Canada: the Empire of the North Part 15

"What are you going to do?" I demanded.

"Blow up the fort," answered one cowardly wretch.

"Begone, you rascals," I commanded, putting on a soldier's helmet and seizing a musket. Then to my little brothers: "Let us fight to the death! Remember what father has always said,--that gentlemen are born to shed their blood in the service of G.o.d and their King."

My brothers and the two soldiers kept up a steady fire from the loopholes. I ordered the cannon fired to call in our soldiers, who were hunting; {170} but the grief-stricken women inside kept wailing so loud that I had to warn them their shrieks would betray our weakness to the enemy. While I was speaking I caught sight of a canoe on the river. It was Sieur Pierre Fontaine, with his family, coming to visit us. I asked the soldiers to go out and protect their landing, but they refused. Then ordering Laviolette, our servant, to stand sentry at the gate, I went out myself, wearing a soldier's helmet and carrying a musket. I left orders if I were killed the gates were to be kept shut and the fort defended. I hoped the Iroquois would think this a ruse on my part to draw them within gunshot of our walls. That was just what happened, and I got Pierre Fontaine and his family safely inside by putting a bold face on. Our whole garrison consisted of my two little brothers aged about twelve, one servant, two soldiers, one old habitant aged eighty, and a few women servants. Strengthened by the Fontaines, we began firing. When the sun went down the night set in with a fearful storm of northeast wind and snow. I expected the Iroquois under cover of the storm. Gathering our people together, I said: "G.o.d has saved us during the day. Now we must be careful for the night. To show you I am not afraid to take my part, I undertake to defend the fort with the old man and a soldier, who has never fired a gun. You, Pierre Fontaine and La Bonte and Galet (the two soldiers), go to the bastion with the women and children. If I am taken, never surrender though I am burnt and cut to pieces before your eyes! You have nothing to fear if you will make some show of fight!"

I posted two of my young brothers on one of the bastions, the old man of eighty on the third, and myself took the fourth. Despite the whistling of the wind we kept the cry "All's well," "All's well"

echoing and reechoing from corner to corner. One would have imagined the fort was crowded with soldiers, and the Iroquois afterwards confessed they had been completely deceived; that the vigilance of the guard kept them from attempting to scale the walls. About midnight the sentinel at the gate bastion called out, "Mademoiselle! I hear something!"

I saw it was our cattle.

"Let me open the gates," urged the sentry.

"G.o.d forbid," said I; "the savages are likely behind, driving the animals in."

Nevertheless I _did_ open the gates and let the cattle in, my brothers standing on each side, ready to shoot if an Indian appeared.

At last came daylight; and we were hopeful for aid from Montreal; but Marguerite Fontaine, being timorous as all Parisian women are, begged her husband to try and escape. The poor husband was almost distracted as she insisted, and he told her he would set her out in the canoe with her two sons, who could paddle it, but he would not abandon Mademoiselle in Vercheres. I had been twenty-four hours without rest or food, and had not {171} once gone from the bastion. On the eighth day of the siege Lieutenant de La Monnerie reached the fort during the night with forty men.

One of our sentries had called out, "Who goes?"

I was dozing with my head on a table and a musket across my arm. The sentry said there were voices on the water. I called, "Who are you?"

They answered, "French--come to your aid!"

I went down to the bank, saying: "Sir, but you are welcome! I surrender my arms to you!"

"Mademoiselle," he answered, "they are in good hands."

I forgot one incident. On the day of the attack I remembered about one in the afternoon that our linen was outside the fort, but the soldiers refused to go out for it. Armed with our guns, my brothers made two trips outside the walls for our linen. The Iroquois must have thought it a trick to lure them closer, for they did not approach.

It need scarcely be added that brave mothers make brave sons, and it is not surprising that twenty-five years later, when Madeline Vercheres had become the wife of M. de La Naudiere, her own life was saved from Abenaki Indians by her little son, age twelve.

But to return to Count Frontenac, marching up the steep streets of Quebec to Chateau St. Louis that October evening of 1689, amid the jubilant shouts of friends and enemies, Jesuit and Recollet, fur trader and councilor,--the haughty Governor set himself to the task of not only crushing the Iroquois but invading and conquering the land of the English, whom he believed had furnished arms to the Iroquois. Now that war had been openly declared between England and France, Frontenac was determined on a campaign of aggression. He would keep the English so busy defending their own borders that they would have no time to tamper with the Indian allies of the French on the Mississippi.

This is one of the darkest pages of Canada's past. War is not a pretty thing at any time, but war that lets loose the bloodhounds of Indian ferocity leaves the blackest scar of all.

