Gateway to America
Chapter 5: Massachusetts Bay & Its Neighbors: Les Acadians and Amerindians Find Themselves in the Way
Provincial life in the slowly-evolving colony of New France was marked by low population figures, lack of support from the Mother Country, and subsistence levels in most areas of economic activity. By contrast, the several communities lining Massachusetts Bay, and that along Boston Harbor in particular, were exploding in every area: record levels of immigration, rapid exploitation of the environment, growing sophistication in mercantile activity, and the establishment of an entrepreneurial class of traders and merchants. The narrow, rigidly theocratic rule of ministers and Puritan idealists had, by the third and fourth generation of their descendants, been steadily eroded, to the point where officials in London began awakening to the idea that its Bay colony was no longer a desert where religious extremists could be sent away and forgotten, but a viable commercial entity that should be monitored and controlled for the king’s benefit. Fitful attempts to bridle Massachusetts produced inevitable discord and friction, especially as colonists embarked upon imperial adventures of their own, mostly directed against neighboring Indians, French-speaking farmers in Nova Scotia (known as Acadians), and the few military representatives of King Louis XIV, stationed mostly around the small settlement of Quebec. Whatever form these bellicose endeavors took (and the inevitable acts of response that followed), be they elaborate invasions, guerrilla-style forays into the wilderness, or piratical exploits on the high seas, were often marked by a surreal mix of tragicomic excess, extraordinary cruelty, and inordinate loss of life. The scale might have been small, but the human hardship proved extreme.
Les Acadians
At the turn of the seventeenth century, France was the most populous nation of Western Europe, approximately 20 million inhabitants. By contrast, England could boast a mere four million, and Spain a little over six. Even so, as a French minister of the times famously worried, France could not afford to export its citizenry or drain off its human resources on anything as speculative as colonial enterprises abroad, and the comparative populations of the various outposts of empire certainly confirm the irresolution of those who followed Champlain into New France. By 1641, about two hundred people lived along the St. Lawrence River. Montreal was formerly targeted with a permanent habitation the next year when fifty-five settlers landed on the island that Cartier had discovered in 1535, and which Champlain had admired seventy-six years after that. In the next decade ten marriages were celebrated in this community, or one per year, from which twenty-two births were recorded. These instances of new life were offset by twenty-three deaths. Cardinal Richelieu had envisioned a colonial population of 15,000 by mid-century. Instead, about three to four hundred lived on the Canadian mainland, with perhaps another three hundred in all of Acadia. In contrast, Maryland and Virginia together had been settled by nearly twenty-four thousand English-speaking colonists. Within approximately that same time frame, Massachusetts totaled twelve thousand. The entirety of Spanish holdings encompassed approximately TO COME souls.
Those men of substance who ventured into New France generally did so at great risk to body, mind, soul, and purse, and the history of Acadia in particular is a litter of frustrated ambition and the crossed stars of commercial enterprise. Men could wheedle sumptuous titles from the king, sell property in France, take on mortgages and huge loans from merchants, then set sail for North America full of determination to make good, only to find other men already ashore with the same commissions, the same determination, and the same staggering loads of debt. Multiple grants of monopoly, multiple awards of sovereignty for the same territories, and multiple distributions of civil authority created an absolute state of chaos from 1640 to 1645, when two designees waged a small though vicious civil war that ranged from present-day St. John in New Brunswick to Port Royal and beyond on Nova Scotia proper. The numbers of combatants were miniscule, often a few dozen on one side fighting a few dozen on the other, but passions were real. Ships were boarded and captured, trading posts burned to the ground, habitations totally destroyed (chapels and all), and prisoners routinely hanged after battle. Delegations representing both allegiances made in-person visitations to Boston, attempting to engage the support of what was already becoming an indispensable trading partner between the Great Bay of Massachusetts, along to the a grey border zone marked by Pemaquid in Maine, on through to the Bay of Fundy. The great Puritan moralist John Winthrop was wary of dealing with papists and Jesuits (was it “lawful for Christians to aid idolators,” he mused), but he certainly desired the commercial link. His decision allowing the Frenchman La Tour to recruit over seventy Massachusetts volunteers and four ships for a war expedition cost him the governorship in 1644.
In 1654, with passions in Great Britain still smoldering from the recently completed war between Charles I and parliamentary forces, the inevitable covetousness of Massachusetts Bay for a colonial adventure of its own came into convenient play. Robert Sedgwick, who had emigrated to Boston in 1635 and achieved some position within the community as a military authority, had returned from one of his trips to England with a commission from Oliver Cromwell to attack New Amsterdam, the principal Dutch settlement in the New World. Again, taking population statistics into mind, “New Englanders” held a 6 to 1 advantage in people power, and Sedgwick intended his victory to open up the fur trade for English interests by controlling the Hudson River Valley. Unfortunately for this plan, news reached Boston that Cromwell had engineered a peace treaty with the Netherlands. Sedgwick was all for going ahead anyway. He had 900 troops at his disposal and at least four ships, but the civic and religious community of Boston would not go along. Dealing with papists, however, that was a different matter. Despite the fact that no state of war then existed between France and England, Sedgwick decided to attack Acadia. Among his many commercial interests was the fish trade, and if entrepreneurship in furs was to be stifled, there was always cod to turn to. In a two-month campaign that began in July, he captured St. John, then Port Royal and, on his way back to Boston, he expelled the French from their comptoir on the Penobscot River in today’s Maine. The entire coastline between Boston and Port Royal was, at least theoretically, now under English control.
But of course it wasn’t. The numbers of people involved in these transfers of authority were, in actuality, very small, yet the amount of territory was immense, far too much to control effectively. Instead of the usual plundering, where farmhouses and barns were put to the torch, and residents forced to flee or put on ships to be repatriated home, Sedgwick found it more politic to leave things pretty much as they had been. French farmers around Port Royal on the Annapolis Basin were allowed legal title to their property, and granted basic civil and religious rights. Even a few Capuchin monks in the area were allowed to stay. Thus began the conflicted relationship between French-speaking Acadians and their English masters that would end in tragedy one century later.
In the course of these various regime changes, Acadian farmers carried on, often in ways that would not alter, attitudinally or manually, for several generations. Their worldview was primarily agricultural. They had come from France as farmers, and farming is what took up most every hour of their day, particularly during the summer months when the tidal range of the Bay of Fundy, affecting as it did countless estuaries where smaller streams and rivers emptied into its salty water, was not as extreme. This gave them the opportunity, working as one, to reclaim land from the ocean.
In keeping with the understated nature of most everything to do with Nova Scotia, aside from titanic Atlantic storms that is, the great achievements of the Acadian people are not always easy for the modern traveler to see or appreciate. Perhaps these early settlers were surprised at what they scanned when they stepped off the ship from France, perhaps it took time to understand and strategize as to the proper exploitation of the resource that faced them. We do know that in 1636 five specialists arrived on a vessel called the Saint Jehan, noted on the passenger list as sauniers, an archaic term that will not be found in most modern French dictionaries. It means “salt worker” or “marsh worker.”
We noted earlier the dyke system around Champlain’s home village of Brouage, whereby salt pans along the coast were enclosed after flooding by the tides, and then allowed to sit and evaporate, yielding salt. In nearby Poitou a similar system had been employed to drain fresh water marshes as well, but nowhere was this technique better perfected than in western Nova Scotia.
The premise was simple enough. Estuarial marshland along the Bay, some 75,000 acres, was enriched with nutrients by two sources that fed it four times a day with each tide change: rivers from the inland, with organic decay and run-off, and the Atlantic itself, which deposits an especially rich red mud from the ocean floor. Acadians took note of the wild hay and grasses that flourished in these flooded fields, and at low tides they found that top soil, in many instances, was up to forty feet deep. First at Port Royal, and then along the coasts in both directions, but especially into the expansive Minas Basin north of this first settlement, large dykes were built to enclose and drain these acres, yielding pasturage of tremendous fertility.
The enterprise to create these fields was prodigious. “What labor is needed!” wrote a French visitor in 1699. The levies themselves (or sea walls) could be as high as sixteen feet, their core a clay or mud base intermixed with tree trunks and branches, some interwoven, then covered with sod, the roots of which grew into the facing and solidified it. This pyramidal form could be twelve feet wide at the footing. Strategically placed were sluice gates or aboiteaux with primitive valves known as clappers that closed as the tides came in, preventing the entrance of sea water, but opened as the tides receded, allowing for drainage of the fields. Ditches were dug within the enclosures which facilitated the reclamation: rain water, snow melt, runoff from streams, all rinsed the pasture of salt, which was channeled into the sluice system, a purification that took two to three years to complete. A gang of five to eight men, it was recorded, could do sixteen feet a day of dyke. The results were fine yields of hay, wheat, peas, and beans. The slight elevation at Fort Beausejour facing east, at the very gateway to Nova Scotia from New Brunswick, presents the best overall view for the modern traveler, hundreds of acres of marsh fields still under productive cultivation.[1] If you didn’t know otherwise, there isn’t a hint, aside from the slight outline of protective dykes, that this wasn’t the way it has been since the dawn of time. No sign of the hundreds of man hours consumed, the collective labor of an entire community, or the social construct that developed over time which solidified the Acadian ethos of shared engagement and identity. The first men who tilled these fields, it should be remembered, did so hitched to ploughs themselves. As historians have pointed out, records up until the 1680s make no mention of horses, oxen, mules, or any other animals normally associated with farm operations. The “beasts of burden,” in other words, were the Acadians themselves.
In 1667, Acadia was transferred once again, and for the last time, to formal French control (a state of legal possession that would last until 1713, despite interregnums where no one was effectively in control), the result of yet another treaty, ending yet another round of conflict between England and France. As was usual in such negotiations, horse trading of various territorial assets between the two powers was arbitrarily negotiated, usually without any concern for the interests or opinions of those directly impacted. British merchants who had invested heavily in Acadian projects suddenly found themselves dispossessed and bankrupted. Massachusetts stood aghast. Returning Acadia to French control would encourage Louis XIV to further strengthen Quebec on the mainland, whereas the continued loss of Acadia would “wither” his interest in the area even further. The French foil to the English presence at Port Royal was Cape Breton, after all, which consisted of about twenty-five permanent residents, a mere pretension. No one in London or Paris, however, really cared, and the Treaty of Breda was signed, with fanfare, in July of that year.
This was the moment that the French Crown finally took North American colonial matters in hand. Various commercial entities such as the Hundred Associates and the homegrown Communauté des Habitants had all attempted to organize the division of spoils in New Canada, but by 1667 their collective failure was recognized by all. In that year the king officially took possession of the entire commercial apparatus, and the formal colonization of Canada may be said to have begun at this juncture, though performance and achievement were at first marginal. What choice did Louis have? On every front, the situation had rapidly deteriorated. Intermittent warfare with the Iroquois had proved devastating, the three important centers of the mainland community – Montreal, Trois Riviers, and Quebec – frequently cut off from each other by marauding bands of savages. Sporadic military expeditions involving professional French soldiers often ended in catastrophe. Senechal Lauson, a major landowner on what would become Quebec’s breadbasket, the Île d’Orléans on the St. Lawrence, went off to confront an Iroquoian war party that was rummaging about the island. He and his entire troop were slaughtered. Internally, what passed for civil government in the colony stood deadlocked in countless controversies, both with the mercantile community and the by now exceedingly powerful religious orders. By 1666, one in eight inhabitants of Quebec was a priest, monk, nun, or dependent of a religious order. As royal governors came and went, these often highly-educated individuals came to see themselves as keepers of the grail, not glory-seeking courtiers here for a quick military success or profit from the bribery and venality of fur and liquor trading with Indians. Friction with civil authority proved bitter and inevitable. Even amongst the religious, dissension was rife, particularly during the administration of Francoise de Laval, Quebec’s first bishop, who found himself pointlessly quarreling with, among other groups, normally quiescent Ursuline nuns. Commercially, the fur trade declined, due in large measure to Indian interferences along the trade routes and a change in fashion at Parisian salons. Fur was still commercially viable, but smaller hats for men drastically reduced the specific demand for beaver. Population figures for the colony did show some upward lift; by 1663 some 3,000 French lived along the Laurentian Valley, but these numbers remained puny alongside those of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, a semi-independent entity that was undergoing an explosion in entrepreneurial activity, most of it initially unfettered from London, which would lead to a demonstrably more aggressive outlook towards its neighbors -- all this a direct result of its demographic growth. In the single year of 1635, for instance, the same number of people boarded ship to emigrate to New England as equaled the entire French population in Canada.
And Acadia? Its population barely maintained a level number: about 350 in all, of whom approximately a third were settled in or near Port Royal. Signs of their eventual prosperity, however, are apparent in the first governmental census ever undertaken by French authorities on the island, a concession that bureaucrats in Paris had really no idea as to the condition of their own colony. Unlike the anecdotal reports of visiting administrators and officials over the next thirty or so years, who depicted a society that was more or less subsistence in nature, the survey of 1671, however crude, paints a more realistic picture. The settlers were mostly poor, to be sure, but they had married young and were often the parents of very large families. In France, half of all children born were dead by their twenty-first birthday, a quarter of those before they had reached the age of one. Infant mortality rates were sharply lower in Acadia, due in large measure to the absence of epidemics that were common in Europe, and the freedom from the usual rounds of devastating warfare and attendant famine that marked life in the old country. Charles Bourgeois of Port Royal was twenty-five years old and married to seventeen-year-old Anne du Gast. They had a young daughter, a year and a half old, and ran a small farm with two acres of cleared land. Their livestock, which may have grazed for some part of the year on common pasture, consisted of nineteen animals, both sheep and beef. Their parents collectively had produced fourteen children, cleared thirty-six acres of land, and managed seventy-nine cattle and sheep. They clearly produced enough food on which to live, with a surplus to trade for imported goods such as tools, iron, some clothing, spirits, and occasional luxury items, most of which were purchased from illegal traders from Massachusetts. Archaeological evidence points to their houses as reasonably substantial: deep-cellared, plank construction, caulked with clay and vegetation. Better, in other words, than the sod houses in the later plains states of Nebraska and Kansas. It is interesting to note that some Acadians refused to answer the questions put to them by the census takers. None of your business, appears to have been their attitude. Almost two-thirds of all people who claim an Acadian heritage are directly related to these 300 to 500 or so individuals listed in the 1671 census (through the male line). In French-Canadian terms, this is equivalent to the Mayflower Society.
By the time of the census, people like Charles Bourgeoise and his family can no longer be safely classified as either “French” or “immigrants.” They represent second and third generation Acadians, born in the New World itself, and more or less bystanders to the successive changes in regime that seemed to take place every twenty or thirty years. Historians have argued as to the dispersal of Acadians between the years 1670 and 1710, when families (usually younger offspring) spread both north and south along the coast from Port Royal. In the Minas Basin, and even more significantly at the head of the Bay of Fundy, settlements grew that outpaced Port Royal itself, due in large measure to the preponderance of fertile marsh land just there for the taking. These new farmers shared the burdens of communal labor, as their forebears had, and seem to have continued the genetic distaste for authority figures that would mark their own progeny in the years of conflict that lay ahead. When a supply ship from Massachusetts sailed up the Bay and let itself settle into the mud at low tide to trade and barter, there were no officials anywhere near to forbid, tax, or interfere with any of their transactions. This is the way Acadians liked it.
Les Acadians
At the turn of the seventeenth century, France was the most populous nation of Western Europe, approximately 20 million inhabitants. By contrast, England could boast a mere four million, and Spain a little over six. Even so, as a French minister of the times famously worried, France could not afford to export its citizenry or drain off its human resources on anything as speculative as colonial enterprises abroad, and the comparative populations of the various outposts of empire certainly confirm the irresolution of those who followed Champlain into New France. By 1641, about two hundred people lived along the St. Lawrence River. Montreal was formerly targeted with a permanent habitation the next year when fifty-five settlers landed on the island that Cartier had discovered in 1535, and which Champlain had admired seventy-six years after that. In the next decade ten marriages were celebrated in this community, or one per year, from which twenty-two births were recorded. These instances of new life were offset by twenty-three deaths. Cardinal Richelieu had envisioned a colonial population of 15,000 by mid-century. Instead, about three to four hundred lived on the Canadian mainland, with perhaps another three hundred in all of Acadia. In contrast, Maryland and Virginia together had been settled by nearly twenty-four thousand English-speaking colonists. Within approximately that same time frame, Massachusetts totaled twelve thousand. The entirety of Spanish holdings encompassed approximately TO COME souls.
Those men of substance who ventured into New France generally did so at great risk to body, mind, soul, and purse, and the history of Acadia in particular is a litter of frustrated ambition and the crossed stars of commercial enterprise. Men could wheedle sumptuous titles from the king, sell property in France, take on mortgages and huge loans from merchants, then set sail for North America full of determination to make good, only to find other men already ashore with the same commissions, the same determination, and the same staggering loads of debt. Multiple grants of monopoly, multiple awards of sovereignty for the same territories, and multiple distributions of civil authority created an absolute state of chaos from 1640 to 1645, when two designees waged a small though vicious civil war that ranged from present-day St. John in New Brunswick to Port Royal and beyond on Nova Scotia proper. The numbers of combatants were miniscule, often a few dozen on one side fighting a few dozen on the other, but passions were real. Ships were boarded and captured, trading posts burned to the ground, habitations totally destroyed (chapels and all), and prisoners routinely hanged after battle. Delegations representing both allegiances made in-person visitations to Boston, attempting to engage the support of what was already becoming an indispensable trading partner between the Great Bay of Massachusetts, along to the a grey border zone marked by Pemaquid in Maine, on through to the Bay of Fundy. The great Puritan moralist John Winthrop was wary of dealing with papists and Jesuits (was it “lawful for Christians to aid idolators,” he mused), but he certainly desired the commercial link. His decision allowing the Frenchman La Tour to recruit over seventy Massachusetts volunteers and four ships for a war expedition cost him the governorship in 1644.
In 1654, with passions in Great Britain still smoldering from the recently completed war between Charles I and parliamentary forces, the inevitable covetousness of Massachusetts Bay for a colonial adventure of its own came into convenient play. Robert Sedgwick, who had emigrated to Boston in 1635 and achieved some position within the community as a military authority, had returned from one of his trips to England with a commission from Oliver Cromwell to attack New Amsterdam, the principal Dutch settlement in the New World. Again, taking population statistics into mind, “New Englanders” held a 6 to 1 advantage in people power, and Sedgwick intended his victory to open up the fur trade for English interests by controlling the Hudson River Valley. Unfortunately for this plan, news reached Boston that Cromwell had engineered a peace treaty with the Netherlands. Sedgwick was all for going ahead anyway. He had 900 troops at his disposal and at least four ships, but the civic and religious community of Boston would not go along. Dealing with papists, however, that was a different matter. Despite the fact that no state of war then existed between France and England, Sedgwick decided to attack Acadia. Among his many commercial interests was the fish trade, and if entrepreneurship in furs was to be stifled, there was always cod to turn to. In a two-month campaign that began in July, he captured St. John, then Port Royal and, on his way back to Boston, he expelled the French from their comptoir on the Penobscot River in today’s Maine. The entire coastline between Boston and Port Royal was, at least theoretically, now under English control.
But of course it wasn’t. The numbers of people involved in these transfers of authority were, in actuality, very small, yet the amount of territory was immense, far too much to control effectively. Instead of the usual plundering, where farmhouses and barns were put to the torch, and residents forced to flee or put on ships to be repatriated home, Sedgwick found it more politic to leave things pretty much as they had been. French farmers around Port Royal on the Annapolis Basin were allowed legal title to their property, and granted basic civil and religious rights. Even a few Capuchin monks in the area were allowed to stay. Thus began the conflicted relationship between French-speaking Acadians and their English masters that would end in tragedy one century later.
In the course of these various regime changes, Acadian farmers carried on, often in ways that would not alter, attitudinally or manually, for several generations. Their worldview was primarily agricultural. They had come from France as farmers, and farming is what took up most every hour of their day, particularly during the summer months when the tidal range of the Bay of Fundy, affecting as it did countless estuaries where smaller streams and rivers emptied into its salty water, was not as extreme. This gave them the opportunity, working as one, to reclaim land from the ocean.
