempt to carry out the scheme.
In spite of the massacre at Schenectady, New York suffered less than New England from border war. In 1691, in a second attack on the French settlement of La Prairie over against Montreal, the English and Dutch colonists achieved some success, carrying out the raid which they had planned, and cutting their way back hand to hand through a party of French troops who tried to bar their retreat. The Iroquois were the salvation of New York. Their raids into Canada safeguarded the rival colony, and when the Five Nations were not on the warpath, the French hesitated to attack their English allies, for fear of provoking a fresh incursion of savages. It has been seen that the Iroquois tended more and more to a policy of neutrality, worn by constant fighting, tired of English inaction, and discerning that their true interest lay in siding with neither French nor English. Still, with the exception of their converted countrymen settled in Canada, they were not likely to band with the French against the English. To do so would have been to break with old ties and traditions, to close their best market, to combine with their deadliest foes against friends of long standing, whose faults had been after all but faults of omission. This the French knew well: they were content to leave New York alone, provided they themselves were left alone by the Iroquois, and so long asthe traders of New York did not seriously threaten their command of the West.
It was otherwise in the case of New England. The Abenaki Indians on the borders of the New England colonies had always been in the French interest. Jesuit influence was strong among them: they had been taught that Christianity could go hand in hand with ferocity, and that murder of white heretics might be not only a pleasure but a duty. Here the object of the French was not to keep the Indians quiet, but to spur them on. As they dreaded lest their Indian allies on the upper lakes should come to terms with the Iroquois,5and enforced barbarities to make peace impossible, so in the closing years of the seventeenth century and the early years of the eighteenth, they incited the Abenaki warriors against the border settlements of Maine and New Hampshire, butchering, looting, carrying into captivity, their one object being to keep alive the taste of blood, lest, lured by the prospect of peaceful and profitable trade with the neighbouring English, the Abenakis should drift apart from New France.
5Seeabove.
A Canadian officer, Villebon, was specially deputed to take charge of Acadia, and organize war-parties against the English settlers. He reoccupied Port Royal, and at the beginning of 1692 the work of massacre was taken seriously in hand. The first point of attack was the border settlement of York on the sea-coast of Maine: it was laid waste early in February, with all the usual horrors of Indian warfare. In June, another seaside settlement—Wells, about twenty miles to the north of York—was attacked by a large party; but some thirty militiamen, headed by a determined officer, Convers by name, made a stubborn defence, and beat off the assailants. Two years later the settlement at Oyster River was surprised, and its inhabitants killed or carried off.
There was one way, and one only, to put a stop to thisdestructive warfare; to build strong forts in advanced positions; to give them adequate garrisons under competent officers; to patrol the frontier constantly with bodies of armed border police, and to harry the Indian marauders by land and sea. New England—and New England meant Massachusetts—was perfectly able to adopt and to maintain such a policy. The New Englanders were many against comparatively few; they had as a rule command of the sea; but the colonists did not like the expense or the personal service which was involved; the Boston citizens did not feel the full force of the blows which struck the outlying farms and homesteads; and the petifogging Government too often employed men to command who knew little or nothing of soldiering.
There was one point, in particular, which should have been strongly fortified and strongly garrisoned. This was Fort Pemaquid, on the sea-coast between the mouths of the Kennebec and the Penobscot. It was to New England, and to the Abenakis, what Fort Frontenac was to Canada and to the Iroquois, an advanced post covering the English colonies and menacing the Indians. In 1689, most of the English garrison having been withdrawn, it had been surprised and taken by the Abenakis. In 1692, Phipps, then Governor of Massachusetts, acting under orders from the King, rebuilt and regarrisoned it. Iberville, sent by Frontenac in the following year, with two ships of war, reconnoitred the fort but did not venture to attack it. In 1696, it was in charge of an incompetent commander, Chubb, who made himself odious to the Indians by a gross act of treachery. Some Abenaki chiefs had been invited to the fort under pledge of personal safety, to exchange prisoners; and, acting under instructions from Stoughton, Lieutenant-Governor of Massachusetts, Chubb laid an ambush for them, killed some and kidnapped others.
It was a proceeding as impolitic as it was immoral, and quickly brought retribution. Early in 1696, two ships ofwar came out from France, and, taking on board troops from Quebec, coasted round the Acadian peninsula, capturing on the way some English vessels, including an armed frigate. Off the mouth of the St. John the French received reinforcements, sent down by Villebon from his Fort Naxouat, which stood higher up the river; and a further band of Indians joined them at Pentegoet, the fort of the French adventurer St. Castin, at the mouth of the river Penobscot. The expedition led by Iberville, St. Castin, and others sailed on to Pemaquid, and on August 14 demanded its surrender. Chubb returned a contemptuous reply, and backed his words by promptly surrendering next day, on condition of safe conduct for himself and his men. He went back to Boston in safety and disgrace, and a year later was murdered by Indians.
