A Historical Geography of the British Colonies Part 13

At the very time that the French and Indian raid on Cas...o...b..y 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.

[Sidenote: _William Phipps._]

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.

[Sidenote: _Condition of Quebec._]

Sixty years had pa.s.sed 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 another {132} the 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 Ma.s.sachusetts 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.

[Sidenote: _Phipps' expedition against Quebec._]

[Sidenote: _Its failure._]

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 anch.o.r.ed 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 sh.o.r.e, 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 cannonade {133} against 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.

[Sidenote: _Boldness of the attempt._]

So ended in complete failure the attempt of Ma.s.sachusetts 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]

[Footnote 4: Phipps, 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.]

[Sidenote: _Death of Phipps._]

Phipps had not proved himself to be a great commander. He failed too as Governor of Ma.s.sachusetts, 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.

[Sidenote: _Wheeler's abortive expedition._]

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' {134} 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 Ma.s.sachusetts Government decided that it was hopeless to attempt to carry out the scheme.

[Sidenote: _Fighting on the New York frontier._]

[Sidenote: _New York protected by the Iroquois._]

In spite of the ma.s.sacre 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 as {135} the traders of New York did not seriously threaten their command of the West.

[Sidenote: _The Abenakis on the borders of New England._]

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,[5] and 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.

[Footnote 5: See above, p. 117.]

[Sidenote: _Port Royal reoccupied by the French._]

[Sidenote: _French and Indian raids on York, Wells, and Oyster River._]

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 ma.s.sacre 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 a.s.sailants. Two years later the settlement at Oyster River was surprised, and its inhabitants killed or carried off.

[Sidenote: _Backwardness of the New Englanders in self-defence._]

There was one way, and one only, to put a stop to this {136} destructive 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 Ma.s.sachusetts--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.

[Sidenote: _Fort Pemaquid._]

[Sidenote: _Chubb's treachery._]

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 Pen.o.bscot. 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 Ma.s.sachusetts, 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 Ma.s.sachusetts, Chubb laid an ambush for them, killed some and kidnapped others.

[Sidenote: _Surrender of Pemaquid._]

It was a proceeding as impolitic as it was immoral, and quickly brought retribution. Early in 1696, two ships of {137} war 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 Pen.o.bscot. 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.

[Sidenote: _Abortive French expedition against Boston._]

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 Pen.o.bscot 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.

[Sidenote: _Treaty of Ryswick._]

[Sidenote: _War of the Spanish Succession._]

The Treaty of Ryswick signed in 1697, and formally proclaimed in America in 1698, settled nothing. It gave {138} breathing-s.p.a.ce 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.

[Sidenote: _French raids on Wells, Cas...o...b..y, Deerfield, and Haverhill._]

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 Cas...o...b..y, were marauded by the Abenaki Indians; and the fort at Casco was hard beset, until relieved by an armed vessel from Ma.s.sachusetts. 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 Ma.s.sachusetts, 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 ent.i.tled _The Redeemed Captive returning to Sion_. A similar {139} attack 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.

[Sidenote: _Port Royal threatened by Major Church and Colonel March._]

In 1691, the year after Phipps had taken Port Royal, a new charter was granted by the Crown to Ma.s.sachusetts, 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, Ma.s.sachusetts, unwilling or unable to make good its claim, pet.i.tioned 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 Pre, but sailed away without venturing to attack the fort. In 1707, a stronger expedition was sent from Ma.s.sachusetts and the neighbouring colonies under Colonel John March; but again, though the troops landed, skirmished, and began a siege, the enterprise came to nothing.

{140} [Sidenote: _Samuel Vetch._]

In 1709 preparations were made for more vigorous and more effective action. In the previous year the colony of Ma.s.sachusetts resolved to appeal to the British Government for help from home to attack Canada.

Their emissary to England was Samuel Vetch, a notable man of the time in North American history. He was a Scotchman, the son of a Presbyterian minister, born and bred in Puritan surroundings; he had served in the Cameronian regiment, and had fought on the continent in William III's armies. After the Peace of Ryswick he went out with other would-be colonists to the Isthmus of Darien, and, on the failure of the scheme, came over to New York. There he married and engaged in trade with Canada, gaining a knowledge of New France, its river, and its people, which subsequently stood him in good stead.

Like Phipps, he was a shrewd, self-made man, whose enemies accused him, apparently with reason, of illicit dealings; like Phipps, he had seen the world outside New England and New York; and, having seen it and having taken stock of Canada as well as of the English colonies, he was a warm advocate, as Phipps had been before him, of united and aggressive action against the French.

[Sidenote: _His mission to England._]

[Sidenote: _British aid promised to New England._]

Quite recently, in 1705, he had been in Canada, to negotiate exchange of prisoners and a treaty of peace between Ma.s.sachusetts and the French. Both Dudley, the Governor of Ma.s.sachusetts, and Vaudreuil, the Canadian Governor, were inclined to peace, but the negotiations broke down in consequence of Vaudreuil's demand that the other English colonies in North America should also be included in the treaty--a condition which Dudley was not in a position to guarantee.

Vetch was for some little time on this occasion both at Quebec and at Montreal. When, therefore he visited England in 1708, he brought with him accurate first-hand knowledge of the enemy's land and people. He was well received. Marlborough's victories supported his plea for a decisive campaign in America, and early in 1709 he was {141} sent back over the Atlantic with the promise of a fleet and five regiments of British troops amounting to 3,000 men. The colonists on their part were to raise contingents of specified strength, and attack by sea was to be combined with a land expedition by way of Lake Champlain.

[Sidenote: _Att.i.tude of the colonies._]

[Sidenote: _Land expedition under Colonel Nicholson._]

[Sidenote: _Its retreat._]