In keeping with the understated nature of most everything to do with Nova Scotia, aside from titanic Atlantic storms that is, the great achievements of the Acadian people are not always easy for the modern traveler to see or appreciate. Perhaps these early settlers were surprised at what they scanned when they stepped off the ship from France, perhaps it took time to understand and strategize as to the proper exploitation of the resource that faced them. We do know that in 1636 five specialists arrived on a vessel called the Saint Jehan, noted on the passenger list as sauniers, an archaic term that will not be found in most modern French dictionaries. It means “salt worker” or “marsh worker.”
We noted earlier the dyke system around Champlain’s home village of Brouage, whereby salt pans along the coast were enclosed after flooding by the tides, and then allowed to sit and evaporate, yielding salt. In nearby Poitou a similar system had been employed to drain fresh water marshes as well, but nowhere was this technique better perfected than in western Nova Scotia.
The premise was simple enough. Estuarial marshland along the Bay, some 75,000 acres, was enriched with nutrients by two sources that fed it four times a day with each tide change: rivers from the inland, with organic decay and run-off, and the Atlantic itself, which deposits an especially rich red mud from the ocean floor. Acadians took note of the wild hay and grasses that flourished in these flooded fields, and at low tides they found that top soil, in many instances, was up to forty feet deep. First at Port Royal, and then along the coasts in both directions, but especially into the expansive Minas Basin north of this first settlement, large dykes were built to enclose and drain these acres, yielding pasturage of tremendous fertility.
The enterprise to create these fields was prodigious. “What labor is needed!” wrote a French visitor in 1699. The levies themselves (or sea walls) could be as high as sixteen feet, their core a clay or mud base intermixed with tree trunks and branches, some interwoven, then covered with sod, the roots of which grew into the facing and solidified it. This pyramidal form could be twelve feet wide at the footing. Strategically placed were sluice gates or aboiteaux with primitive valves known as clappers that closed as the tides came in, preventing the entrance of sea water, but opened as the tides receded, allowing for drainage of the fields. Ditches were dug within the enclosures which facilitated the reclamation: rain water, snow melt, runoff from streams, all rinsed the pasture of salt, which was channeled into the sluice system, a purification that took two to three years to complete. A gang of five to eight men, it was recorded, could do sixteen feet a day of dyke. The results were fine yields of hay, wheat, peas, and beans. The slight elevation at Fort Beausejour facing east, at the very gateway to Nova Scotia from New Brunswick, presents the best overall view for the modern traveler, hundreds of acres of marsh fields still under productive cultivation.[1] If you didn’t know otherwise, there isn’t a hint, aside from the slight outline of protective dykes, that this wasn’t the way it has been since the dawn of time. No sign of the hundreds of man hours consumed, the collective labor of an entire community, or the social construct that developed over time which solidified the Acadian ethos of shared engagement and identity. The first men who tilled these fields, it should be remembered, did so hitched to ploughs themselves. As historians have pointed out, records up until the 1680s make no mention of horses, oxen, mules, or any other animals normally associated with farm operations. The “beasts of burden,” in other words, were the Acadians themselves.
In 1667, Acadia was transferred once again, and for the last time, to formal French control (a state of legal possession that would last until 1713, despite interregnums where no one was effectively in control), the result of yet another treaty, ending yet another round of conflict between England and France. As was usual in such negotiations, horse trading of various territorial assets between the two powers was arbitrarily negotiated, usually without any concern for the interests or opinions of those directly impacted. British merchants who had invested heavily in Acadian projects suddenly found themselves dispossessed and bankrupted. Massachusetts stood aghast. Returning Acadia to French control would encourage Louis XIV to further strengthen Quebec on the mainland, whereas the continued loss of Acadia would “wither” his interest in the area even further. The French foil to the English presence at Port Royal was Cape Breton, after all, which consisted of about twenty-five permanent residents, a mere pretension. No one in London or Paris, however, really cared, and the Treaty of Breda was signed, with fanfare, in July of that year.
This was the moment that the French Crown finally took North American colonial matters in hand. Various commercial entities such as the Hundred Associates and the homegrown Communauté des Habitants had all attempted to organize the division of spoils in New Canada, but by 1667 their collective failure was recognized by all. In that year the king officially took possession of the entire commercial apparatus, and the formal colonization of Canada may be said to have begun at this juncture, though performance and achievement were at first marginal. What choice did Louis have? On every front, the situation had rapidly deteriorated. Intermittent warfare with the Iroquois had proved devastating, the three important centers of the mainland community – Montreal, Trois Riviers, and Quebec – frequently cut off from each other by marauding bands of savages. Sporadic military expeditions involving professional French soldiers often ended in catastrophe. Senechal Lauson, a major landowner on what would become Quebec’s breadbasket, the Île d’Orléans on the St. Lawrence, went off to confront an Iroquoian war party that was rummaging about the island. He and his entire troop were slaughtered. Internally, what passed for civil government in the colony stood deadlocked in countless controversies, both with the mercantile community and the by now exceedingly powerful religious orders. By 1666, one in eight inhabitants of Quebec was a priest, monk, nun, or dependent of a religious order. As royal governors came and went, these often highly-educated individuals came to see themselves as keepers of the grail, not glory-seeking courtiers here for a quick military success or profit from the bribery and venality of fur and liquor trading with Indians. Friction with civil authority proved bitter and inevitable. Even amongst the religious, dissension was rife, particularly during the administration of Francoise de Laval, Quebec’s first bishop, who found himself pointlessly quarreling with, among other groups, normally quiescent Ursuline nuns. Commercially, the fur trade declined, due in large measure to Indian interferences along the trade routes and a change in fashion at Parisian salons. Fur was still commercially viable, but smaller hats for men drastically reduced the specific demand for beaver. Population figures for the colony did show some upward lift; by 1663 some 3,000 French lived along the Laurentian Valley, but these numbers remained puny alongside those of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, a semi-independent entity that was undergoing an explosion in entrepreneurial activity, most of it initially unfettered from London, which would lead to a demonstrably more aggressive outlook towards its neighbors -- all this a direct result of its demographic growth. In the single year of 1635, for instance, the same number of people boarded ship to emigrate to New England as equaled the entire French population in Canada.
And Acadia? Its population barely maintained a level number: about 350 in all, of whom approximately a third were settled in or near Port Royal. Signs of their eventual prosperity, however, are apparent in the first governmental census ever undertaken by French authorities on the island, a concession that bureaucrats in Paris had really no idea as to the condition of their own colony. Unlike the anecdotal reports of visiting administrators and officials over the next thirty or so years, who depicted a society that was more or less subsistence in nature, the survey of 1671, however crude, paints a more realistic picture. The settlers were mostly poor, to be sure, but they had married young and were often the parents of very large families. In France, half of all children born were dead by their twenty-first birthday, a quarter of those before they had reached the age of one. Infant mortality rates were sharply lower in Acadia, due in large measure to the absence of epidemics that were common in Europe, and the freedom from the usual rounds of devastating warfare and attendant famine that marked life in the old country. Charles Bourgeois of Port Royal was twenty-five years old and married to seventeen-year-old Anne du Gast. They had a young daughter, a year and a half old, and ran a small farm with two acres of cleared land. Their livestock, which may have grazed for some part of the year on common pasture, consisted of nineteen animals, both sheep and beef. Their parents collectively had produced fourteen children, cleared thirty-six acres of land, and managed seventy-nine cattle and sheep. They clearly produced enough food on which to live, with a surplus to trade for imported goods such as tools, iron, some clothing, spirits, and occasional luxury items, most of which were purchased from illegal traders from Massachusetts. Archaeological evidence points to their houses as reasonably substantial: deep-cellared, plank construction, caulked with clay and vegetation. Better, in other words, than the sod houses in the later plains states of Nebraska and Kansas. It is interesting to note that some Acadians refused to answer the questions put to them by the census takers. None of your business, appears to have been their attitude. Almost two-thirds of all people who claim an Acadian heritage are directly related to these 300 to 500 or so individuals listed in the 1671 census (through the male line). In French-Canadian terms, this is equivalent to the Mayflower Society.
By the time of the census, people like Charles Bourgeoise and his family can no longer be safely classified as either “French” or “immigrants.” They represent second and third generation Acadians, born in the New World itself, and more or less bystanders to the successive changes in regime that seemed to take place every twenty or thirty years. Historians have argued as to the dispersal of Acadians between the years 1670 and 1710, when families (usually younger offspring) spread both north and south along the coast from Port Royal. In the Minas Basin, and even more significantly at the head of the Bay of Fundy, settlements grew that outpaced Port Royal itself, due in large measure to the preponderance of fertile marsh land just there for the taking. These new farmers shared the burdens of communal labor, as their forebears had, and seem to have continued the genetic distaste for authority figures that would mark their own progeny in the years of conflict that lay ahead. When a supply ship from Massachusetts sailed up the Bay and let itself settle into the mud at low tide to trade and barter, there were no officials anywhere near to forbid, tax, or interfere with any of their transactions. This is the way Acadians liked it.
§
In assessing the political chessboard of life as the 1600s progressed, les Acadians hardly figure in the equation. In many ways, their position mirrored that of the Micmacs and other Algonquian tribes as they had faced the unimaginable and unexpected consequences inherent in the onslaught of European colonization. Amerindians had little foreknowledge, and less experience, with which to conceptualize what was happening to and around them. They were more dumbfounded than anything else.
The Acadians, being Europeans, understood with more clarity the possible consequences as conflict between French and English interests escalated. They knew what war entailed on a large scale, the devastation it wrought and the devilment it unleashed on simple farming communities. They knew enough, in other words, to avoid involvement wherever and whenever they could. What they probably did not understand were the myriad of complicated interchanges, negotiations, intrigues, dynastic mutations, wars and treaties that marked almost an entire century of political life between both Great Britain and France. What news items and updates they heard were usually delivered by a sprinkling of government officials who might occasionally appear as though out of nowhere; reports from their priests; or the sudden appearance offshore of unwanted privateers flying an assortment of flags who casually informed them, both by word and their rapacious behavior, that a state of war existed and they were “the enemy.” Acadians were so insignificant to the ongoing rush of events that, using the cheeseboard analogy once again, you could not even label them as pawns. They were trees in the forest. Who would cut them down, and did it make any difference?
Beginning in 1689, four tumultuous wars would be fought in Europe by and among the Continental superpowers. Ostensibly expressions of the continued rivalry between Bourbon and Habsburg pretensions (with heavy religious overtones of Protestant vs. Catholic), these conflicts would be joined by nearly every country in Europe, from Portugal and Spain on the Iberian peninsula to Austria and Prussia on the eastern flank, and include the newly emerging maritime power of the Dutch Republic. England, of course, could not stand aside. There was too much profit to be made, Romish religion remained despicable and, in taverns at least, the prospect of glory on the battlefield seemed appealing.
Some of the ghastliest battles ever yet fought on European soil would rearrange the boundaries of several nation states up until 1763, which a succession of abstruse treaties would intermittently either restore or confirm as warring parties occasionally gasped for a respite. What made the character of these conflicts distinctly different from past wars, however, would be their more or less international dimensions. While the Duke of Marlborough waded through mud and blood at Blenheim (over 36,000 dead and wounded in some thirteen hours of fighting) a few farmers and their wives in the New World would coincidentally be butchered by roving bands of Indians, or ten fishermen from Canso would be pushed overboard into the Atlantic by privateers and told to swim (if they could) for shore. Such events, cataclysmic to the insignificant individuals involved, would be the direct consequence of whether Marlborough won that battle or lost it.[2]
It would be tedious, I suppose, to recount in detail the twists and turns of everything that happened to places like Port Royal, Minas, and even Quebec as events unfolded after 1688 (Port Royal itself would be attacked over thirteen times in its short history, more than any other place in North America), and I will spare the reader. As a generality, however, we should turn again to the map that graces the front piece of this book. The sphere of influence (and it was spreading) that would ultimately determine the future of New France came from the south, from Massachusetts Bay. No history of the Maritimes can ever be understood without discussing Boston.
In New England, political developments had followed a complicated trail in keeping with the growing sophistication of its society, a burgeoning population, and the relative complexity of public life in England itself as the mother country struggled through new and often contrasting forms of parliamentary and factional politics, to say nothing of seismic shifts in monarchial succession (the Stuarts to Cromwell, then back to the Stuarts, followed by the Glorious Revolution of 1689 and the accession of William and Mary —James Stuart’s son-in-law and daughter, of all things). The old theocracy of Massachusetts government, whereby a favored position was traditionally allotted to its Puritan foundations, had been eroded, its original charter effectively revoked in 1686. Though the English Crown’s attempt to establish direct (and autocratic) rule faltered during the tumultuous administration of Governor Edmund Andros, the fact remains that the compromises hammered out thereafter reflected the growing administrative control that London could, and would, exert over this most troublesome of its North American colonies. The intelligentsia of Massachusetts recognized this transformation and resisted according to its means (mostly the 3,000 miles of open ocean that separated Boston from London), regularly sending over emissaries, and then hiring agents and lobbyists, to prowl the corridors of power seeking whatever leverage then available to sustain their interests. The famous preacher of the Old North Church, Increase Mather, for example, spent four years of his life perfecting his talents of persuasion, tact, and agile ingratiation with an entire legion of influential brokers and go betweens, not to mention the principal figures of the realm. Within just a week of his initial landing in Great Britain, he secured an audience with James II. Within two days of James’s removal from the throne, Mather was in consultation with his successor, William III. He was later seen chatting with his wife, Queen Anne.[3] Keeping current with the increasingly complex interrelationships of powerful men within the ruling strata of English government required this sort of constant attention, a recognition (among other things) of the growingly vital exchange of trade and commerce that both the colony and London sought to exploit for their own particular gains. The sophistication of Massachusetts was its recognition, and its growing loyalty to, the concept of constitutionalism as opposed to a devotion to monarchy and the divine right of kings, a reflection of what Great Britain was going through at the same time and, indeed, had shed considerable blood fighting about. In New France, such was never the case.
Though seeking and wielding influence within the archaic reaches of French colonial administration was an equally byzantine process, the fact remains that no authoritative colonial identity ever emerged to threaten preconceived notions in Paris as to how affairs were to be managed there. No obstinate mercantile interests in Montreal or Quebec ever developed to such importance that their views might overweigh those ultimately made in Paris. Few religious or doctrinal disputes, especially after the revocation of Nantes in 1685 (and aside from jealousies between various clerical orders), ever seriously intruded into policy discussions involving New France. Population gains, though significant proportionally, still lagged far behind those of England’s northern colonies, and the products and markets which New France could supply and sustain for France itself paled indeed when compared to commodities from other French colonies, such as sugar harvested in the Caribbean. Added to which was monarchial predominance within French politics, aided and often abetted by individually powerful ministers, which often limited discussion altogether. When Louis XIV famously started “L’Etat, c’est moi,” no one stood to contradict him.
The aggressiveness of territorial expansion from the two initial New England colonies of Plymouth and Boston, however, proved in some ways an initial boon to the fortunes of a struggling New France, though in the long run it also precipitated its collapse.[4] The spread of early English colonization was manifested by the mobility of the earliest settlers in Massachusetts Bay. Researchers of immigration and genealogical records have concluded that only a third or so of those who first set foot on Massachusetts soil from England remained rooted to that locale. Many, after receiving temporary shelter or steered to shanty quarters such as birch bark lean-tos, headed off to parts unknown once they secured their bearings. Thomas Blackly, for example, a twenty-year-old from London, is first mentioned having fought in the Pequot War. Thereafter, he can be traced living in Hartford, New Haven, Newark, Harvard (in Massachusetts, where he farmed on sixty acres), Brantford (in Connecticut), before dying in Boston, 1674. Within two decades of the initial landing in Plymouth, the first pilgrims had founded seven new towns from the parent plantation; the Bay Colony out of Boston, in just ten years, double that many. The numerical size of these first families, like those in Acadia, were substantial, though exponentially far higher given the greater numbers of colonists to begin with. The thirty families settling in Andover, Massachusetts, in 1646, averaged 8.3 children each, of whom 7.2 reached the age of twenty-one. The life span enjoyed by their heads of family were equally impressive, nearly seventy-two years for men, seventy-one for women. The Bay Colony grew so quickly that area farms could not sustain its population, and wheat had to be imported from Plymouth and even further away.
Cotton Mather had described the early Pilgrim Fathers as men and women who had steered themselves, with great resolution, “into the retirements of an American desert,” a choice of words that suggest withdrawal, abnegation, and passivity. Nothing could have been farther from the truth. New England may have been “a desert,” but these newcomers were dedicated wanderers with a thirst for land, that age-old English obsession, and they acquired it at the expense of local aboriginals who became, within a single generation, deeply suspicious and wary of the acquisitiveness they saw spreading all around them. Their response was one of either withdrawal into remoter sections of the land mass, or violent expressions of anger that immediately drew a vengeful response, often biblically justified. This was not a pretty scenario, and is the first of what would become several hypocritical policy positions that would be deeply ruinous to the Indians. Although New England’s aboriginal population was eventually subdued, their fate gave the French ample propaganda with which to persuade other tribes to join them in the struggle against English rule. The French population was too meager to require the amounts of territory that New England settlers demanded; they were not a threat to traditional Amerindian land use patterns. Without such allies, the French could never have held out as long as they did in the struggle for control of North America; but their early military activities, and the savagery of the contest, so embittered New England that the eventual outcome to this contest, despite hand wringing from pulpits all over the English colony, could never be seen as seriously in doubt.
It bears repeating once again how the later history of the American West, especially those events associated with such famous characters as George Armstrong Custer and Sitting Bull, has eclipsed from the view of most people the equally cataclysmic Indian wars that engulfed eastern North America from almost the beginning of its colonization. Within just sixteen years of Virginia’s settlement in 1606, for example, an Indian uprising wiped out twenty-five percent of the entire English colony. The Pequot War of 1637 resulted in the virtual extermination of that tribe by the Puritans. And although the Wampanoag chieftain, Massasoit, invaluably assisted the first Pilgrims as they struggled through their initial seasons at Plymouth Plantation, the fact remains that his son Metacom (known to the English as King Philip) initiated war in 1675 that shook Massachusetts Bay and beyond to its very foundations. Each of these conflicts was extraordinarily vicious. Over one thousand colonists lost their lives, thirteen towns were completely destroyed, and wanton atrocities were committed on both sides. [5] Hollywood has rarely depicted these events, perhaps because wagon trains, mounted warriors hurtling across the plains on painted ponies, and the dramatic scenery of the West (in California’s own backyard, as it were), make for more theatrical material. Micmacs, Mohawks, Abenakis, Wampanoags, and Narragansetts did not, as a rule, own horses, and as white men pushed them from the shores, they mostly settled for their own protection in brush land of scrubby woods and wet lowlands, places inhospitable, feared by colonists, and subsequently not of the scenic variety that a movie director might prefer.[6] (Cotton Mather called New England’s “tawnies” their “enswamped adversaries” who lived “in inaccessible kennels”). [7] The violence, cruelty, wanton bloodshed, and viciousness that these various conflicts produced, however, and those that followed well into the 1700s, were about as horrific as can be imagined. Their place in the history of both New England and New France, though largely forgotten today, was formative to the extreme in developing later attitudes towards aboriginal populations. Narragansetts were wiped out in “The Great Swamp” near Kingston, Rhode Island, in 1675, and Sioux were wiped out at Wounded Knee, some 1,500 miles west, two centuries later. A couple of Indian casinos in Connecticut, and tax-free cigarettes on the Iroquois reservations in New York State, are as depressingly familiar as stumbling drunks buying beer at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.
The Acadians, being Europeans, understood with more clarity the possible consequences as conflict between French and English interests escalated. They knew what war entailed on a large scale, the devastation it wrought and the devilment it unleashed on simple farming communities. They knew enough, in other words, to avoid involvement wherever and whenever they could. What they probably did not understand were the myriad of complicated interchanges, negotiations, intrigues, dynastic mutations, wars and treaties that marked almost an entire century of political life between both Great Britain and France. What news items and updates they heard were usually delivered by a sprinkling of government officials who might occasionally appear as though out of nowhere; reports from their priests; or the sudden appearance offshore of unwanted privateers flying an assortment of flags who casually informed them, both by word and their rapacious behavior, that a state of war existed and they were “the enemy.” Acadians were so insignificant to the ongoing rush of events that, using the cheeseboard analogy once again, you could not even label them as pawns. They were trees in the forest. Who would cut them down, and did it make any difference?
