FROM 1686 TO 1698

For ten years Hudson Bay becomes the theater of northern buccaneers and bushraiders. A treaty of neutrality in 1686 provides that the bay shall be held in common by the fur traders of England and France; but the adventurers of England and the bushrovers of Quebec have no notion of leaving things so uncertain. Spite of truce, both fit out raiders, and the King of France, according to the shifting diplomacy of the day, issues secret orders “to permit not a vestige of English possession on the northern bay.”

Maricourt Le Moyne held the newly captured forts on the south shore of James Bay till Iberville came back overland in 1687. The fort at Rupert had been completely abandoned after the French victory of the previous summer, and the Hudson’s Bay Company sloop, the Young, had just sailed into the port to reestablish the fur post. Iberville surrounded the sloop by his bushrovers, captured it with all hands, and dispatched four spies across to Charlton Island, where another sloop, the Churchill, swung at anchor. Here Iberville’s run of luck turned. Three of his four spies were captured, fettered, and thrown into the hold of the vessel for the winter. In the spring of 1688 one was brought above decks to help the English sailors. Watching his chance, the grizzled bushrover waited till six of the English crew were up the ratlines. Quick as flash the Frenchman tiptoed across decks in his noiseless moccasins, took one precautionary glance over his shoulder, brained two Englishmen with an ax, liberated his comrades, and at pistol point kept the other Englishmen up the masts till he and his fellows had righted the ship and steered the vessel across to Rupert River, where the provisions were just in time to save Iberville’s party from starvation.

In the spring of 1688, about the time that the brave bush-rovers had brought the English ship from Charlton Island across to Rupert River, two English frigates under Captain Moon, with twenty-four soldiers over and above the crews, had come south from Nelson to attack the French fur traders at Albany. As ill luck would have it, the ice floes began driving inshore. The English ships found themselves locked in the ice before the besieged fort. Across the jam from Rupert River dashed Iberville with his Indian bandits, portaging where the ice floes covered the water, paddling where lanes of clear way parted the floating drift. Iberville hid his men in the tamarack swamps till eighty-two Englishmen had landed and all unsuspecting left their ships unguarded. Iberville only waited till the furs in the fort had been transferred to the holds of the vessels. The ice cleared. The Frenchman rushed his bushrovers on board, seized the vessel with the most valuable cargo, and sailed gayly out of Albany for Quebec. The astounded English set fire to the other ship and retreated overland.

But the dare-devil bushrovers were not yet clear of trouble. As the ice drive jammed and held them in Hudson Straits, they were aghast to see, sailing full tilt with the roaring tide of the straits, a fleet of English frigates, the Hudson’s Bay Company’s annual ships; but Iberville sniffed at danger as a war horse glories in gunpowder. He laughed his merriest, and as the ice drive locked all the ships within gunshot, ran up an English flag above his French crew and had actually signaled the captains of the English frigates to come aboard and visit him, when the ice cleared. Hoisting sail, he showed swift heels to the foe. Iberville’s ambition now was to sweep all the English from Hudson Bay, in other words, to capture Nelson on the west coast, whence came the finest furs; but other raids called him to Canada.

It will be recalled that La Salle’s enemies had secretly encouraged the Iroquois to attack the tribes of the Illinois; and now the fur traders of New York were encouraging the Iroquois to pillage the Indians of the Mississippi valley, in order to divert peltries from the French on the St. Lawrence to the English at New York. Savages of the north, rallied by Perrot and Duluth and La Motte Cadillac, came down by the lakes to Fort Frontenac to aid the French; but they found that La Barre, the new governor, foolish old man, had been frightened into making peace with the Iroquois warriors, abandoning the Illinois to Iroquois raid and utterly forgetful that a peace which is not a victory is not worth the paper it is written on.

For the shame of this disgraceful peace La Barre was recalled to France and the Marquis de Denonville, a brave soldier, sent out as governor. Unfortunately Denonville did not understand conditions in the colony. The Jesuit missionaries were commissioned to summon the Iroquois to a conference at Fort Frontenac, but when the deputies arrived they were seized, tortured, and fifty of them shipped to France by the King’s order to serve as slaves on the royal galleys. It was an act of treachery heinous beyond measure and exposed the Jesuit missionaries among the Five Nations to terrible vengeance; but the Iroquois code of honor was higher than the white man’s. “Go home,” they warned the Jesuit missionary. “We have now every right to treat thee as our foe; but we shall not do so! Thy heart has had no share in the wrong done to us. We shall not punish thee for the crimes of another, tho’ thou didst act as the unconscious tool. But leave us! When our young men chant the song of war they may take counsel only of their fury and harm thee! Go to thine own people”; and furnishing him with guides, they sent him to Quebec.

