FROM 1698 TO 1713

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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