There were to be three war parties: one from Quebec to attack the English settlements around what is now Portland, {172} Maine; a second from Three Rivers to lay waste the border lands of New Hampshire; a third from Montreal to a.s.sault the English and Dutch of the Upper Hudson.

The Montrealers set out in midwinter of 1690, a few months after Frontenac's arrival, led by the Le Moyne brothers, Ste. Helene and Maricourt and Iberville, with one of the Le Bers, and D'Ailleboust, nephew of the first D'Ailleboust at Montreal. The raiders consisted of some two hundred and fifty men, one hundred Indian converts and one hundred and fifty bushrovers, hardy, supple, inured to the wilderness as to native air, whites and Indians dressed alike in blanket coat, hood hanging down the back, buckskin trousers, beaded moccasins, snowshoes of short length for forest travel, cased musket on shoulder, knife, hatchet, pistols, bullet pouch hanging from the sashed belt, and provisions in a blanket, knapsack fashion, carried on the shoulders.

[Ill.u.s.tration: QUEBEC, 1689]

The woods lay snow padded, silent, somber. Up the river bed of the Richelieu, over the rolling drifts, glided the bushrovers. {173} Somewhere on the headwaters of the Hudson the Indians demanded what place they were to attack. Iberville answered, "Albany." "Humph,"

grunted the Indians with a dry smile at the camp fire, "since _when_ have the French become so brave?" A midwinter thaw now turned the snowy levels to swimming lagoons, where snowshoes were useless, and the men had to wade knee-deep day after day through swamps of ice water.

Then came one of those sudden changes,--hard frost with a blinding snowstorm. Where the trail forked for Albany and Schenectady it was decided to follow the latter, and about four o'clock in the afternoon, on the 8th of February, the bush-rovers reached a hut where there chanced to be several Mohawk squaws. Crowding round the chimney place to dry their clothes now stiff with ice, the bushrangers learned from the Indian women that Schenectady lay completely unguarded. There had been some village festival that day among the Dutch settlers. The gates at both ends of the town lay wide open, and as if in derision of danger from the far distant French, a snow man had been mockingly rolled up to the western gate as sentry, with a sham pipe stuck in his mouth. The Indian rangers harangued their braves, urging them to wash out all wrongs in the blood of the enemy, and the Le Moyne brothers moved from man to man, giving orders for utter silence. At eleven that night, shrouded by the snowfall, the bushrovers reached the palisades of Schenectady. They had intended to defer the a.s.sault till dawn, but the cold hastened action, and, uncasing their muskets, they filed silently past the snow man in the middle of the open gate and encircled the little village of fifty houses. When the lines met at the far gate, completely investing the town, a wild yell rent the air! Doors were hacked down. Indians with tomahawks stood guard outside the windows, and the dastardly work began,--as gratuitous a butchery of innocent people as ever the Iroquois perpetrated in their worst raids.

Two hours the ma.s.sacre lasted, and when it was over the French had, to their everlasting discredit, murdered in cold blood thirty-eight men (among them the poor inoffensive dominie), ten women, {174} twelve children; and the victors held ninety captives. To the credit of Iberville he offered life to one Glenn and his family, who had aided in ransoming many French from the Iroquois, and he permitted this man to name so many friends that the bloodthirsty Indians wanted to know if all Schenectady were related to this white man. One other house in the town was spared,--that of a widow with five children, under whose roof a wounded Frenchman lay. For the rest, Schenectady was reduced to ashes, the victors harnessing the Dutch farmers' horses to carry off the plunder. Of the captives, twenty-seven men and boys were carried back to Quebec. The other captives, mainly women and children, were given to the Indians. Forty livres for every human scalp were paid by the Sovereign Council of Quebec to the raiders.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FRENCH SOLDIER OF THE PERIOD]

The record of the raiders led from Three Rivers by Francois Hertel was almost the same. Setting out in January, he was followed by twenty-five French and twenty-five Indians to the border lands between Maine and New Hampshire. The end of March saw the bushrovers outside the little village of Salmon Falls. Thirty inhabitants were tomahawked on the spot, the houses burned, and one hundred prisoners carried off; but news had gone like wildfire to neighboring settlements, and Hertel was pursued by two hundred Englishmen. He placed his bushrovers on a small bridge across Wooster River and here held the pursuers at bay till darkness enabled him to escape.