Though Denonville marched with his soldiers through the Iroquois cantons, he did little harm and less good; for the wily warriors had simply withdrawn their families into the woods, and the Iroquois were only biding their time for fearful vengeance.

This lust of vengeance was now terribly whetted. Dongan, the English governor of New York, had been ordered by King James of England to observe the treaty of neutrality between England and France; but this did not hinder him supplying the Iroquois with arms to raid the French and secretly advising them “not to bury the war hatchet, just to hide it in the grass, and stand on their guard to begin the war anew.”

Nor did the treaty of neutrality prevent the French from raiding Hudson Bay and ordering shot in cold blood any French bushrover who dared to guide the English traders to the country of the Upper Lakes.

In addition to English influence egging on the Iroquois, the treachery of the Huron chief, The Rat, lashed the vengeance of the Five Nations to a fury. He had come down to Fort Frontenac to aid the French. He was told that the French had again arranged peace with the Iroquois, and deputies were even now on their way from the Five Nations.

“Peace!” The old Huron chief was dumbfounded. What were these fool French doing, trusting to an Iroquois peace? “Ah,” he grunted, “that may be well”; and he withdrew without revealing a sign of his intentions. Then he lay in ambush on the trail of the deputies, fell on the Iroquois peace messengers with fury, slaughtered half the band, then sent the others back with word that he had done this by order of Denonville, the French governor.

“There,” grunted The Rat grimly, “I ’ve killed the peace for them! We ’ll see how Onontio gets out of this mess.”

Meanwhile war had been declared between England and France. The Stuarts had been dethroned. France was supporting the exiled monarch, and William of Orange had become king of England. Iberville and Duluth and La Motte Cadillac, the famous fighters of Canada’s wildwood, were laying plans before the French Governor for the invasion and conquest of New York; and New York was preparing to defend itself by pouring ammunition and firearms free of cost into the hands of the Iroquois. Then the Iroquois vengeance fell.

Between the night and morning of August 4 and 5, in 1689, a terrific thunderstorm had broken over Montreal. Amidst the crack of hail and crash of falling trees, with the thunder reverberating from the mountain like cannonading, whilst the frightened people stood gazing at the play of lightning across their windows, fourteen hundred Iroquois warriors landed behind Montreal, beached their canoes, and stole upon the settlement. What next followed beggars description. Nothing else like it occurs in the history of Canada. For years this summer was to be known as “the Year of the Massacre.”

Before the storm subsided, the Iroquois had stationed themselves in circles round every house outside the walls of Montreal. At the signal of a whistle, the warriors fell on the settlement like beasts of prey. Neither doors nor windows were fastened in that age, and the people, deep in sleep after the vigil of the storm, were dragged from their beds before they were well awake. Men, women, and children fell victims to such ingenuity of cruelty as only savage vengeance could conceive. Children were dashed to pieces before their parents’ eyes; aged parents tomahawked before struggling sons and daughters; fathers held powerless that they might witness the tortures wreaked on wives and daughters. Homes which had heard some alarm and were on guard were set on fire, and those who perished in the flames died a merciful death compared to those who fell in the hands of the victors. By daybreak two hundred people had been wantonly butchered. A hundred and fifty more had been taken captives. As if their vengeance could not be glutted, the Iroquois crossed the river opposite Montreal, and, in full sight of the fort, weakly garrisoned and paralyzed with fright, spent the rest of the week, day and night, torturing the white captives. By night victims could be seen tied to the torture stake amid the wreathing flames, with the tormentors dancing round the camp fire in maniacal ferocity. Denonville was simply powerless. He lost his head, and seemed so panic-stricken that he forbade even volunteer bands from rallying to the rescue. For two months the Iroquois overran Canada unchecked. Indeed, it was years before the boldness engendered by this foray became reduced to respect for French authority. Settlement after settlement, the marauders raided. From Montreal to Three Rivers crops went up in flame, and the terrified habitants came cowering with their families to the shelter of the palisades.