Beginning in 1689, four tumultuous wars would be fought in Europe by and among the Continental superpowers. Ostensibly expressions of the continued rivalry between Bourbon and Habsburg pretensions (with heavy religious overtones of Protestant vs. Catholic), these conflicts would be joined by nearly every country in Europe, from Portugal and Spain on the Iberian peninsula to Austria and Prussia on the eastern flank, and include the newly emerging maritime power of the Dutch Republic. England, of course, could not stand aside. There was too much profit to be made, Romish religion remained despicable and, in taverns at least, the prospect of glory on the battlefield seemed appealing.
Some of the ghastliest battles ever yet fought on European soil would rearrange the boundaries of several nation states up until 1763, which a succession of abstruse treaties would intermittently either restore or confirm as warring parties occasionally gasped for a respite. What made the character of these conflicts distinctly different from past wars, however, would be their more or less international dimensions. While the Duke of Marlborough waded through mud and blood at Blenheim (over 36,000 dead and wounded in some thirteen hours of fighting) a few farmers and their wives in the New World would coincidentally be butchered by roving bands of Indians, or ten fishermen from Canso would be pushed overboard into the Atlantic by privateers and told to swim (if they could) for shore. Such events, cataclysmic to the insignificant individuals involved, would be the direct consequence of whether Marlborough won that battle or lost it.[2]
It would be tedious, I suppose, to recount in detail the twists and turns of everything that happened to places like Port Royal, Minas, and even Quebec as events unfolded after 1688 (Port Royal itself would be attacked over thirteen times in its short history, more than any other place in North America), and I will spare the reader. As a generality, however, we should turn again to the map that graces the front piece of this book. The sphere of influence (and it was spreading) that would ultimately determine the future of New France came from the south, from Massachusetts Bay. No history of the Maritimes can ever be understood without discussing Boston.
In New England, political developments had followed a complicated trail in keeping with the growing sophistication of its society, a burgeoning population, and the relative complexity of public life in England itself as the mother country struggled through new and often contrasting forms of parliamentary and factional politics, to say nothing of seismic shifts in monarchial succession (the Stuarts to Cromwell, then back to the Stuarts, followed by the Glorious Revolution of 1689 and the accession of William and Mary —James Stuart’s son-in-law and daughter, of all things). The old theocracy of Massachusetts government, whereby a favored position was traditionally allotted to its Puritan foundations, had been eroded, its original charter effectively revoked in 1686. Though the English Crown’s attempt to establish direct (and autocratic) rule faltered during the tumultuous administration of Governor Edmund Andros, the fact remains that the compromises hammered out thereafter reflected the growing administrative control that London could, and would, exert over this most troublesome of its North American colonies. The intelligentsia of Massachusetts recognized this transformation and resisted according to its means (mostly the 3,000 miles of open ocean that separated Boston from London), regularly sending over emissaries, and then hiring agents and lobbyists, to prowl the corridors of power seeking whatever leverage then available to sustain their interests. The famous preacher of the Old North Church, Increase Mather, for example, spent four years of his life perfecting his talents of persuasion, tact, and agile ingratiation with an entire legion of influential brokers and go betweens, not to mention the principal figures of the realm. Within just a week of his initial landing in Great Britain, he secured an audience with James II. Within two days of James’s removal from the throne, Mather was in consultation with his successor, William III. He was later seen chatting with his wife, Queen Anne.[3] Keeping current with the increasingly complex interrelationships of powerful men within the ruling strata of English government required this sort of constant attention, a recognition (among other things) of the growingly vital exchange of trade and commerce that both the colony and London sought to exploit for their own particular gains. The sophistication of Massachusetts was its recognition, and its growing loyalty to, the concept of constitutionalism as opposed to a devotion to monarchy and the divine right of kings, a reflection of what Great Britain was going through at the same time and, indeed, had shed considerable blood fighting about. In New France, such was never the case.
Though seeking and wielding influence within the archaic reaches of French colonial administration was an equally byzantine process, the fact remains that no authoritative colonial identity ever emerged to threaten preconceived notions in Paris as to how affairs were to be managed there. No obstinate mercantile interests in Montreal or Quebec ever developed to such importance that their views might overweigh those ultimately made in Paris. Few religious or doctrinal disputes, especially after the revocation of Nantes in 1685 (and aside from jealousies between various clerical orders), ever seriously intruded into policy discussions involving New France. Population gains, though significant proportionally, still lagged far behind those of England’s northern colonies, and the products and markets which New France could supply and sustain for France itself paled indeed when compared to commodities from other French colonies, such as sugar harvested in the Caribbean. Added to which was monarchial predominance within French politics, aided and often abetted by individually powerful ministers, which often limited discussion altogether. When Louis XIV famously started “L’Etat, c’est moi,” no one stood to contradict him.
The aggressiveness of territorial expansion from the two initial New England colonies of Plymouth and Boston, however, proved in some ways an initial boon to the fortunes of a struggling New France, though in the long run it also precipitated its collapse.[4] The spread of early English colonization was manifested by the mobility of the earliest settlers in Massachusetts Bay. Researchers of immigration and genealogical records have concluded that only a third or so of those who first set foot on Massachusetts soil from England remained rooted to that locale. Many, after receiving temporary shelter or steered to shanty quarters such as birch bark lean-tos, headed off to parts unknown once they secured their bearings. Thomas Blackly, for example, a twenty-year-old from London, is first mentioned having fought in the Pequot War. Thereafter, he can be traced living in Hartford, New Haven, Newark, Harvard (in Massachusetts, where he farmed on sixty acres), Brantford (in Connecticut), before dying in Boston, 1674. Within two decades of the initial landing in Plymouth, the first pilgrims had founded seven new towns from the parent plantation; the Bay Colony out of Boston, in just ten years, double that many. The numerical size of these first families, like those in Acadia, were substantial, though exponentially far higher given the greater numbers of colonists to begin with. The thirty families settling in Andover, Massachusetts, in 1646, averaged 8.3 children each, of whom 7.2 reached the age of twenty-one. The life span enjoyed by their heads of family were equally impressive, nearly seventy-two years for men, seventy-one for women. The Bay Colony grew so quickly that area farms could not sustain its population, and wheat had to be imported from Plymouth and even further away.
Cotton Mather had described the early Pilgrim Fathers as men and women who had steered themselves, with great resolution, “into the retirements of an American desert,” a choice of words that suggest withdrawal, abnegation, and passivity. Nothing could have been farther from the truth. New England may have been “a desert,” but these newcomers were dedicated wanderers with a thirst for land, that age-old English obsession, and they acquired it at the expense of local aboriginals who became, within a single generation, deeply suspicious and wary of the acquisitiveness they saw spreading all around them. Their response was one of either withdrawal into remoter sections of the land mass, or violent expressions of anger that immediately drew a vengeful response, often biblically justified. This was not a pretty scenario, and is the first of what would become several hypocritical policy positions that would be deeply ruinous to the Indians. Although New England’s aboriginal population was eventually subdued, their fate gave the French ample propaganda with which to persuade other tribes to join them in the struggle against English rule. The French population was too meager to require the amounts of territory that New England settlers demanded; they were not a threat to traditional Amerindian land use patterns. Without such allies, the French could never have held out as long as they did in the struggle for control of North America; but their early military activities, and the savagery of the contest, so embittered New England that the eventual outcome to this contest, despite hand wringing from pulpits all over the English colony, could never be seen as seriously in doubt.
It bears repeating once again how the later history of the American West, especially those events associated with such famous characters as George Armstrong Custer and Sitting Bull, has eclipsed from the view of most people the equally cataclysmic Indian wars that engulfed eastern North America from almost the beginning of its colonization. Within just sixteen years of Virginia’s settlement in 1606, for example, an Indian uprising wiped out twenty-five percent of the entire English colony. The Pequot War of 1637 resulted in the virtual extermination of that tribe by the Puritans. And although the Wampanoag chieftain, Massasoit, invaluably assisted the first Pilgrims as they struggled through their initial seasons at Plymouth Plantation, the fact remains that his son Metacom (known to the English as King Philip) initiated war in 1675 that shook Massachusetts Bay and beyond to its very foundations. Each of these conflicts was extraordinarily vicious. Over one thousand colonists lost their lives, thirteen towns were completely destroyed, and wanton atrocities were committed on both sides. [5] Hollywood has rarely depicted these events, perhaps because wagon trains, mounted warriors hurtling across the plains on painted ponies, and the dramatic scenery of the West (in California’s own backyard, as it were), make for more theatrical material. Micmacs, Mohawks, Abenakis, Wampanoags, and Narragansetts did not, as a rule, own horses, and as white men pushed them from the shores, they mostly settled for their own protection in brush land of scrubby woods and wet lowlands, places inhospitable, feared by colonists, and subsequently not of the scenic variety that a movie director might prefer.[6] (Cotton Mather called New England’s “tawnies” their “enswamped adversaries” who lived “in inaccessible kennels”). [7] The violence, cruelty, wanton bloodshed, and viciousness that these various conflicts produced, however, and those that followed well into the 1700s, were about as horrific as can be imagined. Their place in the history of both New England and New France, though largely forgotten today, was formative to the extreme in developing later attitudes towards aboriginal populations. Narragansetts were wiped out in “The Great Swamp” near Kingston, Rhode Island, in 1675, and Sioux were wiped out at Wounded Knee, some 1,500 miles west, two centuries later. A couple of Indian casinos in Connecticut, and tax-free cigarettes on the Iroquois reservations in New York State, are as depressingly familiar as stumbling drunks buying beer at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.
§
“New England Bleeding”
Samuel Sewall
The broad focus of New England’s geographical attention was two-fold. The superb harbor of Boston, and that growing town’s gradual mercantile control of the many fishing ports around the bay such as Marblehead and Gloucester, had produced tremendous economic benefits that no minister or merchant could deny, though at first London seemed either unaware or deeply complacent at this self-evident growth. From the crown’s perspective, the Bay had little or nothing to offer as a trading partner, especially as local stocks of beaver and other fur-bearing animals were hunted to extinction, but this imbalance subtly changed.[8] Massachusetts did not have tobacco, but it did have fish, though the first Pilgrim settlers who landed in Plymouth under John Bradford’s guiding hand proved remarkable inept at catching them. They had packed a large net, but no one knew how to handle it at first, and their first attempts to harvest from the abundant seas around them were discouraging failures. “We always lost by fishing,” as Bradford put it, and the gruff work of the sea was left to “strangers,” those men who lived outside the religious covenant and drank too much in the bargain. It did not take long for these hardy souls from Massachusetts Bay to venture beyond coastal waters into the vast network of shallow “banks” where the cod ran thick. First to Georges Bank in the Gulf of Maine, then further east to Brown’s, La Have, Sambro, Middle, Canso, Misaine, Banquereau off Nova Scotia until, finally, the mother lode of them all, the Grand Banks. By the end of the 1600s, New England schooners dominated the offshore fishing grounds of Nova Scotia, to the point where English fishermen rarely traveled west of Newfoundland.
Aside from fish and timber products however, the larder seemed bare. Very little manufacturing was initially developed, the only iron forge near Boston a failed enterprise by 1652. As immigration continued, with towns expanding, imported luxury and industrial goods from England took on added importance. The New England market for English exports started to pile up on ledger sheets in London and Bristol, and administrators began paying attention. Developing as well was a nascent merchant class in Boston, a phenomenon the Puritan clergy saw both as a manifestation of God’s pleasure, but also as a secular threat to ministerial dominance. Men descended from “tinkers and peddlers” had been forced upon their own resources. Bay colonists could not support themselves agriculturally, they depended on purchasing wheat from neighboring colonies. They built fishing boats to exploit the banks, then built larger and more sophisticated craft to carry their produce to Europe and the Caribbean, there to exchange for goods impossible to produce at home. Along trading routes, links and partnerships were developed that encouraged more sophisticated deal making and more imaginative mercantile schemes. Native ingenuity in ship building, for example, soon resulted in “bulk sales:” a New England vessel would sail east, land at an English port loaded with fish, spars, and assorted maritime gear, all to be sold upon arrival … ship and all. Only forty years after Winthrop set foot in Boston, there were thirty merchants in the town worth from £10,000 to £30,000. From simple bartering, the basis of a sophisticated ethos in business and the accumulation of wealth had been established.
New Englanders could not escape the obvious conclusion that this burgeoning prosperity stood threatened by the French presence in Acadia, especially when wars broke out in Continental Europe. Access to the vast inland resources that virgin forests produced were negated when Abenakis in Maine, and Micmacs along the coast—all incited by the French and “their Jesuits”—unsettled life in these frontier communities with “cut-throat” and predatory attacks. On the open sea, French naval activity based in the Maritimes, whether formal or piratical, disrupted trade with their indiscriminate attacks on craft large and small. Fishermen especially were at risk as they plucked mountains of cod from the Banks, only to lose everything when overhauled by predators. “Sad news of the taking of 3 Salem ketches by the Cape Sable Indians; one of then Col. Higginson’s,” Sewall noted in his diary, “one of the masters kill’d.” The Massachusetts Bay Colony might claim all of Maine (and it did, vociferously), but saw that ambition thwarted if they could not possess Acadia as well. Securing the coast, then domesticating the Indians, became the eastern objective.
Toward the west, Bay Colony leaders came to another important conclusion. The early Puritans had conceived of their colony as a Zion in the wilderness of “this obscure corner of the world.” With growing clarity, however, and given the obvious fact that their initial separatist desire was daily threatened by the impingement of European politics, Massachusetts adopted the more pragmatic approach of reaching out to its more worldly colonial neighbors to coordinate joint campaigns against the common enemy. They began to realize that the Connecticut and Hudson River valleys could not be left to others to defend; that if French forces ever forced the possession of either, ruination “from the rear” would topple Boston and destroy the Puritan Jerusalem so laboriously carved from the wilderness since 1620. In this respect, as Governor Bradford put it, the fur station at Albany, now a frontier post of some 500 souls, was strategically vital, the “well fashioned curb for our enemies,” a “dam, which should it be through neglect broken down, we dread to think of the inundation of calamities that would quickly follow thereupon.” In 1690, the first of what would become, over the years, several joint operations north against New France by land and by sea was conceived and launched. Not surprisingly, these would encounter similar thrusts southwards by the French themselves, who could read a map just as skillfully. In the western theatre, the activities of the Iroquois tribes would prove vital to both camps. On whose side would these fearsome warriors enlist? Countering the impression that many have, even today, of Amerindian credulity and childishness, especially when it came to negotiating with white men, the Iroquois proved subtle, devious, and aware of their central importance in this strategic debate. In the matter of gift giving, for instance, a French officer, in assessing the clumsiness with which English colonists, and then the British army itself, handled their interactions with Indians, noted acutely that they seemed to offer presents only grudgingly, “when they want to carry some temporary point, as in taking up the hatchet against [us]. This does not escape the natural sagacity of the savages, who are sensible of the design lurking at the bottom of this liberality.” They Iroquois acted in what they saw as their best interests, and suffered accordingly.
In the eastern theatre, this same question would apply to the Acadians. The French automatically presumed on the allegiances of these sturdy peasants, who shared their language, patrimony, and religion. The English automatically presumed them to be enemies. The Acadians, like the Iroquois, acted not out of patriotism or devotion to any country other than what they considered to be their own. It wasn’t French, it wasn’t English, it was Acadian. This would prove to be an illusion.
The thrusts and counterthrusts between French and English forays that we will discuss below, wherein New England especially became “miserably briared in the perplexities of Indian war,” were always justified by charges of atrocities or outrages perpetuated by the opposing side. This justified in the minds of those reacting (their own heavy-handed responses) to such a degree that assigning first blame for setting off what appears in retrospect to be a never-ending wave of reprisals, is sometimes difficult to gauge. After a while, who needed an excuse to do anything? Certainly the decision of Louis XIV to dispatch, for the first time, regular troops of his army to New France served to encourage the vanity of his governors there, eager as some were to display the colors, and valor, of Frenchmen in general. The numbers of soldiers who disembarked in Port Royal or Quebec were miniscule in comparison to the totality of Louis’s forces, some 350,000 men under arms in the year of his death, 1715. Twenty, thirty, fifty, or one hundred men in white uniforms, with blue woolen stockings, tricorn hats, and bearing a musket with bayonet and perhaps 40 balls with appropriate powder, was not enough to turn any tide in North America, but a brave show they made. (Until the beginning of the Seven Years' War, France never had more than 800 regulars at any one time in the colony.) Beginning in 1663, however, detachments of such men, aided by their invaluable Indian allies and ever-increasing numbers of experienced coureurs de bois, began marching west and south of the St Lawrence River valley into Iroquois country. These were punishing raids meant to discourage the Five Nations from embracing the British too fondly (the choice was presented, English rum or French cognac?), and as warnings that war parties ranging into French territories would guarantee retaliation. The Iroquois response, however, was not the desired result. As a colonist would write in 1709 of the Iroquois, “For them to live in peace is to live out of their element, war, conquest and murder being what they delight in.” Lescarbot, writing of Indians in general, had put it even more succinctly. Indians lived the life of Alexander the Great. When struck, their natural inclination was to strike back.
In August of 1689, under cover of lightning storms and darkness, over 1,500 Iroquois emerged from their canoes at the rapids of LaChine and undertook what Parkman called “the most frightful massacre in Canadian history.” Small hamlets and farmsteads, isolated from various stockades garrisoned by handfuls of regular soldiers, were stormed, put to the torch, and their inhabitants indiscriminately slaughtered. Corn and hay were burned, livestock left gutted by the roadsides, the country a donnybrook of scattered war parties leaving desolation everywhere within a radius of some twenty miles. The next day, a relief column of eighty regulars and Christian convert Indians were set upon and overwhelmed within sight of a nearby fort. Four or five of the fleetest afoot managed to outrun the Iroquois, who returned to enjoy the fruits of their victory, and to look for more. The main band of invaders returned home after a week or so of unrestrained looting, bringing at least one hundred captives with them, many of whom were distributed throughout the Five Nations for the usual orgies of ritualistic torture. Bands of smaller war parties infested the Montreal region for the rest of the summer. Needless to say, les habitants “were wild with terror … stupefied and speechless.” Into this arena of despair, Louis de Buade, Comte de Frontenac et Palluau, returned for a second tour of duty.
Frontenac, a rather battered sixty-seven years old as he stepped once again to shore at Quebec, was a man of prickly temperament, easily roused to anger and punctilious as to the respect and deference that were, he considered, his rightful due. Rare was the townhouse, meeting hall, chateau, farmstead, or wigwam where a quarrel might not easily be ignited, never to be forgiven. As a professional nobleman, remembering slights was a prerequisite of daily conduct; as a professional soldier, ignoring with equanimity the sight of blood and mayhem rarely impeded his sense of imperial mission. His first tenure as Louis XIV’s royal governor had been stormy, unproductive, and marked by intolerance for the opinions and advice of anyone else, including that of his royal master. He was recalled in 1682; but continuing bad news from the beggared colony encouraged the king to reconsider the martial qualities that Frontenac appeared to possess. As for the count, he was destitute, having lost his properties to an endless line of creditors, relying on his wife to wheedle about the corridors of Versailles defending his good name and securing what crumbs she could for the embittered courtier. He had little choice but to volunteer his services once again for the thankless task of defending New France. He did not expect to win glory there, had but the faintest hopes of repairing his shattered finances, but arrived just the same with his usual energy and highhanded ways. He wasn’t “home” for barely a week before he set off in a flotilla of canoes, in miserable, rainy weather, to see for himself what manner of condition the colony lay in. What he saw steeled his heart, and set him on a strategy that best suited the types of fighting men he had available, who could administer the feckless heretics and traitors who ringed him to the south with lessons they would not soon forget.
Frontenac, like Champlain before him, had a genuine appreciation of his Indian allies. He had no qualms making a fool of himself in tribal gatherings, stomping around doing war dances, screaming and yelling bloodcurdling cries, if that was required to energize them to do his will. He was liberal with gifts, an expense superiors back home in Paris would decry as “onerous” for the next sixty years or so as colonial administrators emulated his example. Unlike his royal master, who regarded these payments to his Indian allies as “gratuities,” Frontenac recognized them for what they were, a far cheaper way to get experienced fighters into the field than importing troops from Europe, who would not be sent in sufficient numbers no matter how loudly he might request them.[9] He impressed these fearsome warriors with his passion, and realized that their special qualities were best seconded by coureurs de bois, producing companies of men who were “Half Indianized French and Half Frenchified Indians,” according to Cotton Mather. In 1690 he organized three separate guerrilla-style operations that were designed with no particular strategic goal in mind other than to sow terror. In that they succeeded beyond measure.