But the darkest deed of infamy was perpetrated by the third band of raiders,--a deed that reveals the glories of war as they {175} exist, stripped of pageantry. Portneuf had led the raiders from Quebec, and he was joined by that famous leader of the Abenaki Indians, Baron de Saint-Castin, from the border lands between Acadia and Maine. Later, when Hertel struck through the woods with some of his followers, Portneuf's men numbered five hundred. With these he attacked Fort Loyal, or what is now Portland, Maine, in the month of June. The fort boasted eight great guns and one hundred soldiers. Under cover of the guns Lieutenant Clark and thirty men sallied out to reconnoiter the attacking forces ambushed in woods round a pasturage. At a musket crack the English were literally cut to pieces, four men only escaping back to the fort. The French then demanded unconditional surrender.

The English asked six days to consider. In six days English vessels would have come to the rescue. Secure, under a bluff of the ocean cliff, from the cannon fire of the fort, the French began to trench an approach to the palisades. Combustibles had been placed against the walls, when the English again asked a parley, offering to surrender if the French would swear by the living G.o.d to conduct them in safety to the nearest English post. To these conditions the French agreed.

Whether they could not control their Indian allies or had not intended to keep the terms matters little. The English had no sooner marched from the fort than, with a wild whoop, the Indians fell on men, women, and children. Some were killed by a single blow, others reserved for the torture stake. Only four Englishmen survived the onslaught, to be carried prisoners to Quebec.

The French had been victorious on all three raids; but they were victories over which posterity will never boast, which no writer dare describe in all the detail of their horrors, and which leave a black blot on the escutcheon of Canada.

It was hardly to be expected that the New England colonies would let such raids pa.s.s unpunished. The destruction of Schenectady had been bad enough. The ma.s.sacre of Salmon Falls caused the New Englanders to forget their jealousies for the once and to unite in a common cause.

All the colonies agreed {176} to contribute men, ships, and money to invade New France by land and sea. The land forces were placed under Winthrop and Schuyler; but as smallpox disorganized the expedition before it reached Lake Champlain, the attack by land had little other effect than to draw Frontenac from Quebec down to Montreal, where Captain Schuyler, with Dutch bushmen, succeeded in ravaging the settlements and killing at least twenty French.

The expedition by sea was placed under Sir William Phips of Ma.s.sachusetts,--a man who was the very antipodes of Frontenac. One of a poor family of twenty-six children, Phips had risen from being a shepherd boy in Maine to the position of ship's carpenter in Boston.

Here, among the harbor folk, he got wind of a Spanish treasure ship containing a million and a half dollars' worth of gold, which had been sunk off the West Indies. Going to England, Phips succeeded in interesting that same clique of courtiers who helped Radisson to establish the Hudson's Bay Company,--Albemarle and Prince Rupert and the King; and when, with the funds which they advanced, Phips succeeded in raising the treasure vessel, he received, in addition to his share of the booty, a t.i.tle and the appointment as governor of Ma.s.sachusetts.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SIR WILLIAM PHIPS]

Here, then, was the daring leader chosen to invade New France. Phips sailed first for Port Royal, which had in late years become infested with French pirates, preying on Boston commerce. Word had just come of the fearful ma.s.sacres of {177} colonists at Portland. Boston was inflamed with a spirit of vengeance. The people had appointed days of fasting and prayer to invoke Heaven's blessing on their war. When Phips sailed into Annapolis Basin with his vessels and seven hundred men in the month of May, he found the French commander, Meneval, ill of the gout, with a garrison of about eighty soldiers, but all the cannon chanced to be dismounted. The odds against the French did not permit resistance. Meneval stipulated for an honorable surrender,--all property to be respected and the garrison to be sent to some French port; but no sooner were the English in possession than, like the French at Portland, they broke the pledge. There was no ma.s.sacre as in Maine, but plunderers ran riot, seizing everything on which hands could be laid, ransacking houses and desecrating the churches; and sixty of the leading people, including Meneval and the priests, were carried off as prisoners. Leaving one English flag flying, Phips sailed home.

Indignation at Boston had been fanned to fury, for now all the details of the butchery at Portland were known; and Phips found the colony mustering a monster expedition to attack the very stronghold of French power,--Quebec itself. England could afford no aid to her colonies, but thirty-two merchant vessels and frigates had been impressed into the service, some of them carrying as many as forty-four cannon.

Artisans, sailors, soldiers, clerks, all cla.s.ses had volunteered as fighters, to the number of twenty-five hundred men; but there was one thing lacking,--they had no pilot who knew the St. Lawrence. Full of confidence born of inexperience, the fleet set sail on the 9th of August, commanded again by Phips.

Time was wasted ravaging the coasts of Gaspe, holding long-winded councils of war, arguing in the commander's stateroom instead of drilling on deck. Three more weeks were wasted poking about the lower St. Lawrence, picking up chance vessels off Tadoussac and Anticosti.

