Canada: the Empire of the North

A >> Agnes C. Laut >> Canada: the Empire of the North

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"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 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.

[Illustration: 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 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, {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.

[Illustration: 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 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 {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
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.

[Illustration: 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 massacres 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 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 {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.

[Illustration: 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 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.

{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 God, 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 pass 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?"

[Illustration: 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 passed in futile arguments and councils of war,
and on Tuesday, the 17th, towards night, was heard wild shouting within
Quebec walls.

[Illustration: ATTACK ON QUEBEC, 1690]

"My faith, Messieurs!" exclaimed one of the French prisoners aboard
Phips' ship; "now you _have_ lost your chance! Those {182} 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 {183} 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.

[Illustration: CASTLE ST. LOUIS, QUEBEC]

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 {184} 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 {185} 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.

[Illustration: PLAN OF QUEBEC (after Franquelin, 1683)]

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.

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