The best documented of these was the winter march from Montreal to the frontier hamlet of Schenectady, located on the Mohawk River fifteen miles northwest of Albany. About one hundred and ten coureurs de bois, with another hundred Christianized Indians, crossed the frozen St. Lawrence and plunged into the woods. Wearing snow shoes, pulling their gear in toboggans, they began a march that proved a tribute to the growing resiliency of native-born French Canadians. These men were not peasant farmers from France, nor indentured servants, impressed convicts, or the riffraff of French seaports. Many were third generation “Canadians,” some metis or half breeds, but all had been inculcated with the Indian ethos of self-reliance and adaptability. “As the sea is the sailor’s element,” Parkman wrote, “so the forest was theirs.” The primeval element of a trackless wilderness was home to these men. It made them tough, it made them impervious to control, and it made them merciless.
The weather tested them. Frozen lakes and streams were transformed to slush by a turn to warmer temperatures, then hardened again by a fresh batch of snowstorms. Alternately soaked, chilled, and soaked again, it seems hard to imagine the kind of endurance that was required to not only survive such a march, but to be conditioned to fight when circumstances demanded it. It took over three weeks to reach Schenectady, and at about eleven at night, in the middle of blizzard-like conditions, this band approached the sleeping village, surrounded by a stockade fence with gates at either end. No guards were out, the gates stood open. Cold did not numb their thinking. The group split in two, as one struggled through snow drifts to close the eastern portal. No one was to escape.
Modern history, like any epoch in the human story, has had its fair share of atrocity stories, some from as fresh as yesterday it seems, so much so that something that happened four centuries ago to a very limited number of people should not necessarily shock our imagination any more or less than other despicable acts of cruelty. Nonetheless, many of the massacres perpetuated during the French and Indian wars seem to stand out for their heartlessness and sheer ferocity. About one hundred and fifty people were asleep that frigid evening, mostly Dutch-speaking subsistence farmers. Around eight or ten militia soldiers were in a rough-hewn block house, along with thirty Mohawk Indians. On a signal, all the buildings were suddenly rushed by the attackers, most of the non-combatants brutally slaughtered as they struggled out of bed. The usual tales of pregnant women being disemboweled, of young babies swung and battered to death against doorways and walls, with stragglers beaten to death fleeing from one house to another, a few survivors fleeing into a wilderness covered in snow to almost certain death, were tales that would stagger New York and New England as they spread across the colonies. Sixty villagers were killed in the two hours of fighting, more than half that number women and children. Another twenty-seven, all men or boys, were taken captive and led north on the return trek. The entire village, save four houses, were burnt to the ground, and survivors unwanted by the French left there in the freezing cold. Likewise Frontenac’s other bands of irregulars, after arduous travel through northeastern forests, undertook sanguinary attacks in both today’s New Hampshire and Maine. In the village of Dover, old Major Waldron took pity on two squaws begging for shelter in his semi-fortified farmhouse (“as loving as bears, and as harmless as tigers,” as Mather would refer to Indian Fifth Columns). In the middle of the night, they unbarricaded the door and Waldron was overwhelmed in the ensuing struggle. He was tied to his kitchen chair, hoisted onto a table, and tortured the rest of the night, finally dispatched with his own regulation sword.
Such raids were more demoralizing than militarily significant, though the results achieved did sufficiently warrant Frontenac’s approach. Frontier towns were deserted in a panic, homesteaders out in the woods packed their belongings and moved south. Tales and rumors spread everywhere through the Colony, along with mordant attempts at humor that somehow rang hollow, as in “Seven Indians, and one with a gun Caused Capt. Nixon, and 40 men to run.”
The crucial question of who would control the vast territories of present-day Maine, New Hampshire and New Brunswick remained moot. Port Royal seemed the key to many New Englanders, with Quebec, of course, not far behind. This was the perfect moment for bellicosity, the desire for revenge, caution tossed to the winds; a perfect time, in other words, for a man whose motto was Incertum quo Fata ferant, or “None can tell where Fate will bear me.”
Samuel Sewall
The broad focus of New England’s geographical attention was two-fold. The superb harbor of Boston, and that growing town’s gradual mercantile control of the many fishing ports around the bay such as Marblehead and Gloucester, had produced tremendous economic benefits that no minister or merchant could deny, though at first London seemed either unaware or deeply complacent at this self-evident growth. From the crown’s perspective, the Bay had little or nothing to offer as a trading partner, especially as local stocks of beaver and other fur-bearing animals were hunted to extinction, but this imbalance subtly changed.[8] Massachusetts did not have tobacco, but it did have fish, though the first Pilgrim settlers who landed in Plymouth under John Bradford’s guiding hand proved remarkable inept at catching them. They had packed a large net, but no one knew how to handle it at first, and their first attempts to harvest from the abundant seas around them were discouraging failures. “We always lost by fishing,” as Bradford put it, and the gruff work of the sea was left to “strangers,” those men who lived outside the religious covenant and drank too much in the bargain. It did not take long for these hardy souls from Massachusetts Bay to venture beyond coastal waters into the vast network of shallow “banks” where the cod ran thick. First to Georges Bank in the Gulf of Maine, then further east to Brown’s, La Have, Sambro, Middle, Canso, Misaine, Banquereau off Nova Scotia until, finally, the mother lode of them all, the Grand Banks. By the end of the 1600s, New England schooners dominated the offshore fishing grounds of Nova Scotia, to the point where English fishermen rarely traveled west of Newfoundland.
Aside from fish and timber products however, the larder seemed bare. Very little manufacturing was initially developed, the only iron forge near Boston a failed enterprise by 1652. As immigration continued, with towns expanding, imported luxury and industrial goods from England took on added importance. The New England market for English exports started to pile up on ledger sheets in London and Bristol, and administrators began paying attention. Developing as well was a nascent merchant class in Boston, a phenomenon the Puritan clergy saw both as a manifestation of God’s pleasure, but also as a secular threat to ministerial dominance. Men descended from “tinkers and peddlers” had been forced upon their own resources. Bay colonists could not support themselves agriculturally, they depended on purchasing wheat from neighboring colonies. They built fishing boats to exploit the banks, then built larger and more sophisticated craft to carry their produce to Europe and the Caribbean, there to exchange for goods impossible to produce at home. Along trading routes, links and partnerships were developed that encouraged more sophisticated deal making and more imaginative mercantile schemes. Native ingenuity in ship building, for example, soon resulted in “bulk sales:” a New England vessel would sail east, land at an English port loaded with fish, spars, and assorted maritime gear, all to be sold upon arrival … ship and all. Only forty years after Winthrop set foot in Boston, there were thirty merchants in the town worth from £10,000 to £30,000. From simple bartering, the basis of a sophisticated ethos in business and the accumulation of wealth had been established.
New Englanders could not escape the obvious conclusion that this burgeoning prosperity stood threatened by the French presence in Acadia, especially when wars broke out in Continental Europe. Access to the vast inland resources that virgin forests produced were negated when Abenakis in Maine, and Micmacs along the coast—all incited by the French and “their Jesuits”—unsettled life in these frontier communities with “cut-throat” and predatory attacks. On the open sea, French naval activity based in the Maritimes, whether formal or piratical, disrupted trade with their indiscriminate attacks on craft large and small. Fishermen especially were at risk as they plucked mountains of cod from the Banks, only to lose everything when overhauled by predators. “Sad news of the taking of 3 Salem ketches by the Cape Sable Indians; one of then Col. Higginson’s,” Sewall noted in his diary, “one of the masters kill’d.” The Massachusetts Bay Colony might claim all of Maine (and it did, vociferously), but saw that ambition thwarted if they could not possess Acadia as well. Securing the coast, then domesticating the Indians, became the eastern objective.
Toward the west, Bay Colony leaders came to another important conclusion. The early Puritans had conceived of their colony as a Zion in the wilderness of “this obscure corner of the world.” With growing clarity, however, and given the obvious fact that their initial separatist desire was daily threatened by the impingement of European politics, Massachusetts adopted the more pragmatic approach of reaching out to its more worldly colonial neighbors to coordinate joint campaigns against the common enemy. They began to realize that the Connecticut and Hudson River valleys could not be left to others to defend; that if French forces ever forced the possession of either, ruination “from the rear” would topple Boston and destroy the Puritan Jerusalem so laboriously carved from the wilderness since 1620. In this respect, as Governor Bradford put it, the fur station at Albany, now a frontier post of some 500 souls, was strategically vital, the “well fashioned curb for our enemies,” a “dam, which should it be through neglect broken down, we dread to think of the inundation of calamities that would quickly follow thereupon.” In 1690, the first of what would become, over the years, several joint operations north against New France by land and by sea was conceived and launched. Not surprisingly, these would encounter similar thrusts southwards by the French themselves, who could read a map just as skillfully. In the western theatre, the activities of the Iroquois tribes would prove vital to both camps. On whose side would these fearsome warriors enlist? Countering the impression that many have, even today, of Amerindian credulity and childishness, especially when it came to negotiating with white men, the Iroquois proved subtle, devious, and aware of their central importance in this strategic debate. In the matter of gift giving, for instance, a French officer, in assessing the clumsiness with which English colonists, and then the British army itself, handled their interactions with Indians, noted acutely that they seemed to offer presents only grudgingly, “when they want to carry some temporary point, as in taking up the hatchet against [us]. This does not escape the natural sagacity of the savages, who are sensible of the design lurking at the bottom of this liberality.” They Iroquois acted in what they saw as their best interests, and suffered accordingly.
In the eastern theatre, this same question would apply to the Acadians. The French automatically presumed on the allegiances of these sturdy peasants, who shared their language, patrimony, and religion. The English automatically presumed them to be enemies. The Acadians, like the Iroquois, acted not out of patriotism or devotion to any country other than what they considered to be their own. It wasn’t French, it wasn’t English, it was Acadian. This would prove to be an illusion.
The thrusts and counterthrusts between French and English forays that we will discuss below, wherein New England especially became “miserably briared in the perplexities of Indian war,” were always justified by charges of atrocities or outrages perpetuated by the opposing side. This justified in the minds of those reacting (their own heavy-handed responses) to such a degree that assigning first blame for setting off what appears in retrospect to be a never-ending wave of reprisals, is sometimes difficult to gauge. After a while, who needed an excuse to do anything? Certainly the decision of Louis XIV to dispatch, for the first time, regular troops of his army to New France served to encourage the vanity of his governors there, eager as some were to display the colors, and valor, of Frenchmen in general. The numbers of soldiers who disembarked in Port Royal or Quebec were miniscule in comparison to the totality of Louis’s forces, some 350,000 men under arms in the year of his death, 1715. Twenty, thirty, fifty, or one hundred men in white uniforms, with blue woolen stockings, tricorn hats, and bearing a musket with bayonet and perhaps 40 balls with appropriate powder, was not enough to turn any tide in North America, but a brave show they made. (Until the beginning of the Seven Years' War, France never had more than 800 regulars at any one time in the colony.) Beginning in 1663, however, detachments of such men, aided by their invaluable Indian allies and ever-increasing numbers of experienced coureurs de bois, began marching west and south of the St Lawrence River valley into Iroquois country. These were punishing raids meant to discourage the Five Nations from embracing the British too fondly (the choice was presented, English rum or French cognac?), and as warnings that war parties ranging into French territories would guarantee retaliation. The Iroquois response, however, was not the desired result. As a colonist would write in 1709 of the Iroquois, “For them to live in peace is to live out of their element, war, conquest and murder being what they delight in.” Lescarbot, writing of Indians in general, had put it even more succinctly. Indians lived the life of Alexander the Great. When struck, their natural inclination was to strike back.
In August of 1689, under cover of lightning storms and darkness, over 1,500 Iroquois emerged from their canoes at the rapids of LaChine and undertook what Parkman called “the most frightful massacre in Canadian history.” Small hamlets and farmsteads, isolated from various stockades garrisoned by handfuls of regular soldiers, were stormed, put to the torch, and their inhabitants indiscriminately slaughtered. Corn and hay were burned, livestock left gutted by the roadsides, the country a donnybrook of scattered war parties leaving desolation everywhere within a radius of some twenty miles. The next day, a relief column of eighty regulars and Christian convert Indians were set upon and overwhelmed within sight of a nearby fort. Four or five of the fleetest afoot managed to outrun the Iroquois, who returned to enjoy the fruits of their victory, and to look for more. The main band of invaders returned home after a week or so of unrestrained looting, bringing at least one hundred captives with them, many of whom were distributed throughout the Five Nations for the usual orgies of ritualistic torture. Bands of smaller war parties infested the Montreal region for the rest of the summer. Needless to say, les habitants “were wild with terror … stupefied and speechless.” Into this arena of despair, Louis de Buade, Comte de Frontenac et Palluau, returned for a second tour of duty.
Frontenac, a rather battered sixty-seven years old as he stepped once again to shore at Quebec, was a man of prickly temperament, easily roused to anger and punctilious as to the respect and deference that were, he considered, his rightful due. Rare was the townhouse, meeting hall, chateau, farmstead, or wigwam where a quarrel might not easily be ignited, never to be forgiven. As a professional nobleman, remembering slights was a prerequisite of daily conduct; as a professional soldier, ignoring with equanimity the sight of blood and mayhem rarely impeded his sense of imperial mission. His first tenure as Louis XIV’s royal governor had been stormy, unproductive, and marked by intolerance for the opinions and advice of anyone else, including that of his royal master. He was recalled in 1682; but continuing bad news from the beggared colony encouraged the king to reconsider the martial qualities that Frontenac appeared to possess. As for the count, he was destitute, having lost his properties to an endless line of creditors, relying on his wife to wheedle about the corridors of Versailles defending his good name and securing what crumbs she could for the embittered courtier. He had little choice but to volunteer his services once again for the thankless task of defending New France. He did not expect to win glory there, had but the faintest hopes of repairing his shattered finances, but arrived just the same with his usual energy and highhanded ways. He wasn’t “home” for barely a week before he set off in a flotilla of canoes, in miserable, rainy weather, to see for himself what manner of condition the colony lay in. What he saw steeled his heart, and set him on a strategy that best suited the types of fighting men he had available, who could administer the feckless heretics and traitors who ringed him to the south with lessons they would not soon forget.
Frontenac, like Champlain before him, had a genuine appreciation of his Indian allies. He had no qualms making a fool of himself in tribal gatherings, stomping around doing war dances, screaming and yelling bloodcurdling cries, if that was required to energize them to do his will. He was liberal with gifts, an expense superiors back home in Paris would decry as “onerous” for the next sixty years or so as colonial administrators emulated his example. Unlike his royal master, who regarded these payments to his Indian allies as “gratuities,” Frontenac recognized them for what they were, a far cheaper way to get experienced fighters into the field than importing troops from Europe, who would not be sent in sufficient numbers no matter how loudly he might request them.[9] He impressed these fearsome warriors with his passion, and realized that their special qualities were best seconded by coureurs de bois, producing companies of men who were “Half Indianized French and Half Frenchified Indians,” according to Cotton Mather. In 1690 he organized three separate guerrilla-style operations that were designed with no particular strategic goal in mind other than to sow terror. In that they succeeded beyond measure.
The best documented of these was the winter march from Montreal to the frontier hamlet of Schenectady, located on the Mohawk River fifteen miles northwest of Albany. About one hundred and ten coureurs de bois, with another hundred Christianized Indians, crossed the frozen St. Lawrence and plunged into the woods. Wearing snow shoes, pulling their gear in toboggans, they began a march that proved a tribute to the growing resiliency of native-born French Canadians. These men were not peasant farmers from France, nor indentured servants, impressed convicts, or the riffraff of French seaports. Many were third generation “Canadians,” some metis or half breeds, but all had been inculcated with the Indian ethos of self-reliance and adaptability. “As the sea is the sailor’s element,” Parkman wrote, “so the forest was theirs.” The primeval element of a trackless wilderness was home to these men. It made them tough, it made them impervious to control, and it made them merciless.
The weather tested them. Frozen lakes and streams were transformed to slush by a turn to warmer temperatures, then hardened again by a fresh batch of snowstorms. Alternately soaked, chilled, and soaked again, it seems hard to imagine the kind of endurance that was required to not only survive such a march, but to be conditioned to fight when circumstances demanded it. It took over three weeks to reach Schenectady, and at about eleven at night, in the middle of blizzard-like conditions, this band approached the sleeping village, surrounded by a stockade fence with gates at either end. No guards were out, the gates stood open. Cold did not numb their thinking. The group split in two, as one struggled through snow drifts to close the eastern portal. No one was to escape.
Modern history, like any epoch in the human story, has had its fair share of atrocity stories, some from as fresh as yesterday it seems, so much so that something that happened four centuries ago to a very limited number of people should not necessarily shock our imagination any more or less than other despicable acts of cruelty. Nonetheless, many of the massacres perpetuated during the French and Indian wars seem to stand out for their heartlessness and sheer ferocity. About one hundred and fifty people were asleep that frigid evening, mostly Dutch-speaking subsistence farmers. Around eight or ten militia soldiers were in a rough-hewn block house, along with thirty Mohawk Indians. On a signal, all the buildings were suddenly rushed by the attackers, most of the non-combatants brutally slaughtered as they struggled out of bed. The usual tales of pregnant women being disemboweled, of young babies swung and battered to death against doorways and walls, with stragglers beaten to death fleeing from one house to another, a few survivors fleeing into a wilderness covered in snow to almost certain death, were tales that would stagger New York and New England as they spread across the colonies. Sixty villagers were killed in the two hours of fighting, more than half that number women and children. Another twenty-seven, all men or boys, were taken captive and led north on the return trek. The entire village, save four houses, were burnt to the ground, and survivors unwanted by the French left there in the freezing cold. Likewise Frontenac’s other bands of irregulars, after arduous travel through northeastern forests, undertook sanguinary attacks in both today’s New Hampshire and Maine. In the village of Dover, old Major Waldron took pity on two squaws begging for shelter in his semi-fortified farmhouse (“as loving as bears, and as harmless as tigers,” as Mather would refer to Indian Fifth Columns). In the middle of the night, they unbarricaded the door and Waldron was overwhelmed in the ensuing struggle. He was tied to his kitchen chair, hoisted onto a table, and tortured the rest of the night, finally dispatched with his own regulation sword.
Such raids were more demoralizing than militarily significant, though the results achieved did sufficiently warrant Frontenac’s approach. Frontier towns were deserted in a panic, homesteaders out in the woods packed their belongings and moved south. Tales and rumors spread everywhere through the Colony, along with mordant attempts at humor that somehow rang hollow, as in “Seven Indians, and one with a gun Caused Capt. Nixon, and 40 men to run.”
The crucial question of who would control the vast territories of present-day Maine, New Hampshire and New Brunswick remained moot. Port Royal seemed the key to many New Englanders, with Quebec, of course, not far behind. This was the perfect moment for bellicosity, the desire for revenge, caution tossed to the winds; a perfect time, in other words, for a man whose motto was Incertum quo Fata ferant, or “None can tell where Fate will bear me.”
§
William Phips was a second-generation New Englander whose father immigrated from Bristol, to settle along the beautiful Sheepscot River near Bath in today’s Maine, on what Cotton Mather called “a despicable plantation.” His father was your standard frontiersman, being resourceful, independent, and morally ambivalent. He was the kind of man whose services the local Abenakis valued: he bought their furs, fixed their guns, and traded items back and forth of dubious legality (alcohol, powder, and other destabilizing items). William was Phips Elder’s seventh child (his mother, with two husbands, was variously described as having given birth to between fifteen and twenty-six offspring), and as one of several mouths to feed, he was simply put to work “keeping sheep in the wilderness.” His playmates were Abenaki Indians from the adjoining woods. Apprenticed to a carpenter as a young man, he drifted to Boston, learned to read and write, engaged in ship-building projects along the coast, and evacuated by sea refugees from Maine when the Abenaki went on one of their periodic rampages, mostly designed to keep the white man in his place, to show them who owned these woods, to teach that invaluable lesson that these colonists bridle their covetousness.