Among the prize vessels taken near Anticosti was one of Jolliet's, bearing his wife and mother-in-law. The ladies delighted the hearts of the Puritans by the {178} news that not more than one hundred men garrisoned Quebec; but Phips was reckoning without his host, and his host was Frontenac. Besides, it was late in the season--the middle of October--before the English fleet rounded the Island of Orleans and faced the Citadel of Quebec.

[Ill.u.s.tration: COUNT FRONTENAC (From a statue at Quebec)]

Indians had carried word to the city that an Englishwoman, taken prisoner in their raids, had told them more than thirty vessels had sailed from Boston to invade New France. Frontenac was absent in Montreal. Quickly the commander at Quebec sent coureurs with warning to Frontenac, and then set about casting up barricades in the narrow streets that led from Lower to Upper Town.

Frontenac could not credit the news. Had he not heard here in Montreal from Indian coureurs how the English overland expedition lay rotting of smallpox near Lake Champlain, such pitiable objects that the Iroquois refused to join them against the French? New France now numbered a population of twelve thousand and could muster three thousand fighting men; and though the English colonies numbered twenty {179} thousand people, how could they, divided by jealousies, send an invading army of twenty-seven hundred, as the rumor stated? Frontenac, grizzled old warrior, did not credit the news, but, all the same, he set out amid pelting rains by boat for Quebec. Half-way to Three Rivers more messengers brought him word that the English fleet were now advancing from Tadoussac. He sent back orders for the commander at Montreal to rush the bush-rovers down to Quebec, and he himself arrived at the Citadel just as the Le Moyne brothers anch.o.r.ed below Cape Diamond from a voyage to Hudson Bay. Maricourt Le Moyne reported how he had escaped past the English fleet by night, and it would certainly be at Quebec by daybreak.

Scouts rallied the bushrangers on both sides of the St. Lawrence to Quebec's aid. Frontenac bade them guard the outposts and not desert their hamlets, while Ste. Helene and the other Le Moynes took command of the sharpshooters in Lower Town, scattering them in hiding along the banks of the St. Charles and among the houses facing the St. Lawrence below Castle St. Louis.

Sure enough, at daybreak on Monday, October 16, sail after sail, thirty-four in all, rounded the end of Orleans Island and took up position directly opposite Quebec City. It was a cold, wet autumn morning. Fog and rain alternately chased in gray shadows across the far hills, and above the mist of the river loomed ominous the red-gray fort which the English had come to capture. Castle St. Louis stood where Chateau Frontenac stands to-day; and what is now the promenade of a magnificent terrace was at that time a breastwork of cannon extending on down the sloping hill to the left as far as the ramparts. In fact, the cannon of that period were more dangerous than they are to-day, for long-range missiles have rendered old-time fortifications adapted for close-range fighting almost useless; and the cannon of Upper Town, Quebec, that October morning swept the approach to three sides of the fort, facing the St. Charles, opposite Point Levis and the St.

Lawrence, where it curves back on itself; and the fourth side was sheer wall--invulnerable.

{180} With a rattling of anchor chains and a creaking of masts the great sails of the English fleet were lowered, and a little boat put out at ten o'clock under flag of truce to meet a boat half-way from Lower Town. Phips' messenger was conducted blindfold up the barricaded streets leading to Castle St. Louis; and the gunners had been instructed to clang their muskets on the stones to give the impression of great numbers. Suddenly the bandage was taken from the man's eyes and he found himself in a great hall, standing before the august presence of Frontenac, surrounded by a circle of magnificently dressed officers. The New Englander delivered his message,--Phips' letter demanding surrender: "_Your prisoners, your persons, your estates . . .

and should you refuse, I am resolved by the help of G.o.d, in whom I trust, to revenge by force of arms all our wrongs_." . . . As the reading of the letter was finished the man looked up to see an insolent smile pa.s.s round the faces of Frontenac's officers, one of whom superciliously advised hanging the bearer of such insolence without waste of time. The New Englander pulled out his watch and signaled that he must have Frontenac's answer within an hour. The haughty old Governor pretended not to see the motion, and then, with a smile like ice, made answer in {181} words that have become renowned: "I shall not keep you waiting so long! Tell your General I do not recognize King William! I know no king of England but King James! Does your General suppose that these brave gentlemen"--pointing to his officers--"would consent to trust a man who broke his word at Port Royal?"

[Ill.u.s.tration: CASTLE ST. LOUIS]

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 pa.s.sed in futile arguments and councils of war, and on Tuesday, the 17th, towards night, was heard wild shouting within Quebec walls.