In the midst of this universal terror came the country’s savior. Frontenac had been recalled because he quarreled with the intendant and he quarreled with the Jesuits and he quarreled with the fur traders; but his bitterest enemies did not deny that he could put the fear of the Lord and respect for the French into the Iroquois’ heart. Arbitrary he was as a czar, but just always! To be sure he mended his fortunes by personal fur trade, but in doing so he cheated no man; and he worked no injustice, and he wrought in all things for the lasting good of the country. Homage he demanded as to a king, once going so far as to drive the Sovereign Councilors from his presence with the flat of a sword; but he firmly believed and he had publicly proved that he was worthy of homage, and that the men who are forever shouting “liberty liberty and the people’s rights,” are frequently wolves in sheep’s clothing, eating out the vitals of a nation’s prosperity.

Here, then, was the haughty, hot-headed, aggressive Frontenac, sent back in his old age to restore the prestige of New France, where both La Barre the grafter, and Denonville the courteous Christian gentleman, had failed.

To this period of Iroquois raids belongs one of the most heroic episodes in Canadian life. The only settlers who had not fled to the protection of the palisaded forts were the grand old seigniors, the new nobility of New France, whose mansions were like forts in themselves, palisaded, with stone bastions and water supply and yards for stock and mills inside the walls. Here the seigniors, wildwood knights of a wilderness age, held little courts that were imitations of the Governor’s pomp at Quebec. Sometimes during war the seignior’s wife and daughters were reduced to plowing in the fields and laboring with the women servants at the harvest; but ordinarily the life at the seigniory was a life of petty grandeur, with such style as the backwoods afforded. In the hall or great room of the manor house was usually an enormous table used both as court of justice by the seignior and festive board. On one side was a huge fireplace with its homemade benches, on the other a clumsily carved chiffonier loaded with solid silver. In the early days the seignior’s bedstead might be in the same room, an enormous affair with panoplies of curtains and counterpanes of fur rugs and feather mattresses, so high that it almost necessitated a ladder. But in the matter of dress the rude life made up in style what it lacked in the equipments of a grand mansion.

The bishop’s description of the women’s dresses I have already given, though at this period the women had added to the “sins” of bows and furbelows and frills, which the bishop deplored, the yet more heinous error of such enormous hoops that it required fine maneuvering on the part of a grand dame to negotiate the door of the family coach; and however pompous the seignior’s air, it must have suffered temporary eclipse in that coach from the hoops of his spouse and his spouse’s daughters. As for the seignior, when he was not dressed in buckskin, leading bushrovers on raids, he appeared magnificent in all the grandeur that a 20 pounds wig and Spanish laces and French ruffles and imported satins could lend his portly person; and if the figure were not portly, one may venture to guess, from the pictures of stout gentlemen in the quilted brocades of the period, that padding made up what nature lacked.

Such a seigniory was Vercheres, some twenty miles from Montreal, on the south side of the St. Lawrence. M. de Vercheres was an officer in one of the regiments, and chanced to be absent from home during October of 1696, doing duty at Quebec. Madame de Vercheres was visiting in Montreal. Strange as it may seem, the fort and the family had been left in charge of the daughter, Madeline, at this time only fourteen years of age. At eight o’clock on the morning of October 22 she had gone four hundred paces outside the fort gates when she heard the report of musket firing. The rest of the story may be told in her own words:

I at once saw that the Iroquois were firing at our settlers, who lived near the fort. One of our servants call out: “Fly, Mademoiselle, fly! The Iroquois are upon us!”

Instantly I saw some forty-five Iroquois running towards me, already within pistol shot. Determined to die rather than fall in their hands, I ran for the fort, praying to the Blessed Virgin, “Holy Mother, save me! Let me perish rather than fall in their hands!” Meanwhile my pursuers paused to fire their guns. Bullets whistled past my ears. Once within hearing of the fort, I shouted, “To arms! To arms!”

There were but two soldiers in the fort, and they were so overcome by fear that they ran to hide in the bastion. At the gates I found two women wailing for the loss of their husbands. Then I saw several stakes had fallen from the palisades where enemies could gain entrance; so I seized the fallen planks and urged the women to give a hand putting them back in their places. Then I ran to the bastion, where I found two of the soldiers lighting a fuse.

“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 God 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; 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: “God 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.

“God 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 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 Récollet, 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, Maine; a second from Three Rivers to lay waste the border lands of New Hampshire; a third from Montreal to assault 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.

The woods lay snow padded, silent, somber. Up the river bed of the Richelieu, over the rolling drifts, glided the bushrovers. 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 assault 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 massacre 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, 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.

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 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 God 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 pass unpunished. The destruction of Schenectady had been bad enough. The massacre 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 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 Massachusetts, 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 title and the appointment as governor of Massachusetts.

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 massacres of 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 massacre 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 classes 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 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.

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 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 anchored 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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