In Boston, Phips made a remarkable conquest, securing the hand in marriage of a respected widow, the daughter of a ship captain and the “relict” of a successful merchant. We can only imagine this courtship. One of the more amusing instances of amorous pursuits in Puritan Boston was that of Samuel Sewall who, having lost his wife in 1720, chose a Mrs. Winthrop as the object of his affections. Sewall’s famous diary is a step-by-step chronicle of what turned out to be a fruitless battle. In his entry for October 12, 1720, he called on Mrs. Winthrop. “I got my chair in place, had some converse, but very cold and indifferent to what ‘twas before. Asked to acquit me of rudeness if I drew off her glove. Inquiring the reason, I told her ‘twas great odds between handling a dead goat and a living lady. Got it off.” We may expect, I think, that Phip’s courtship of Mrs. Hull was a good bit rougher, he being, according to Mather, “rather like a hatchet than a razor.” Phips promised the world. He would be a captain of a King’s ship, he would command men better than himself, he would provide Mrs. Hull with the finest brick building in Boston’s North End. “She entertained these passages with sufficient incredulity,” but married the man anyway. When Sewall dropped by to congratulate her on this dubious union and, in fact, the resulting purchase of a grand house indeed, she provided the sober Puritan with “a cup of good beer, and thanked me for my visit.”
Phips was no retiring violet. How he heard tales of Spanish pieces of eight lying in shallow waters off Hispaniola in a sunken wreck we will never know, but local taverns seem a good bet. Through industry, bravado, insinuation, bluster and God knows what else, he managed two salvage operations off Puerto Plata, a small harbor in today’s Dominica. “By the policy of address,” wrote Mather, whose biography of Phips, published in 1702 after his subject’s death remains one of the more entertaining of that minister’s works, “he fished out of a very old Spaniard (or Portuguese) a little advice about the true spot where lay the wreck.” (Read between the lines, and we can picture, I think, a bottle of rum.) His second expedition, financed by the Duke of Albemarle, anchored off the aptly named Ambrosia Banks where Phips, leading a crew of impressed Indian divers, oversaw their swimming and “peeping” through clear water some thirty to forty feet deep. A particularly treacherous reef called “The Boilers,” which lurked only a single yard below the water’s surface, seemed promising, but no sure signs of a wreck could be found. Before rowing back to the ship after another discouraging day, one of the Indians broke the water’s surface with great news: cannon littered on the ocean floor beneath them. Another dive, and the Indian came up with what was later described as a “pig” or “sow” of lumpen silver, estimated at £250 value. “Thanks be to God,” Phips cried, “we are made!” Treasure of silver, gold, jewels and pearls were extracted from the Nuestra Senora de la Concepcion, which fetched in London the princely sum of £220,000, of which Phips received not only a share of £11,000 but a knighthood from James II as well, who had himself partaken of the loot (the Crown’s “royal tenth”). Flush with the excitement of it all, he took advantage of James’s generous offer to ask him for an additional reward. Ever conscious of the revocation of Massachusetts’s ancient charter, he boldly requested that “New England might have its lost privileges restored.”
“Anything but that,” the king replied.
Phips, in his bluff manner, ingratiated himself with both the nobility and the mob, Everyone loves a rogue, after all. Even Puritan ministers found him attractive. He counted both Increase and Cotton Mather as his dear friends; Cotton, in fact, would call his rough-and-ready friend “Phippius Maximus.” The talk of London, we may suppose, he was a frequent visitor to the London Exchange, looking for investors along a certain promenade locally known as the Walk of New England, where Boston merchants and their factors met to discuss business. We may also assume, I think, that he took repose in the coffee houses and taverns favored by his countrymen, such as The Sun of New England. Defoe wrote in his diary that Phips and his backers were certainly lucky men. Had the treasure hunt failed (“a lottery of one hundred thousand to one odds”), “everyone would have been ashamed to have owned themselves concerned in it, a voyage that would have been as much ridiculed as Don Quixot’s adventure upon the wind mills. Bless us!” Certainly when Phips debarked in Boston May, 1689, he found himself marked as man to be reckoned with – he was held up as an exemplar during graduation exercises at the nascent Harvard College as “Jason fetching the Golden Fleece” – but he also found the Massachusetts Bay Colony at an uneasy and pivotal point in its history.
After fifty-seven years of essentially self-rule, the early vice-like grip of the original Puritan fathers had been considerably diminished. The first settlers had been doctrinaire dissenters, men like William Bradford and John Winthrop, whose rigid and uncompromising religious views were designed to dominate every facet of daily life around the Bay. As is true for most religious reformations, the fervor of those first in line can rarely be sustained, and by the second, third, and fourth generations of those who followed, the bearers of the true flame, men like the ministers Increase Mather and his son Cotton, could only bemoan the backsliding they saw all around them. That irascible man of God, Cotton once attempted to lecture a fisherman that he should “not contradict the main end of this wilderness,” which was to “approve yourselves a religious people.” Nonsense, replied the reprobate, “Our main end [is] to catch fish!”
Political turmoil in England only complicated this dilemma. When the original charter of the old colony was revoked in 1684, in effect the termination of their self-rule, a royal governor, Edmund Andros, was sent to take control. Losing governmental monopoly was bad enough, but Andros compounded this loss with two very public policy decisions. The first involved land titles, always a touchy subject wherever or whenever they might be challenged. Andros specifically questioned the validity of purchases from Indians, whose deed signatures were of as much legality as “a scratch with a bear’s claw.” This smacked of potential confiscations or, just as bad, onerous taxation or fees to reconfirm one’s title. Even worse, the Governor flaunted his Anglican leanings, even forcing the Puritans of the Old South Meeting Hall to share their building for services. The High Church of England, of course, was but one step removed from Rome, a leap that the accession of James II in 1685, an open Catholic, made not only possible, but perhaps certain; “such a dread of popery hangs over our heads,” as a merchant from New York put it. The joyous celebrations of the populace when they heard tidings of the Glorious Revolution, however, when the Protestant William III toppled the Stuarts, were tempered by the realization that Andros owed everything he had to the former King James, now the guest of Louis XIV in the luxurious chateaux St.-Germain-en-Laye. What would Andros do? Would he hold Boston for James or William? If the former, did that mean a jointure with New France and Quebec? Did it mean falling to their knees in subjection “to his foolishness, the Pope?” The Mathers and others were aghast at that possibility, and Cotton stood at the forefront of an insurrection that entombed Andros into the prison at Boston’s fort for three months. This initiated a period of tremendous insecurity, where the government of Massachusetts changed six times amid a blurring maze of factional activity. Such volatility, in the end, pushed the colony into an inevitable reliance on London: its authorities, laws, controls, financial services and, most importantly, its army and navy.
At this particular moment, however, England had other more pressing business at hand. William III, not secure in the overthrow of his father-in-law, now had to transport himself and an army across the Irish Sea to confront James on the battlefield there. French troops supplied by Louis XIV, along with native Catholic Irish levies who, of course, would suffer most, squared off against a collection of Dutch, German, English and Scotch-Irish Protestants from Ulster at a bend in the river Boyne, some thirty miles north of Dublin. The day was a complete disaster for the Stuart interests. King William lingered another two months, just long enough to see that matters were under control, then turned about and decamped to London, there to plan yet another Continental campaign. At various moments here and there he was briefed on affairs in the New World, particularly by Lord Halifax, who noted his king’s general ignorance of his farther flung colonies, “which he did not before fully comprehend.” One thing William did understand was money. Sugar was a commodity of incredible value. During the last decade of the seventeenth century, four expensive naval operations were directed to the Caribbean to protect the flow and supply of sugar to England, as well as to hamper French commercial activities in the same commodity. Massachusetts was told, by actions if not by words, to protect itself.
Stung, nettled, discomforted, and outraged by Count Frontenac’s ruthless bloodletting, Boston decided to respond. The Governor and his council determined that Port Royal, an infestation of pirates (both native born and scum from the West Indies) who preyed incessantly on fisherman from Boston and Salem, would be the preliminary target. In the spring of 1690, William Phips was placed in command of a small flotilla. Hauling anchor off Nantasket (today’s Hull), he arrived at “the gut,” or entry, to Port Royal Sound in two weeks, some seven hundred militia and sailors in seven vessels. He found there a French commander of but little resolve, only seventy men under his command, in a fort that was falling about around his ears. It took little persuasion to talk him into surrender, the terms of which Phips completely ignored.
Phips, after all, was a man of dubious character. As Thomas Hutchinson wrote in his 1764 History of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts-Bay, “His education was very low. He was of a hasty temper.” In fact, he was more pirate than knight, a rough and tumble seaman who had put down mutinies in his time with bare fists and crude bravado. The minute he had the French contingent disarmed and in hand, he proceeded to sack Port Royal. Warehouses were rifled, houses looted, and the Catholic church in town scandalously vandalized. In one somewhat twisted way, this lawlessness was in keeping with Puritan ideology. Phips, before the expedition began, had been baptized by Cotton Mather and received into his church. Though no theologian, Phips was undoubtedly aware of a central “determinist” theory that men like the Mathers frequently preached from their pulpits, that God ruled all and directly made His pleasure (or displeasure) known as events in the history of man unfolded. Dreadful circumstances, whether it be war, disease, famine, or drought, were manifestations that God was angry with his people. The greater the human distress, the more manifest the signal that men should repent. In military terms, this added an ironic twist that entrepreneurial people like Phips could understand, if indeed his victims—in this case, the Acadians (being Catholic)—could not. The more damage Phips might inflict, the more obvious it was that the enemy suffered; the more they suffered, the more obvious it was that God was “on their side” in punishing the French. This convenient methodology was put into motion for several days, as the militia fanned out from Port Royal in semi-organized expeditions to steal everything in sight.
In terms of riches and hard currency, however, Port Royal was a meager prize. Men made off with bedclothes, shoes, tools, communion wafers, and household goods, which drew at public auction in Boston some £740, but as for gold crucifixes and candlesticks, the inventory did not amount to much. Phips himself gathered up his opposite number’s personal effects, in complete violation of his articles for surrender. Monsieur Meneval was outraged, and enumerated the items he demanded be returned, of which here is a partial list: “Six silver spoons, six silver forks, two large silver tumblers, one silver cup in the shape of a gondola, two pair of silver shoe-buckles, a very handsome musket, entirely new, a pair of pistols, two dressing gowns, three new wigs, a gray vest, one pair of fine summer stockings, new, four pairs of silk garters, two dozen of shirts, six vests of dimity, four nightcaps with lace edgings, two woolen mattresses from my bed, all my table service of fine tin, all my kitchen linen, two hogsheads of French wine, one half pipe of French brandy.” Meneval protested in vain, as Mrs. Phips refused to return anything. Wigs, after all, were now fashionable in Boston. Even Cotton Mather took to wearing one, much to the dismay of that stalwart old Puritan, Samuel Sewall. [10]
After making the local Acadians pledge allegiance to King William and Queen Mary, Phips hastened for home in triumph. In a matter of days a few French officials showed up out of the woods, and the local inhabitants renewed their fealty to King Louis, no doubt with a nod and a wink. Whoever’s flag waved from the fort was the power of the moment, a concession to reality and common sense.
The ease of conquest went straight to Phips’s head. This was but “a little step towards a greater action,” and an ambitious two-pronged invasion of Canada was then proposed. A land army would proceed up the traditional stepping stones north to Montreal via Lake Champlain and the Richelieu river, drawing Frontenac’s attention (and limited resources) there. Meanwhile Phips would command an amphibious force up the St. Lawrence and capture Quebec. What looked promising on paper, not surprisingly, proved impossible logistically. The western march began as planned, but lasted a mere one hundred miles. Canoes promised but not delivered, recalcitrant Indian allies, and a general malaise infecting the commanding officers (some called it cowardice), resulted in an ignominious disintegration of resolve, word of which fatally reached Frontenac, who drew off defenders from Montreal – only fifty soldiers were left in garrison there – to reinforce Quebec. In Boston, Phips waited endlessly for powder and supplies expected from England, realizing too late perhaps that grandiose expectations for this operation had perhaps outstripped the material capacity of the Bay Colony to support. Pleas to London were ignored. “This small vessel,” wrote the Governor in reference to Boston’s appeal, “coming upon this sole errand and business, to serve their Majesties interest, must not be permitted to return empty.” The king may have curled this letter into a ball and thrown it away. He was busy. In the end, nothing came from London. Very late in the season, and without even a reliable pilot, Phips nonetheless set sail, leading a ragged assemblage of thirty-four vessels, large and small, carrying over two thousand men. Head winds and heavy, adverse currents in the St. Lawrence impeded his progress, but on October 15 he was anchored off Quebec. The very next evening, and fatal to the Bay Colony’s campaign, six hundred men from Montreal had marched into Quebec to cheers, rolling drum rolls, and celebratory cannonades, Galli in suo sterquilinio according to Cotton Mather, “cocks crowing on their own dunghill.” Those besieged now outnumbered their besiegers.
The military operations proved an exercise in futility. Phips might have been a superb ship’s captain, able to exercise control over a finite number of men, but commanding an army in adverse circumstances was beyond whatever abilities he possessed. His opponent mocked him. When summoned to surrender, Frontenac replied that his answer would flow from the mouths of his cannon. Phips delayed and dawdled, holding several conferences trying to decide where and when to attack. When a landing force was finally disembarked under the command of Major Walley, and clumsily at that, it was harassed and confounded by irregulars firing upon it from scrub and woods. The New Englanders organized frontal attacks but the guerrillas simply melted away, leaving their foes in a state of agitation and dismay. Inadequately supplied, they shivered out in the open for four nights, grew hungry, saw evidence that smallpox was spreading in their ranks, and grew disorderly. The chaplain of the army, the outspoken John Wise of Ipswich, approached Walley and remonstrated with him and other officers. “You are out of your wits,” he later recalled saying, “What do you mean by such methods? We did not come hither to drive a parcel of cowardly Frenchman from swamp to swamp, but to attack Quebec. ‘Saith he, I cannot rule them,’” an indictment of colonial militias that would resonate for another hundred years. Phips, in the meantime, unleashed his frustration by organizing a bombardment of the upper town by his fleet, an utterly fruitless exercise that did nothing but terrorize Ursuline nuns and deplete his supply of powder. Frontenac replied to the bombardment by “warmly entertaining” the fleet with fusillades of his own, and Phips’s flagship, riddled with shot and having the king’s colors blown off (a trophy several Frenchmen risked their lives to recover in a brisk canoe trip, under fire), cut his anchor ropes and drifted downstream out of the action. This fiasco demoralized everyone. The foot soldiers now stranded ashore were marched to the river’s edge in the middle of the night because “we are afraid to awaken Angry Frontenac;” they camped out in the open on an “unmercifully cold beach” to await their rescue. Wise was disgusted at the sight, these proud New Englanders sleeping “upon the wet sand, they lie many of them 30 or 40 in a heap like hogs in a sty.” In a state of near panic, this by now a rabble was finally extricated the next morning, leaving their artillery behind as a final statement of what Wise labeled “cowardice.” Seven days later the fleet retraced its path down the St. Lawrence for further mishaps out to sea. One ship ran aground on the “squalid wilderness” of Anticosti Island, at the river’s mouth, where its crew, two-thirds of whom perished, attempted to winter over in shanties built from their vessel’s wreckage; other ships were blown as far off course as the Caribbean, and some disappeared without a trace.
It was a chastened William Phipps who straggled back into Boston Harbor on the 19th of November. He was now criticized as “a man who never did Exploit above water,” a less than reverential reference to his exploits salvaging treasure. The Colony had expected the anticipated plunder of Quebec City to cover expeditionary expenses; instead, they suddenly found themselves £40,000 in debt and the cupboards bare. In such circumstances, they turned to the tried and true expedient of all governments that fall on hard times, they issued letters of credit. These depreciated in value almost instantly and became, as Mather put it, “waste paper.” Phips undertook the hazards of a winter voyage east, arriving in London both to justify his conduct and to press for another invasion of Canada. His arguments would become tediously familiar in London, as they were repeated continuously for the next seventy years by a variety of “trumpets.” The end result would finally be the overthrow of New France, though the path was often torturous, clumsy, and far more expensive than anyone would have thought worthwhile at the time.
The adventures of Mr. Phips continued apace. Though his proposals for additional military action against Quebec came to naught, his personality remained infectious and his friends firm. With the aforementioned fall of the Andros government in Boston, abetted by Cotton Mather and others of the Puritan intelligentsia, Phips found himself anointed the Royal Governor. He returned to Boston to assume his duties, but soon found himself embroiled in colonial politics for which his temperament ill-suited him.[11] When an Acadian trader, Abraham Boudrot, arrived in Boston Harbor with “sundry packs of beaver and considerable quantity of skins and small furs,” a royal customs official sought to seize the cargo as contraband. Phips, his entrepreneurial instincts aroused, threatened to “break his head” if he touched a single pelt, not the first time he swirled his cane about in anger. He also faced the disquieting spectacle of a local hysteria, an “ensnaring horrible storm” that culminated in the infamous Salem witch trials (Samuel Sewall was one of the judges), wherein nineteen presumably innocent people were summarily executed, and over one hundred others imprisoned, presumably with the same fate hanging over their heads.[12] Phips, out of his element here – “he had not wit enough for the government,” as he himself admitted – was perhaps misguided by Mather, whose behavior and writings on this phenomenon have earned him never-ending calumny. The Governor sensed that things had spun out of control when Mrs. Phips herself was suspected of witchcraft. As Hutchinson wrote sixty-two years later, “No body was safe. The most effectual way to prevent an accusation was to become an accuser.” Phips thereupon began the process of derailing the persecutions. In the short history of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, perhaps at no other juncture were the communal spirits and material fortunes of the place ever at lower ebb. Nearly bankrupt, taxation at its highest ever level, still embarrassed by the failed expedition north, and now beset by the “distempered imagination” of Satan within their midst, the Colony foundered. The “awful frown of God” was upon them, and upon Phips as well, who found himself recalled to London for inquiries into his behavior. There he died.
The story of the last decade of the seventeenth century is really that of Frontenac’s la petite guerre, or small war policy, the ruthlessness of which never diminished. The reach of Indian war parties was extreme. Communities as close to Boston as Groton and Haverhill and even my own Newbury were often targeted. Three episodes stand out. In York, Maine, Minister Shubael Dummer was shot dead as he walked from the front door to his horse, “a shepherd sacrificed by wolves.” He was the second graduate of Harvard College to die in battle. TO COME future graduates, through 2013, would follow his sorry fate. York was burned to the ground, around one hundred of its citizens dragged into captivity. On the Sabbath following, one of the Indians put on Dummer’s robes and mocked the bedraggled prisoners (including Dummer’s wife, who soon perished) with a sacrilegious sermon. Dummer, like Samuel Sewall, was brought up in Newbury, where many of his family settled and prospered. His half-nephew, William Dummer (later a governor of Massachusetts), would later found Governor Dummer’s Academy, a prestigious boarding school for boys and just a few miles away from where this book was written. [13]
In 1697, a more famous incident occurred in Haverhill, Massachusetts, a neighboring community to Newburyport located up the Merrimack River, which served as a major Indian “highway.” Hannah Duston, a forty-year-old settler’s wife, was lying in bed with her newborn child, her ninth, when Indians appeared at the edge of their fields. Husband Thomas rushed into the bed chamber with a warning, but quickly made, in the few seconds available to him, the chilling decision that Hannah would hold him up. He fled into the woods with his several children, fighting off his Indian pursuers, until he reached the safety of a nearby fortified farmhouse. Hannah was left behind, with a wet nurse and the baby. The Indians, at least twenty, stormed the farm and looted everything in it. The baby was taken and repeatedly dashed against an apple tree until dead, the house was burned and livestock slaughtered. Then the two women were dragged into the woods and, along with other prisoners, directed on north for a long trek into the central fastness of New Hampshire. At one point, the band split apart into smaller groupings. Hannah found herself in a family unit of twelve, consisting of two warriors, three squaws, six children, and a young white boy of 14, Sam, captured eighteen months previously in Worcester. Hannah watched and waited. Encamped on an island in the Merrimack River near today’s Penacook, New Hampshire, she waited until all were asleep, awoke the nurse and the boy and, arming themselves with tomahawks, proceeded to kill everyone in the hut save a woman and child, both of whom escaped bleeding into the wilderness. Exhibiting perhaps the shrewd business acumen that would later distinguish mercantile New England, she then scalped all ten of the Indians, realizing that bounties were being offered for dead aboriginals, regardless of age or sex. The three then took off downriver in a canoe, traveling only by night, until they reached Haverhill once again.