The loss of Fort Pemaquid was a serious blow to the English, and in the next year, 1697, the French Government determined to follow up their success by attacking Boston. A strong fleet was sent out to Newfoundland under the Marquis de Nesmond. Its orders were to defeat any English vessels off that coast, and sailing south to the mouth of the Penobscot to take up Canadian troops and Indian allies. The expedition was then to proceed to take Boston, and, having accomplished this object, to overrun the whole of New England to the north of that city. Frontenac had the land forces in readiness, proposing to take command himself; but on this occasion the French took a leaf out of the English book; the fleet was detained by contrary winds till the summer was past, the combination failed, and all the grand scheme came to nothing at all. For Boston read Quebec, and the record of this failure might be the record of one of the stillborn enterprises, by which the English from time to time hoped to reduce Canada.
The Treaty of Ryswick signed in 1697, and formally proclaimed in America in 1698, settled nothing. It gavebreathing-space to Louis XIV and his enemies, and, while it lasted, there was a respite from border forays for the English colonies in North America. But no attempt was made to adjust boundaries, or to remove causes of past and future disputes, and the only specific provision, which the treaty contained with regard to America, referred to Hudson Bay. Both sides knew that the truce was not likely to be long-lived, and its end came when, in 1701, the King of France promised the exiled James II on his deathbed to acknowledge his son as rightful King of England. In the following year war broke out again, the War of the Spanish Succession, the war which, after Marlborough's victories, ended with the Peace of Utrecht.
It was in Europe that the battle of the American colonies was fought, in Flanders and at Blenheim, rather than on the St. Lawrence or on the coasts of Acadia and New England. There was fighting in America, but it was in the main fighting of the same indecisive kind as had gone before—murder, pillage, and the like; and history repeated itself with singular fidelity. On May 4, 1702, war was declared: in August, 1703, the old work of raiding the New England frontier was resumed. The settlement at Wells, which had suffered before, was the first to suffer again; the neighbouring settlements, as far as Casco Bay, were marauded by the Abenaki Indians; and the fort at Casco was hard beset, until relieved by an armed vessel from Massachusetts. In the following year, at the end of February, 1704, the village of Deerfield was attacked by night by some 250 French and Indians. It stood on the Connecticut river, on the north-western frontier of Massachusetts, and at the date of the attack contained in all nearly 300 human beings. Of them about fifty were killed, and over 100 were carried off, among the latter being the minister of the place, John Williams, who survived to tell a tale of almost incredible loss and suffering in a narrative entitledThe Redeemed Captive returning to Sion. A similarattack was made, in 1708, on the village of Haverhill on the Merrimac river, which cost the lives of about fifty villagers; and one after another the border settlements, during these troubled years, were infested by savages appearing from and disappearing in the backwoods under cover of night. The authors of the outrages were the French rulers of Canada; their agents were in the main converted Indians; the series of raids was not so much the spontaneous movement of natives against white men, as a crusade against heretics, prompted and led by Europeans, and carried out by Indian warriors on the lines of Indian warfare. There was much vicarious suffering. The past inroads of the Iroquois into Canada led to years of retaliation on New England: retaliation on New England induced the New Englanders in their turn to attack Acadia.
In 1691, the year after Phipps had taken Port Royal, a new charter was granted by the Crown to Massachusetts, which included Acadia within the limits of the colony. But in the same year, and in the very month of September in which the charter was given, the Frenchman Villebon reoccupied Port Royal, and four years later, Massachusetts, unwilling or unable to make good its claim, petitioned the British Government to take over its rights and responsibilities in regard to the Acadian peninsula. Whether in English or in French hands, Port Royal remained a small, ill-fortified, and poorly defended post, constantly open to, and constantly threatened with attack. In 1704, after and in consequence of the French raid on Deerfield, a buccaneering force from New England, under Major Benjamin Church, appeared before it, having previously burnt the Acadian settlement of Grand Pré, but sailed away without venturing to attack the fort. In 1707, a stronger expedition was sent from Massachusetts and the neighbouring colonies under Colonel John March; but again, though the troops landed, skirmished, and began a siege, the enterprise came to nothing.