Haverhill today is a grimy old mill city, architecturally interesting but the victim nonetheless of excessively enthusiastic urban renewal projects from the 1950s. Overlooking one massive and forlorn intersection, a virtual concrete desert as it were, is an archaic, mock-heroic nineteenth-century bronze statue of Hannah Duston, in the politically incorrect stance of waving her tomahawk. She received £50 from a grateful General Assembly for her bounty of scalps, and was entertained by Boston’s finest. Sewall noted in his diary the ironic note that the Worcester boy, Sam, had been shown by one of the warriors the proper technique of scalping, “little thinking that the captives would make some of their first experiment upon himself. Sam kill’d him.” What Hannah said to her husband when she next saw him has not been recorded, though several of our famous literary icons put many words, and motivations, into her mouth. John Greenleaf Whittier, who was born in nearby Amesbury, wrote a particularly florid account of Duston’s ordeal, but Nathaniel Hawthorne called her a “bloody old hag,” casting aspirations on her sanguinary revenge. Thoreau’s response was somewhat more nuanced. He had visited Haverhill on occasion, and walked to the Duston homestead, where nothing but the outlines of a cellar hole were then visible. He met people who still remembered the apple tree where Hannah’s baby was killed, and had eaten fruit from it many times.[14]
The third incident is the most famous in New England lore, perhaps because its location, Deerfield, Massachusetts, still retaining its rural and colonial character (it too is the home of a prestigious prep school, Deerfield Academy). North America was now feeling the effects of the second great European conflict of Louis XIV, known as the War of the Spanish Succession. Who sat in the Palacio Real in Madrid, of course, was hardly a matter of concern to the three hundred or so people who were asleep in their beds on February 29, 1704, nor did the approaching Indian war party have any clear idea where Spain might be located. But they knew how to travel up and down the Connecticut River Valley, how to reconnoiter and then surprise yet another village on the borderlands, and they knew what they were looking for: loot, captives, and rum. They found all three. What so chilled those who heard of the ensuing tragedy was the very caliber of the people taken, in particular the town’s minister, John Williams, who had been born in Roxbury, outside of Boston. His church there had had as its principal divine the famous John Eliot, preacher to the Indians, champion of their rights, the man who had translated religious tracts into the Algonquian tongue, despite the fact that most Indians were illiterate. Williams’s wife, however, was even more squarely placed in New England’s saintly hierarchy, being a Mather. Increase Mather was Eunice Mather’s uncle, and Cotton her first cousin. The progression of their capture followed the usual line: complete surprise and shock “as the enemy came in like a flood upon us,” the instant murder of two children on the William’s very threshold, as well as a negro slave; hauled out into wintry, freezing conditions, the town ablaze, then a trek into the wilderness where Eunice Mather, unable to keep up, was tomahawked to death. Williams and his remaining children then survived a fifty-seven-day march that ended in Montreal on April 25. Close to three years later, Williams won his freedom and returned to Massachusetts, but without one of his daughters, a girl named Eunice, after her mother. In what would become a cause célèbre in Puritan circles, her rescue became the focus of the entire colony. Fast days, prayer days, endless cycles of diplomacy between New France and New England dragged on for years, but a decade after the abduction Williams heard startling news. His daughter had no wish to return to Deerfield. She had been long adopted by an Iroquoian tribe, “forgot her English and her catechism,” had married one of her tribe’s savage warriors and, under Jesuitical sway, been converted to Catholicism. This was about as nightmarish a scenario as a nonconformist minister could possibly imagine. The only place worse than Rome, as Cotton Mather had preached, was Hell.[15]
The Deerfield disaster proved a galvanizing event throughout the Colony. “The dismal news of the slaughter made at Deerfield is certainly and generally known,” Sewall noted in his diary. “Our congregation was made a Bochim.” [16] Calls for retaliation raged through the colonies, disregarding the reality that any aggressive response would certainly encourage a counter riposte, but it little mattered at the time. One man who re-entered the breech with a vengeance was another New England character, Benjamin Church.
In Boston, Phips made a remarkable conquest, securing the hand in marriage of a respected widow, the daughter of a ship captain and the “relict” of a successful merchant. We can only imagine this courtship. One of the more amusing instances of amorous pursuits in Puritan Boston was that of Samuel Sewall who, having lost his wife in 1720, chose a Mrs. Winthrop as the object of his affections. Sewall’s famous diary is a step-by-step chronicle of what turned out to be a fruitless battle. In his entry for October 12, 1720, he called on Mrs. Winthrop. “I got my chair in place, had some converse, but very cold and indifferent to what ‘twas before. Asked to acquit me of rudeness if I drew off her glove. Inquiring the reason, I told her ‘twas great odds between handling a dead goat and a living lady. Got it off.” We may expect, I think, that Phip’s courtship of Mrs. Hull was a good bit rougher, he being, according to Mather, “rather like a hatchet than a razor.” Phips promised the world. He would be a captain of a King’s ship, he would command men better than himself, he would provide Mrs. Hull with the finest brick building in Boston’s North End. “She entertained these passages with sufficient incredulity,” but married the man anyway. When Sewall dropped by to congratulate her on this dubious union and, in fact, the resulting purchase of a grand house indeed, she provided the sober Puritan with “a cup of good beer, and thanked me for my visit.”
Phips was no retiring violet. How he heard tales of Spanish pieces of eight lying in shallow waters off Hispaniola in a sunken wreck we will never know, but local taverns seem a good bet. Through industry, bravado, insinuation, bluster and God knows what else, he managed two salvage operations off Puerto Plata, a small harbor in today’s Dominica. “By the policy of address,” wrote Mather, whose biography of Phips, published in 1702 after his subject’s death remains one of the more entertaining of that minister’s works, “he fished out of a very old Spaniard (or Portuguese) a little advice about the true spot where lay the wreck.” (Read between the lines, and we can picture, I think, a bottle of rum.) His second expedition, financed by the Duke of Albemarle, anchored off the aptly named Ambrosia Banks where Phips, leading a crew of impressed Indian divers, oversaw their swimming and “peeping” through clear water some thirty to forty feet deep. A particularly treacherous reef called “The Boilers,” which lurked only a single yard below the water’s surface, seemed promising, but no sure signs of a wreck could be found. Before rowing back to the ship after another discouraging day, one of the Indians broke the water’s surface with great news: cannon littered on the ocean floor beneath them. Another dive, and the Indian came up with what was later described as a “pig” or “sow” of lumpen silver, estimated at £250 value. “Thanks be to God,” Phips cried, “we are made!” Treasure of silver, gold, jewels and pearls were extracted from the Nuestra Senora de la Concepcion, which fetched in London the princely sum of £220,000, of which Phips received not only a share of £11,000 but a knighthood from James II as well, who had himself partaken of the loot (the Crown’s “royal tenth”). Flush with the excitement of it all, he took advantage of James’s generous offer to ask him for an additional reward. Ever conscious of the revocation of Massachusetts’s ancient charter, he boldly requested that “New England might have its lost privileges restored.”
“Anything but that,” the king replied.
Phips, in his bluff manner, ingratiated himself with both the nobility and the mob, Everyone loves a rogue, after all. Even Puritan ministers found him attractive. He counted both Increase and Cotton Mather as his dear friends; Cotton, in fact, would call his rough-and-ready friend “Phippius Maximus.” The talk of London, we may suppose, he was a frequent visitor to the London Exchange, looking for investors along a certain promenade locally known as the Walk of New England, where Boston merchants and their factors met to discuss business. We may also assume, I think, that he took repose in the coffee houses and taverns favored by his countrymen, such as The Sun of New England. Defoe wrote in his diary that Phips and his backers were certainly lucky men. Had the treasure hunt failed (“a lottery of one hundred thousand to one odds”), “everyone would have been ashamed to have owned themselves concerned in it, a voyage that would have been as much ridiculed as Don Quixot’s adventure upon the wind mills. Bless us!” Certainly when Phips debarked in Boston May, 1689, he found himself marked as man to be reckoned with – he was held up as an exemplar during graduation exercises at the nascent Harvard College as “Jason fetching the Golden Fleece” – but he also found the Massachusetts Bay Colony at an uneasy and pivotal point in its history.
After fifty-seven years of essentially self-rule, the early vice-like grip of the original Puritan fathers had been considerably diminished. The first settlers had been doctrinaire dissenters, men like William Bradford and John Winthrop, whose rigid and uncompromising religious views were designed to dominate every facet of daily life around the Bay. As is true for most religious reformations, the fervor of those first in line can rarely be sustained, and by the second, third, and fourth generations of those who followed, the bearers of the true flame, men like the ministers Increase Mather and his son Cotton, could only bemoan the backsliding they saw all around them. That irascible man of God, Cotton once attempted to lecture a fisherman that he should “not contradict the main end of this wilderness,” which was to “approve yourselves a religious people.” Nonsense, replied the reprobate, “Our main end [is] to catch fish!”
Political turmoil in England only complicated this dilemma. When the original charter of the old colony was revoked in 1684, in effect the termination of their self-rule, a royal governor, Edmund Andros, was sent to take control. Losing governmental monopoly was bad enough, but Andros compounded this loss with two very public policy decisions. The first involved land titles, always a touchy subject wherever or whenever they might be challenged. Andros specifically questioned the validity of purchases from Indians, whose deed signatures were of as much legality as “a scratch with a bear’s claw.” This smacked of potential confiscations or, just as bad, onerous taxation or fees to reconfirm one’s title. Even worse, the Governor flaunted his Anglican leanings, even forcing the Puritans of the Old South Meeting Hall to share their building for services. The High Church of England, of course, was but one step removed from Rome, a leap that the accession of James II in 1685, an open Catholic, made not only possible, but perhaps certain; “such a dread of popery hangs over our heads,” as a merchant from New York put it. The joyous celebrations of the populace when they heard tidings of the Glorious Revolution, however, when the Protestant William III toppled the Stuarts, were tempered by the realization that Andros owed everything he had to the former King James, now the guest of Louis XIV in the luxurious chateaux St.-Germain-en-Laye. What would Andros do? Would he hold Boston for James or William? If the former, did that mean a jointure with New France and Quebec? Did it mean falling to their knees in subjection “to his foolishness, the Pope?” The Mathers and others were aghast at that possibility, and Cotton stood at the forefront of an insurrection that entombed Andros into the prison at Boston’s fort for three months. This initiated a period of tremendous insecurity, where the government of Massachusetts changed six times amid a blurring maze of factional activity. Such volatility, in the end, pushed the colony into an inevitable reliance on London: its authorities, laws, controls, financial services and, most importantly, its army and navy.
At this particular moment, however, England had other more pressing business at hand. William III, not secure in the overthrow of his father-in-law, now had to transport himself and an army across the Irish Sea to confront James on the battlefield there. French troops supplied by Louis XIV, along with native Catholic Irish levies who, of course, would suffer most, squared off against a collection of Dutch, German, English and Scotch-Irish Protestants from Ulster at a bend in the river Boyne, some thirty miles north of Dublin. The day was a complete disaster for the Stuart interests. King William lingered another two months, just long enough to see that matters were under control, then turned about and decamped to London, there to plan yet another Continental campaign. At various moments here and there he was briefed on affairs in the New World, particularly by Lord Halifax, who noted his king’s general ignorance of his farther flung colonies, “which he did not before fully comprehend.” One thing William did understand was money. Sugar was a commodity of incredible value. During the last decade of the seventeenth century, four expensive naval operations were directed to the Caribbean to protect the flow and supply of sugar to England, as well as to hamper French commercial activities in the same commodity. Massachusetts was told, by actions if not by words, to protect itself.
Stung, nettled, discomforted, and outraged by Count Frontenac’s ruthless bloodletting, Boston decided to respond. The Governor and his council determined that Port Royal, an infestation of pirates (both native born and scum from the West Indies) who preyed incessantly on fisherman from Boston and Salem, would be the preliminary target. In the spring of 1690, William Phips was placed in command of a small flotilla. Hauling anchor off Nantasket (today’s Hull), he arrived at “the gut,” or entry, to Port Royal Sound in two weeks, some seven hundred militia and sailors in seven vessels. He found there a French commander of but little resolve, only seventy men under his command, in a fort that was falling about around his ears. It took little persuasion to talk him into surrender, the terms of which Phips completely ignored.
Phips, after all, was a man of dubious character. As Thomas Hutchinson wrote in his 1764 History of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts-Bay, “His education was very low. He was of a hasty temper.” In fact, he was more pirate than knight, a rough and tumble seaman who had put down mutinies in his time with bare fists and crude bravado. The minute he had the French contingent disarmed and in hand, he proceeded to sack Port Royal. Warehouses were rifled, houses looted, and the Catholic church in town scandalously vandalized. In one somewhat twisted way, this lawlessness was in keeping with Puritan ideology. Phips, before the expedition began, had been baptized by Cotton Mather and received into his church. Though no theologian, Phips was undoubtedly aware of a central “determinist” theory that men like the Mathers frequently preached from their pulpits, that God ruled all and directly made His pleasure (or displeasure) known as events in the history of man unfolded. Dreadful circumstances, whether it be war, disease, famine, or drought, were manifestations that God was angry with his people. The greater the human distress, the more manifest the signal that men should repent. In military terms, this added an ironic twist that entrepreneurial people like Phips could understand, if indeed his victims—in this case, the Acadians (being Catholic)—could not. The more damage Phips might inflict, the more obvious it was that the enemy suffered; the more they suffered, the more obvious it was that God was “on their side” in punishing the French. This convenient methodology was put into motion for several days, as the militia fanned out from Port Royal in semi-organized expeditions to steal everything in sight.
In terms of riches and hard currency, however, Port Royal was a meager prize. Men made off with bedclothes, shoes, tools, communion wafers, and household goods, which drew at public auction in Boston some £740, but as for gold crucifixes and candlesticks, the inventory did not amount to much. Phips himself gathered up his opposite number’s personal effects, in complete violation of his articles for surrender. Monsieur Meneval was outraged, and enumerated the items he demanded be returned, of which here is a partial list: “Six silver spoons, six silver forks, two large silver tumblers, one silver cup in the shape of a gondola, two pair of silver shoe-buckles, a very handsome musket, entirely new, a pair of pistols, two dressing gowns, three new wigs, a gray vest, one pair of fine summer stockings, new, four pairs of silk garters, two dozen of shirts, six vests of dimity, four nightcaps with lace edgings, two woolen mattresses from my bed, all my table service of fine tin, all my kitchen linen, two hogsheads of French wine, one half pipe of French brandy.” Meneval protested in vain, as Mrs. Phips refused to return anything. Wigs, after all, were now fashionable in Boston. Even Cotton Mather took to wearing one, much to the dismay of that stalwart old Puritan, Samuel Sewall. [10]
After making the local Acadians pledge allegiance to King William and Queen Mary, Phips hastened for home in triumph. In a matter of days a few French officials showed up out of the woods, and the local inhabitants renewed their fealty to King Louis, no doubt with a nod and a wink. Whoever’s flag waved from the fort was the power of the moment, a concession to reality and common sense.
The ease of conquest went straight to Phips’s head. This was but “a little step towards a greater action,” and an ambitious two-pronged invasion of Canada was then proposed. A land army would proceed up the traditional stepping stones north to Montreal via Lake Champlain and the Richelieu river, drawing Frontenac’s attention (and limited resources) there. Meanwhile Phips would command an amphibious force up the St. Lawrence and capture Quebec. What looked promising on paper, not surprisingly, proved impossible logistically. The western march began as planned, but lasted a mere one hundred miles. Canoes promised but not delivered, recalcitrant Indian allies, and a general malaise infecting the commanding officers (some called it cowardice), resulted in an ignominious disintegration of resolve, word of which fatally reached Frontenac, who drew off defenders from Montreal – only fifty soldiers were left in garrison there – to reinforce Quebec. In Boston, Phips waited endlessly for powder and supplies expected from England, realizing too late perhaps that grandiose expectations for this operation had perhaps outstripped the material capacity of the Bay Colony to support. Pleas to London were ignored. “This small vessel,” wrote the Governor in reference to Boston’s appeal, “coming upon this sole errand and business, to serve their Majesties interest, must not be permitted to return empty.” The king may have curled this letter into a ball and thrown it away. He was busy. In the end, nothing came from London. Very late in the season, and without even a reliable pilot, Phips nonetheless set sail, leading a ragged assemblage of thirty-four vessels, large and small, carrying over two thousand men. Head winds and heavy, adverse currents in the St. Lawrence impeded his progress, but on October 15 he was anchored off Quebec. The very next evening, and fatal to the Bay Colony’s campaign, six hundred men from Montreal had marched into Quebec to cheers, rolling drum rolls, and celebratory cannonades, Galli in suo sterquilinio according to Cotton Mather, “cocks crowing on their own dunghill.” Those besieged now outnumbered their besiegers.
The military operations proved an exercise in futility. Phips might have been a superb ship’s captain, able to exercise control over a finite number of men, but commanding an army in adverse circumstances was beyond whatever abilities he possessed. His opponent mocked him. When summoned to surrender, Frontenac replied that his answer would flow from the mouths of his cannon. Phips delayed and dawdled, holding several conferences trying to decide where and when to attack. When a landing force was finally disembarked under the command of Major Walley, and clumsily at that, it was harassed and confounded by irregulars firing upon it from scrub and woods. The New Englanders organized frontal attacks but the guerrillas simply melted away, leaving their foes in a state of agitation and dismay. Inadequately supplied, they shivered out in the open for four nights, grew hungry, saw evidence that smallpox was spreading in their ranks, and grew disorderly. The chaplain of the army, the outspoken John Wise of Ipswich, approached Walley and remonstrated with him and other officers. “You are out of your wits,” he later recalled saying, “What do you mean by such methods? We did not come hither to drive a parcel of cowardly Frenchman from swamp to swamp, but to attack Quebec. ‘Saith he, I cannot rule them,’” an indictment of colonial militias that would resonate for another hundred years. Phips, in the meantime, unleashed his frustration by organizing a bombardment of the upper town by his fleet, an utterly fruitless exercise that did nothing but terrorize Ursuline nuns and deplete his supply of powder. Frontenac replied to the bombardment by “warmly entertaining” the fleet with fusillades of his own, and Phips’s flagship, riddled with shot and having the king’s colors blown off (a trophy several Frenchmen risked their lives to recover in a brisk canoe trip, under fire), cut his anchor ropes and drifted downstream out of the action. This fiasco demoralized everyone. The foot soldiers now stranded ashore were marched to the river’s edge in the middle of the night because “we are afraid to awaken Angry Frontenac;” they camped out in the open on an “unmercifully cold beach” to await their rescue. Wise was disgusted at the sight, these proud New Englanders sleeping “upon the wet sand, they lie many of them 30 or 40 in a heap like hogs in a sty.” In a state of near panic, this by now a rabble was finally extricated the next morning, leaving their artillery behind as a final statement of what Wise labeled “cowardice.” Seven days later the fleet retraced its path down the St. Lawrence for further mishaps out to sea. One ship ran aground on the “squalid wilderness” of Anticosti Island, at the river’s mouth, where its crew, two-thirds of whom perished, attempted to winter over in shanties built from their vessel’s wreckage; other ships were blown as far off course as the Caribbean, and some disappeared without a trace.
It was a chastened William Phipps who straggled back into Boston Harbor on the 19th of November. He was now criticized as “a man who never did Exploit above water,” a less than reverential reference to his exploits salvaging treasure. The Colony had expected the anticipated plunder of Quebec City to cover expeditionary expenses; instead, they suddenly found themselves £40,000 in debt and the cupboards bare. In such circumstances, they turned to the tried and true expedient of all governments that fall on hard times, they issued letters of credit. These depreciated in value almost instantly and became, as Mather put it, “waste paper.” Phips undertook the hazards of a winter voyage east, arriving in London both to justify his conduct and to press for another invasion of Canada. His arguments would become tediously familiar in London, as they were repeated continuously for the next seventy years by a variety of “trumpets.” The end result would finally be the overthrow of New France, though the path was often torturous, clumsy, and far more expensive than anyone would have thought worthwhile at the time.
The adventures of Mr. Phips continued apace. Though his proposals for additional military action against Quebec came to naught, his personality remained infectious and his friends firm. With the aforementioned fall of the Andros government in Boston, abetted by Cotton Mather and others of the Puritan intelligentsia, Phips found himself anointed the Royal Governor. He returned to Boston to assume his duties, but soon found himself embroiled in colonial politics for which his temperament ill-suited him.[11] When an Acadian trader, Abraham Boudrot, arrived in Boston Harbor with “sundry packs of beaver and considerable quantity of skins and small furs,” a royal customs official sought to seize the cargo as contraband. Phips, his entrepreneurial instincts aroused, threatened to “break his head” if he touched a single pelt, not the first time he swirled his cane about in anger. He also faced the disquieting spectacle of a local hysteria, an “ensnaring horrible storm” that culminated in the infamous Salem witch trials (Samuel Sewall was one of the judges), wherein nineteen presumably innocent people were summarily executed, and over one hundred others imprisoned, presumably with the same fate hanging over their heads.[12] Phips, out of his element here – “he had not wit enough for the government,” as he himself admitted – was perhaps misguided by Mather, whose behavior and writings on this phenomenon have earned him never-ending calumny. The Governor sensed that things had spun out of control when Mrs. Phips herself was suspected of witchcraft. As Hutchinson wrote sixty-two years later, “No body was safe. The most effectual way to prevent an accusation was to become an accuser.” Phips thereupon began the process of derailing the persecutions. In the short history of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, perhaps at no other juncture were the communal spirits and material fortunes of the place ever at lower ebb. Nearly bankrupt, taxation at its highest ever level, still embarrassed by the failed expedition north, and now beset by the “distempered imagination” of Satan within their midst, the Colony foundered. The “awful frown of God” was upon them, and upon Phips as well, who found himself recalled to London for inquiries into his behavior. There he died.
The story of the last decade of the seventeenth century is really that of Frontenac’s la petite guerre, or small war policy, the ruthlessness of which never diminished. The reach of Indian war parties was extreme. Communities as close to Boston as Groton and Haverhill and even my own Newbury were often targeted. Three episodes stand out. In York, Maine, Minister Shubael Dummer was shot dead as he walked from the front door to his horse, “a shepherd sacrificed by wolves.” He was the second graduate of Harvard College to die in battle. TO COME future graduates, through 2013, would follow his sorry fate. York was burned to the ground, around one hundred of its citizens dragged into captivity. On the Sabbath following, one of the Indians put on Dummer’s robes and mocked the bedraggled prisoners (including Dummer’s wife, who soon perished) with a sacrilegious sermon. Dummer, like Samuel Sewall, was brought up in Newbury, where many of his family settled and prospered. His half-nephew, William Dummer (later a governor of Massachusetts), would later found Governor Dummer’s Academy, a prestigious boarding school for boys and just a few miles away from where this book was written. [13]
In 1697, a more famous incident occurred in Haverhill, Massachusetts, a neighboring community to Newburyport located up the Merrimack River, which served as a major Indian “highway.” Hannah Duston, a forty-year-old settler’s wife, was lying in bed with her newborn child, her ninth, when Indians appeared at the edge of their fields. Husband Thomas rushed into the bed chamber with a warning, but quickly made, in the few seconds available to him, the chilling decision that Hannah would hold him up. He fled into the woods with his several children, fighting off his Indian pursuers, until he reached the safety of a nearby fortified farmhouse. Hannah was left behind, with a wet nurse and the baby. The Indians, at least twenty, stormed the farm and looted everything in it. The baby was taken and repeatedly dashed against an apple tree until dead, the house was burned and livestock slaughtered. Then the two women were dragged into the woods and, along with other prisoners, directed on north for a long trek into the central fastness of New Hampshire. At one point, the band split apart into smaller groupings. Hannah found herself in a family unit of twelve, consisting of two warriors, three squaws, six children, and a young white boy of 14, Sam, captured eighteen months previously in Worcester. Hannah watched and waited. Encamped on an island in the Merrimack River near today’s Penacook, New Hampshire, she waited until all were asleep, awoke the nurse and the boy and, arming themselves with tomahawks, proceeded to kill everyone in the hut save a woman and child, both of whom escaped bleeding into the wilderness. Exhibiting perhaps the shrewd business acumen that would later distinguish mercantile New England, she then scalped all ten of the Indians, realizing that bounties were being offered for dead aboriginals, regardless of age or sex. The three then took off downriver in a canoe, traveling only by night, until they reached Haverhill once again.
Haverhill today is a grimy old mill city, architecturally interesting but the victim nonetheless of excessively enthusiastic urban renewal projects from the 1950s. Overlooking one massive and forlorn intersection, a virtual concrete desert as it were, is an archaic, mock-heroic nineteenth-century bronze statue of Hannah Duston, in the politically incorrect stance of waving her tomahawk. She received £50 from a grateful General Assembly for her bounty of scalps, and was entertained by Boston’s finest. Sewall noted in his diary the ironic note that the Worcester boy, Sam, had been shown by one of the warriors the proper technique of scalping, “little thinking that the captives would make some of their first experiment upon himself. Sam kill’d him.” What Hannah said to her husband when she next saw him has not been recorded, though several of our famous literary icons put many words, and motivations, into her mouth. John Greenleaf Whittier, who was born in nearby Amesbury, wrote a particularly florid account of Duston’s ordeal, but Nathaniel Hawthorne called her a “bloody old hag,” casting aspirations on her sanguinary revenge. Thoreau’s response was somewhat more nuanced. He had visited Haverhill on occasion, and walked to the Duston homestead, where nothing but the outlines of a cellar hole were then visible. He met people who still remembered the apple tree where Hannah’s baby was killed, and had eaten fruit from it many times.[14]
The third incident is the most famous in New England lore, perhaps because its location, Deerfield, Massachusetts, still retaining its rural and colonial character (it too is the home of a prestigious prep school, Deerfield Academy). North America was now feeling the effects of the second great European conflict of Louis XIV, known as the War of the Spanish Succession. Who sat in the Palacio Real in Madrid, of course, was hardly a matter of concern to the three hundred or so people who were asleep in their beds on February 29, 1704, nor did the approaching Indian war party have any clear idea where Spain might be located. But they knew how to travel up and down the Connecticut River Valley, how to reconnoiter and then surprise yet another village on the borderlands, and they knew what they were looking for: loot, captives, and rum. They found all three. What so chilled those who heard of the ensuing tragedy was the very caliber of the people taken, in particular the town’s minister, John Williams, who had been born in Roxbury, outside of Boston. His church there had had as its principal divine the famous John Eliot, preacher to the Indians, champion of their rights, the man who had translated religious tracts into the Algonquian tongue, despite the fact that most Indians were illiterate. Williams’s wife, however, was even more squarely placed in New England’s saintly hierarchy, being a Mather. Increase Mather was Eunice Mather’s uncle, and Cotton her first cousin. The progression of their capture followed the usual line: complete surprise and shock “as the enemy came in like a flood upon us,” the instant murder of two children on the William’s very threshold, as well as a negro slave; hauled out into wintry, freezing conditions, the town ablaze, then a trek into the wilderness where Eunice Mather, unable to keep up, was tomahawked to death. Williams and his remaining children then survived a fifty-seven-day march that ended in Montreal on April 25. Close to three years later, Williams won his freedom and returned to Massachusetts, but without one of his daughters, a girl named Eunice, after her mother. In what would become a cause célèbre in Puritan circles, her rescue became the focus of the entire colony. Fast days, prayer days, endless cycles of diplomacy between New France and New England dragged on for years, but a decade after the abduction Williams heard startling news. His daughter had no wish to return to Deerfield. She had been long adopted by an Iroquoian tribe, “forgot her English and her catechism,” had married one of her tribe’s savage warriors and, under Jesuitical sway, been converted to Catholicism. This was about as nightmarish a scenario as a nonconformist minister could possibly imagine. The only place worse than Rome, as Cotton Mather had preached, was Hell.[15]
The Deerfield disaster proved a galvanizing event throughout the Colony. “The dismal news of the slaughter made at Deerfield is certainly and generally known,” Sewall noted in his diary. “Our congregation was made a Bochim.” [16] Calls for retaliation raged through the colonies, disregarding the reality that any aggressive response would certainly encourage a counter riposte, but it little mattered at the time. One man who re-entered the breech with a vengeance was another New England character, Benjamin Church.
§
“The Council of War were called together. Church told them that if he should take command of men, he should not lie in any town or garrison with them, but would lie in the woods as the enemy did … If they intended to make an end of the war by subduing the enemy, they must make a business of the war as the enemy did.”
-Benjamin Church
By the time of the Deerfield massacre, Count Frontenac was no longer at the helm of New France, but buried since 1698 deep in the crypt of the Recollect monastery in Quebec, a final snub to the official religious hierarchy of the colony, represented by the bishop in his cathedral, with whom he had frequently quarreled (the Count enjoyed amateur theatricals, and could not resist putting on Moliere’s Tartuffe, despite the episcopal threat of excommunication for anyone who attended). Still vigorous at the age of seventy-six, he had led expeditions hither and yon to the western edges of French authority, and especially into the territories of the Five Nations where he pummeled the Iroquois repeatedly. After years of continuous warfare, and years of suffering the ravages of white man’s diseases, these Indians now found themselves pinched, both militarily and demographically. From their peak ability to mobilize some 2,500 warriors in the field in 1689, that figure had dramatically dissolved within just nine years. Many raids now had as their focus the kidnapping of able-bodied replacements, much like Eunice Mather, to help rebolster their numerical strength. The Iroquois were acutely aware of their declining potency, and sought in subsequent negotiations with white men, French or English, to stand aloof from both. Frontenac had understood this implicitly, but the colonies had not. Their stance was always to encourage the Iroquois to “discomfort” the French. Equally undermining were the steady efforts of Jesuit missionaries to infiltrate the Five Nations and, with their growing success, further strains were placed on the hitherto working relationship between Iroquois and the English. Jesus Christ was a Frenchmen, said the Jesuits, and the English had crucified him. In 1836, a geologist working in Acadia noted that an Indian expressed shock that Bethlehem was located in Israel. Wasn’t the town where God was born somewhere in France?
Partially filling the Aboriginal void – or scourge – created by the gradual eclipse of the Five Nations, was the growing belligerence of the Abenakis, Amerindians who wandered the forests and shore lines of today’s Maine and New Brunswick. These Indians, like the Micmacs, had been largely Christianized, or at least superficially so, and their aggressive and bloody attacks along the New England frontier demanded a response. The question became, what form would that take? Cotton Mather had succinctly (for him, at any rate; he was famous for verbosity)[17] summarized the problem thusly: “New Englanders found that while they continued only on the defensive part, their people were thinned, and their treasure wasted, without any hopes of seeing a period put unto the Indian tragedies.”
Like most of the Colony, Benjamin Church was infuriated when he heard the news from Deerfield. “His blood boiled within him.” Sixty-five years of age in 1704, Church had seen his fair share of fighting, most of it the impromptu variety of stalking the enemy in their own lairs. As his son put it, “he perfectly understood the manner of the Indians in fighting, and was thoroughly acquainted with their haunts, swamps, and places of refuge.” A true frontiersman, he was the first white to settle what is today’s Little Compton, Rhode Island, an individualist practice many of the clergy frowned upon, seeing such behavior as “forsaking Churches and Ordinances, and all for land and elbow room.” With his ear to the ground, he took pains to treat the Indians who roamed about him with care, and came to know, and appreciate, their qualities as woodsmen and hunters. When hostilities broke out during King Philip’s War, 1675, he used this special insight to great effect, fighting Indians on their own terms. As a man familiar with their nature, he was also particularly effective in recruiting disaffected or Christianized natives in the pursuit of those considered to be “in rebellion.” “They exceed most of our English in hunting and skulking in the woods, being always used to it.”[18] It was an Indian in Church’s troop, after all, who put a bullet into King Philip’s heart whereupon, the guerrilla captain related, the dead chieftain “fell upon his face in the mud and water.” After Philip’s body was quartered, Church granted his killer Philip’s left hand as a reward, “to show to such gentlemen as would bestow gratuities upon him; and accordingly he got many a penny by it.”[19]
Church was subsequently enlisted several times by authorities in Boston to lead various expeditions north, where Abenakis, many led by Jesuit missionaries, continuously raided settlements along the major rivers and coastline of Maine, where the boundaries between French and colonial territories were hotly disputed. This was a no-man’s land of ambiguity, full of rough and ready characters who traded at will with all combatants. One Jarman Bridgway admitted under questioning to supplying Micmacs in Cape Sable, just a short sail east, with “barrels of powder, bullets, shot, spears and knives.” But tangible results remained meager, the prey as elusive as he was vicious. Church recoiled seeing settlers disemboweled, their headless bodies strung up on fence posts, in one case with a pig’s head placed contemptuously on the trunk. Yet when Church’s forces came into view, the Abenaki slunk off into the interior, especially during times of the year when “moose and beaver now being fat,” they could subsist in comfort away from the shore. His goals to “destroy our enemies, ease our taxes,” seemed as far away as ever.
Deerfield, however, stimulated the old veteran, “though ancient and unwieldy,” to offer himself yet again to service. Being, if nothing else, a sort of condottieri, he crisscrossed the Plymouth area that he knew so well, drum beating, to recruit a fresh force of irregulars, many familiar to him from past expeditions. “Treating them with drink convenient,” in his own words, “he told them, that he did not doubt but with God’s blessing to bring them all home again.” Certainly he made further note of the current market in scalp bounties, which could often result in more potential income than regular wages. He also enlisted the usual collection of Indians, which “was a great fatigue and expense, being a people that need much treating,” especially with rum.[20] The ostensible purpose of the expedition, now numbering over five hundred men, was to punish the Abenaki and then take Port Royal. Church attempted to do the former, but mysteriously ignored the latter.
Setting off in May, and equipped with a small flotilla of whaleboats in order to navigate the shoreline, Church found himself in need of pilots. He snared “old Lafaure,” with his two sons and an Indian, harvesting seabird eggs on an offshore island, gave chase and opened fire, wounding the Abenaki. When the men surrendered, Church plied them for information and a pledge to guide his force. Monsieur Lafaure became “surly and cross,” whereupon Church had two stakes erected, with dry wood piled about the base, and tied up the two sons, telling his Indian allies to put on their paint and prepare for the torture. One of the boys caved in immediately, that he would do whatever was desired if Church “would not let the savages roast him. Upon which the Colonel ordered him to be loosed from the stake, and took him by the hand, told him he would be as kind to him as his own father, at which he seemed to be very thankful.” Church then proceeded to hug the Maine coast, rousting a few French officers here and there, uprooting several scattered homesteaders, and conducting elaborate search and destroy missions, some at night, which often resulted in troops firing wildly at each other in confused panic. “I was in an exceeding great passion,” Church wrote after one of these debacles, which often caused reflexive acts of violence on the commander’s part. When several men inside a birch lean-to refused to come out when told to surrender, Church ordered his men to fall upon it with hatchets and put everyone inside to death. He didn’t care whether they were Frenchmen or Abenaki, “they were all enemies alike to me.” This act of brutality actually shocked some people back home in Boston when they heard of it, but Church didn’t care, “he excused himself but indifferently.” Loading his men onto British transports, Church then headed for Nova Scotia, where he didn’t find, or punish, Aboriginals, but instead the Acadians.
Floating on a rip tide up the Minas Basin, Church achieved almost complete surprise. He sent a French-speaking officer ahead to one of the larger villages along the southern shore, stating succinctly that having “already made some beginning of killing and scalping some Canada men,” … we “are now come with a great army of English and Indians, all volunteers, with resolution to subdue you, and make you sensible of your cruelties to us, by treating you after the same manner.” By the time his men were aboard canoes and barks to land on shore, however, the extreme tides of the Bay of Fundy was at the ebb stage, and transports became stuck hundreds of feet from land. Men tried to slog through heavy mud to gain solid footing, but ignominiously returned to their craft, now bogged in muck, to await the next turn in the tide. When they finally reached land, peppered by an occasional shot or two from the woods, they were in a foul mood indeed. This was alleviated when, after looting the few farmhouses they came onto, brandy and claret was uncovered. Whatever discipline may have previously existed, disappeared about as quickly as these liquors were consumed, as a near riot ensued, with soldiers and Indians running to and fro firing off their muskets in every direction, the intended targets, if there were any, being chickens, pigs, and cattle, all running for their lives. Church finally restored order, every casket of rum, cider, and wine being cracked and poured into the lanes. Then the process of destruction began: houses and barns were torched, livestock slaughtered, and, most destructively, “the Colonel gave orders to his men to dig down the dams and let the tide in, to destroy all their corn and everything that was good.” Harrying parties went off in all directions to spread as much havoc as possible. This was a scorched-earth policy in the truest (and wettest) sense of the word.
At every opportunity, Church spread the word. “For the future, if any such hostilities [as had lately been done upon Deerfield] were made upon our frontier towns, he would come out with a thousand savages, and whaleboats convenient, and turn his back upon them, and let his savages scalp, and roast the French; or at least treat them as their savages had treated ours.” Hutchinson, in his History, called all this mere gasconade, or “bluster,” but for the Acadians who were watching the fruit of their laborious industry go up in flames, there was certainly a dose of melancholic reality to what they were watching. After several days of indiscriminate pillage, Church hauled anchor and turned for home. Governor Dudley, in his report to the Massachusetts Assembly, “supposes this expedition struck great terror into the Indians, and drove them from our frontiers; but it appears from Church’s journal that the poor Acadians, who had been so often ravaged before, were the principal sufferers now, and that the Indians were little or nothing annoyed.” So said Hutchinson again.[21]
In practical terms, Church’s expedition had achieved very little. Production of food in and near Minas and Beausejour (where a secondary expedition had been sent) was certainly disrupted. The dykes were repaired, though it took two to three years for the again protected fields to be desalinated, and some months were required to replenish livestock levels, but the colony nevertheless survived. Politically and commercially, however, it was no longer isolated. With every Indian atrocity, and the list grew exponentially every year, the eyes of Massachusetts, and finally London, looked to Acadia and, wistfully, beyond to the St. Lawrence. The two objectives went together. It would serve no purpose, once Quebec was taken, if the asp still lived at the very center of a wicked hive in Port Royal, or Nova Scotia in general. Awareness of the strategic principles involved were now common knowledge in the English court. Maturation of informed opinion, especially when communication was slow and often unreliable, had taken about eighty years in London’s case; but by 1700, ministers and politicians there had fully recognized the importance of its colonies in North America and the desirability of removing the French. This is not to say the English admired or held particular affection for the colonists, particularly those in New England, far from it. They were far too saucy, far too independent, more like “republicans” who ruled themselves through elected councils, people who cared not a farthing for any king’s whim. These were, collectively, an entity that should be brought under proper control.
The Crown now began direct contributions to the effort to subdue New Canada, with the advice and input of a continuous stream of colonists who now were a regular presence within polite society, of whom many, unsurprisingly, were motivated by self-interest. A whirl of conflicting advice was also now flooding the nascent bureaucracy of Whitehall. Letters, reports, charges and countercharges filled the correspondence trays of powerful courtiers, to be passed along the information tree as time, circumstance, and opportunity allowed. Royal appointees in Boston were praised to the sky or pilloried via each arriving merchant vessel from Boston Harbor. A new governor like Joseph Dudley was a welcome breath of Anglican fresh air when he took up his duties in 1702, but he was condemned by the old Puritan theocracy, who thought him “as black as his hat,” and members of the Established “High” Church little better than “ceremony-mongers.” Factions thrived in Boston along religious and economic lines. Everyone wanted to see Acadia crushed and permanent peace established, but then again, war was good for business. Dudley was even accused of selling powder and shot to Port Royal, even as he was supervising expeditions to overrun the place. There would appear to have been some truth to the charge. Cotton Mather recalled the mystery surrounding Church’s orders from three years previously, wherein the Colonel had rifled the Acadian coast everywhere but Port Royal. Mather, who detested the governor, saw profiteering, even treason, in Dudley’s behavior, and accused him of such in a most intemperate letter. Church “could easily have taken the fort, or done anything in the world, but the reason which he has often given for his not doing it is because you absolutely forbad him, you peremptorily forbad him … The story grows now too black a story for me to meddle with --- The expedition baffled – The fort never so much as demanded ---A nest of hornets provoked to fly out upon us -- A shame cast upon us that will never be forgotten – I dare not, I cannot meddle with these mysteries.” In 1707 six Boston merchants were arrested and tried for trading with the enemy, and all six were convicted. The most infamous was one William Rowse, who had been sent to Port Royal under a flag of truce to negotiate a transfer of prisoners then in French custody. Such human trafficking between French and Bostonnaise authorities had by now become a regular feature of administrative life in both colonies, and a serious commercial occasion, as some prisoners could fetch considerable ransom. Rowse, however, while being away an inordinate amount of time, returned with just seventeen former captives. A second trip resulted in only seven. Clearly, something was afoot, and trade in illicit war materials was proven against him. The judges hemmed and hawed over possible sentences, thinking perhaps that fines, some imprisonment and, for Rowse at least, an afternoon standing on the gallows with a rope around his neck might send home the appropriate message, but Dudley intervened and helped secure their release. The governor’s reputation was further damaged when an expedition to Port Royal of about one thousand men, under the command of a gentleman from Newbury, failed miserably in “a confusion of Babel.” Rather than “insulting” the place as intended, the combined militias “went about our business like fools,” to the embarrassment of all involved.
The ambiguity of business relationships between the Bay Colony and Acadia, along with the frequency of transoceanic missions and emissaries, many conducted by men whose loyalties were often questioned, produced several careers along the lines of Samuel Vetch’s. Vetch, a Scotsman, was a born imperialist along the lines of Cecil Rhodes, the nineteenth-century adventurer who carved Rhodesia out of a welter of African tribe lands. Some would dismiss the aspirations that such men held as nothing more than wild dreams and self-deluded fantasias, but somehow, as the history of human affairs has constantly demonstrated, salesmen like Rhodes and Vetch had the ability to convince others to sign on, provide financing, and, when confronted with abysmal failure, to try again. Second nature to all those who develop and propagate Grand Visions has usually been a skill in amorous affairs as well, and Vetch, hitherto a professional soldier and veteran of several battles in Flanders, managed to woe and marry the daughter of Robert Livingston, a name resonant, then and even now, with political influence in the colony of New York. This new-found aura of respectability enabled Vetch to prosper as a merchant and trader, much of it in the ill-defined border zone of dubious ethics, involving as it did doing business with Indians and the French. Vetch was one of those six merchants tried in Boston, and alluded to above.
Vetch certainly had his eye on Canada. In 1708 he secured an audience with Queen Mary in London, something of a public relations coup given that he had just survived a trial for treason ten months before in Boston.[22] With a glib tongue, and a printed treatise he had written entitled Canada survey’d, he secured her approval for the by now standard invasion scheme of New France. Land forces would set off along the Hudson for Montreal, while sea forces embarked for the St. Lawrence and Canada. Details might vary, but such plans were a standard set piece in English (and then American) circles right on through to the War of 1812. Vetch hurried back to Boston, urged and organized the colonial component to the proposed expedition, then looked the fool as the promised fleet never arrived. Affairs in Portugal, he was informed, were rather more pressing. With Boston crawling with colonial troops, devouring every foodstuff to be seen, a desperate Vetch tried to fall back on a secondary plan, the capture of Port Royal, which required the assistance of two Royal Navy frigates lying in anchor at Boston Harbor. Their captains, apprised of the new scheme, saw no honor or profit in it for themselves, and slipped off “without taking leave of anybody.” The militia were then disbanded, the entire scheme a financial disaster. As Hutchinson dryly put it, “This was a heavy charge upon the province, without any good effect.”
Vetch, however, was a resourceful man. The next year a second expedition was planned. Troops were assembled from the countryside, other colonies sent contingents, and the difficult task of assembling enough food pressed forward. As usual, plans went awry, the royal fleet arrived far too late in the year to assay Quebec, and Port Royal again became the proposed target. This time the flotilla, comprising thirty-six vessels and including a floating bomb platform, set sail, arriving through the gut of Port Royal on September 24. There they found a dispirited French garrison that numbered less than three hundred men, a falling-down fort, and a commander who intimated that “a decent pretence for surrender was all that was desired.” Vetch arranged for a desultory bombardment, the French went through the motions of reply, and articles of capitulation were quickly offered and signed. Aside from twenty-six men who had drowned, the colonial force lost only fifteen soldiers to enemy fire. As is so often the case, the purported strength of Port Royal had proven illusory, a revelation that encouraged authorities in London to press again for a surge up the St. Lawrence. In June of 1711, unbeknownst to the provincial government in Boston, a fleet of ten ships of the line appeared with barely a fore notice in Boston Harbor. That shock was followed by another: ten weeks of provisions were to be provided by Boston and the other colonies immediately. With secrecy almost unheard of for the times, British commanders had decided to tell no one of the expedition in order to secure complete surprise. They certainly achieved that goal.
The mercantile and farming communities around the Bay slipped into a state of apprehension, followed by anger, as authorities scooped up supplies and paid less than going rates for what they took. Merchants locked their warehouses and tried to spirit merchandise into hiding. The sudden demand of royal authorities, they argued, should reasonably raise prices (and profits), “the common chance in trade, which every merchant was justly entitled to.” Admiral Hovenden Walker, in charge of the enterprise, was appalled at such “hypocrisy,” as were his officers. New Englanders, an artillery commander wrote home, were “ill natured and sour.” Goods were therefore seized as needed, and able-bodied men impressed into service, such people who, “it must be owned, would have preferred a prison on shore to a man of war at sea.” (As Dr. Johnson pointed out, “A man in jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company.”) The general hostility of provincial authorities against the French, however carried the day. Vetch told Samuel Sewall about a fire he had witnessed in Quebec, where a Romish chapel had burned to the ground, its crucifix falling into the conflagration at a decidedly dramatic moment. Sewall could not resist writing a short Latin couplet in celebration:
The bawdy, bloody Cross, at length
Was forc’d to taste the flame:
The cheating Saviour, to the fire
Savoury food became.
Certainly Boston had never seen such a prodigious collection of men and material. “Curious townspeople and staring rustics” could count over seventy vessels in harbor, ready to depart with a complement of almost 12,000 soldiers, marines, sailors and victualers. Samuel Vetch and other speculators could only see in this vast armada a vision of their dreams come true.
Unfortunately for such grandiose expectations, Admiral Walker, though a veteran seaman and participant in many complicated actions, proved utterly incompetent in this particular command. The fleet managed to sail, unmolested, into the Bay of St. Lawrence, but as they approached the river’s mouth, with Anticosti Island off the port bows, the flotilla was bedeviled by heavy fog and winds “blowing very fresh.” Various men recruited (if English) or impelled (if French) to act as pilots, either purposely distorted the route to be followed or, more likely, became as confused and disoriented as everyone else on board. On the stormy night of August 22, thinking he was off the southern shore of the St. Lawrence, with seventy miles of open water between himself and the northern edge of the bay, Walker went to bed. When he was awakened by an army officer who claimed to see breaking surf on all sides, he angrily showed him the door. When the officer returned for a second round of abuse, “desiring me for the Lord’s sake to come up upon deck myself, or we should certainly be lost,” the admiral “put on my gown and slippers,” ascended to the deck, and viewed with horror a “hurly burly,” the entire fleet running aground on an ugly assemblage of reefs surrounding Isles aux Oeufs (or Isles of Eggs), which lay like a “slab of granite” off the northern shore of the St. Lawrence. Walker had enough sailing room to get away, but the anchors of at least ten vessels broke under the surging strains of gale-tossed waves and broke apart, sending close to a thousand men to their deaths, a tragedy local fisherman exploited as they looted dead bodies washed up on shore for the next several days, and scrounged for salvage. Vetch recorded hearing the “lamentable” cries of those drowning, along with the signal shots of fog guns as ships blundered about trying to gauge position or evade danger.[23] Walker was so unhinged the next day that he allowed his council of war to wallow in despair. Instead of exhibiting any sort of leadership, he succumbed to the growing sense of misery and defeatism that understandably had infected his underlings. Vetch grew desperate, and allegedly volunteered to pilot the fleet upriver himself, even though “I was never bred to sea.” Too late in the season, Walker determined, and the entire invasion force went their separate ways, the New Englanders back to Boston (yet another attempt to Canada “blasted”), the Admiral and his red coats to England. One New Englander, while thinking about the lame excuse always used when aborting missions to take Quebec (season and approaching winter), had occasion to recall Caesar’s most famous remark, Veni, vidi, vici. Romans understood “the want of time,” they acted quickly and decisively, which never seemed the case anywhere near the St. Lawrence River.
When Walker finally arrived back in England, after considering and then rejecting the notion of attacking French settlements in Newfoundland, he took leave of his flagship, the seventy-gun Edgar, sitting in harbor at Spithead. He then had the melancholy surprise of hearing a gigantic explosion as his back was turned. Some spark or other carelessness had ignited the store of gunpowder on board, and the entire man of war was destroyed, a fitting end to the entire trans-Atlantic fiasco. Though not his last employ in the Royal Navy, he lost his position on the Active list, had his half pay revoked, and was forced to seek fortunes abroad, on a plantation in South Carolina, being as he was “a drowning man, catching in haste at any twig to save himself.” There he lived on “Indian corn and potatoes (because I could not afford to buy plum cake in London”).
Samuel Vetch fell to hard times. He received several minor appointments, such as Governor of Nova Scotia, with headquarters at a more or less impoverished Port Royal (now called Annapolis Royal), but the golden touch now eluded him. He returned to England seeking redress for the many expenses incurred in his service to the crown (or so he claimed), but he died in debtor’s prison in 1732. As for his compatriots in Boston, “Some pious minds gave over all hopes of reducing Canada.”
References
1 This watery “bridge” lies at the head of Chignecto Bay, and is partially traversed by the Missaguash River.
2 Cotton Mather resented the inference that a disparity in numbers of combatants in any way diminished the value of New England’s struggles. “’Tis true, the European campaigns, for the numbers of men appearing in them, compared with the little numbers that appear in these American actions, may tempt the reader to make a very diminutive business of our whole Indian war.” Not so! “We think our story as considerable as that silly business of the invading and conquering of Florida by the Spaniards under Fernando de Soto; and yet that story the world has thought worthy to be read in divers languages.”
3 The word “lobbyist” comes from the Latin lobium, meaning lodge, anteroom, or hallway. It came to mean an area where the general public could mingle, intercept, or plead with a person of influence as he or she made their way into an inner sanctum, royal chamber, or more formal legislative venue.
4 There were distinct differences between the two colonies. The first, Plymouth Plantation, had been settled by an extremist wing of the Dissenter or Non-Conformist Protestant community, many of whom had fled England for the Dutch cities of Amsterdam and Leyden beginning in 1608. The second, more numerous, had sent a “feeler” community to Salem in 1626; it was followed by John Winthrop four years later. While also Dissenters, they were more religiously moderate in approach than the Plymouth radicals. By the end of the seventeenth century, with its Indian wars, ruinous taxation, and the gradual secularization of life around Massachusetts Bay, formal government in Plymouth virtually dissolved, and the new charter of 1691 saw the “Old Colony” absorbed by its more powerful neighbor to the north in Boston. This “debacle” was witnessed by two surviving members of the historic Mayflower voyage of seventy-one years before.
5 A typical instance occurred when colonists, mopping up after an assault on the Narragansett tribe in 1675, began separating their captives into groups – those marketable as slaves, those who were not. One ancient Indian “was so decrepit he could not go. Some would have had him devoured by dogs, but the tenderness of some of them prevailed to cut off his head.”
6 Horses were beginning to appear in New France by the 1660s. The Indians, predictably amazed, referred to them as “French moose.”
7 Many of the first colonists had tried their hand in Ireland first, such as John Winthrop (Increase Mather received his B.A. from Trinity College in Dublin). It is not surprising to see many of the earliest commentators draw comparisons between the various savages they had encountered, be they Celt or Aboriginal, and to equate their similarities of experience. Nathaniel Saltonstall found the dark and wet lairs of Indians to be the same thing as Irish bogs … quagmires which ensnared the brave soldiers trying to root our their subhuman enemies.
8 Beaver were hunted out by 1650. When unmolested, beaver stocks can recover with incredible speed. Commercial fur farms were established on the remote Argentinean island of Tierra del Fuego in the 1950s. When fur prices collapsed and breeding stocks remained unculled, population numbers soared, so much so that the ecological balance of the island collapsed as some 100,000 beaver decimated fragile woodlots and forests. Halfhearted eradication attempts are ongoing.
9 By the 1740s, 25% of the colonial budget for New France would be spent on Indian-related supplies and payments.
10 “Mr. Mather preaches the Lecture from Mat. 24., and appoint his portion with the Hypocrites,” he wrote in a 1690 entry. “To be zealous against an innocent fashion, taken up and used by the best of men; and yet make no Conscience of being guilty of great Immoralities. Tis supposed he means wearing of Perriwigs: said would deny themselves in anything but parting with an opportunity to do God service; that so might not offend good Christians. Meaning, I suppose, was fain to wear a Perriwig for his health. I expected not to hear a vindication of Perriwigs in Boston pulpit from Mr. Mather.”
11 One of the worst items in his baggage was a new charter. Among many features odious to the Old Guard of Puritanism was a provision that guaranteed liberty of conscience for all Protestants. The Bay Colony since its inception had used governmental authority to coerce its residents into Puritan orthodoxy. Those who resisted were harangued, abused, punished, and often expelled, as Roger Williams was in 1635, who fled to present-day Rhode Island. This judicial ability was rendered impotent in the new charter, and “true” Puritans realized it. “The symptoms of death are on us,” Sewall noted. Increase Mather, who had negotiated the new charter as best he could, realized its defects but could do nothing to ameliorate what were, to him, draconian alterations. He was told, in effect, that the Colony’s approval was “neither expected nor desired.” Such Imperial disdain would, broadly speaking, result in the Revolutionary War of 1775-1781. Mather received substantial personal criticism back in Boston, which he keenly resented.
12 The Salem hysteria has, for good reason, been a much-discussed subject in the history of New England, but the number of unfortunates pale in comparison with statistics from the mother country at approximately the same time. It has been estimated that four thousand people, mostly women, were either hanged or burned to death in seventeenth century England for witchcraft.
13 William’s brother helped finance the foundation of an even better-known institution of higher learning, the College of New Haven, today’s Yale.
14 Elizabeth Emerson, Hannah’s sister, is remembered under less auspicious circumstances. She was executed on June 8, 1693 for the crime of infracide, having murdered illegitimate twins that she had just given birth to, then burying them in the garden behind her parent’s home. The man she identified as their father (they were allegedly conceived in the “inn house” of Haverhill), a husband with five children of his of his own, was never questioned, prosecuted, or punished, though he did later die in yet another Indian attack. It was customary for a condemned man or woman to endure a sermon before their hanging. Cotton Mather preached Elizabeth’s, entitled “They Die in Youth, and Their Life is Among the Unclean.”
15 Williams died in 1729 and never saw his daughter again. But eleven years later Eunice visited Deerfield with her husband, who had taken the English family name Williams. She came as a squaw. Persuaded to put on a dress and attend church, she quickly reverted to Indian attire after the service. Eunice came to Deerfield on three other occasions, bringing her “half-breed” children in tow. Her grandson, one Eleazer Williams, attended Dartmouth College.
16 In the Old Testament book of Judges, an angel of the Lord rebuked the Israelites at a village called Bochim “for not obeying me” and “breaking my covenant with you;” as punishment, “I will not clear [enemies] out of your way, they shall oppose you and their gods shall become a snare to you.” After this threat, “the people wept aloud.”
17 When he died in 1728, Mather left behind “the longest bibliography yet achieved, or likely ever to be achieved, by an American author.”
18 One Puritan recorded the annoyance an Indian scout found in leading a group of white men into the forest to track down hostiles. The creaking leather of one soldier was such a giveaway that the Indian stopped the column, gave the offending individual his own pair of moccasins, and continued the pursuit barefoot, the boots hanging around his neck by their shoestrings. Some early Puritans were offended by the thought of fighting Indians on their own terms, sensing, perhaps, a form of racial regression that diminished their moral standing. The early colonial historian William Hubbard, condemned as a “gross mistake” the behavior of one militia group that fought a running style battle with renegades that resulted in many deaths among “a choice company of young men, the flower of the county of Essex.”
19 King Philip’s various body parts were separately displayed throughout the region. His head was spiked and mounted in Plymouth, where Cotton Mather, some years later, detached the jaw bone as a souvenir.
20 Liquor was not only helpful in recruiting Indians for military expeditions, but apparently for their conversion as well, Mather complaining in 1704 about a missionary “mining his Bottle more than his Bible.”
21 Church dictated these memoirs to his son. He died after falling off his horse in 1718, following “a friendly and pious visit” with a sister. His great-grandson, also named Benjamin, achieved notoriety during the Revolutionary War when, as the fledging nation’s first surgeon general, he was caught sending letters in cipher to British General Thomas Gage, outlining colonial defensive measure in Boston. George Washington himself conducted the court martial, wherein Church was lucky to escape with his life.
22 The dynastic succession to the English throne, as per usual, had become quite the maze. James II, a Stuart and, fatally, a Catholic, had been removed from the throne after a reign of only three years during the Glorious Revolution of 1688. His several attempts to regain the crown, the most formidable of which was the Irish expedition of the next year, all proved futile. His opponent had been the Dutchman William of Orange, married to James’s eldest daughter, Mary, both Protestants. Mary died of smallpox in 1694, William was assassinated in the Netherlands, 1702. He was succeeded by James’s second daughter Anne, also Protestant. Anne is probably best known for her attachment to Sarah Churchill, wife to the Duke of Marlborough. James II lived until 1701. He regarded both his daughters with loathing.
23 The famous pilgrimage church of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupre, first established in 1658 in the town of that name some twenty miles downriver from Quebec City, was principally built by sailors who had been shipwrecked off the Isles aux Oeufs, long a dangerous spot on the river’s passage, St. Anne being one of many patron saints for those who go down to the sea. (She is also the protectress of Quebec City and Micmac Indians.) The well-known Gothic basilica of 1926 stands on the original site.
-Benjamin Church
By the time of the Deerfield massacre, Count Frontenac was no longer at the helm of New France, but buried since 1698 deep in the crypt of the Recollect monastery in Quebec, a final snub to the official religious hierarchy of the colony, represented by the bishop in his cathedral, with whom he had frequently quarreled (the Count enjoyed amateur theatricals, and could not resist putting on Moliere’s Tartuffe, despite the episcopal threat of excommunication for anyone who attended). Still vigorous at the age of seventy-six, he had led expeditions hither and yon to the western edges of French authority, and especially into the territories of the Five Nations where he pummeled the Iroquois repeatedly. After years of continuous warfare, and years of suffering the ravages of white man’s diseases, these Indians now found themselves pinched, both militarily and demographically. From their peak ability to mobilize some 2,500 warriors in the field in 1689, that figure had dramatically dissolved within just nine years. Many raids now had as their focus the kidnapping of able-bodied replacements, much like Eunice Mather, to help rebolster their numerical strength. The Iroquois were acutely aware of their declining potency, and sought in subsequent negotiations with white men, French or English, to stand aloof from both. Frontenac had understood this implicitly, but the colonies had not. Their stance was always to encourage the Iroquois to “discomfort” the French. Equally undermining were the steady efforts of Jesuit missionaries to infiltrate the Five Nations and, with their growing success, further strains were placed on the hitherto working relationship between Iroquois and the English. Jesus Christ was a Frenchmen, said the Jesuits, and the English had crucified him. In 1836, a geologist working in Acadia noted that an Indian expressed shock that Bethlehem was located in Israel. Wasn’t the town where God was born somewhere in France?
Partially filling the Aboriginal void – or scourge – created by the gradual eclipse of the Five Nations, was the growing belligerence of the Abenakis, Amerindians who wandered the forests and shore lines of today’s Maine and New Brunswick. These Indians, like the Micmacs, had been largely Christianized, or at least superficially so, and their aggressive and bloody attacks along the New England frontier demanded a response. The question became, what form would that take? Cotton Mather had succinctly (for him, at any rate; he was famous for verbosity)[17] summarized the problem thusly: “New Englanders found that while they continued only on the defensive part, their people were thinned, and their treasure wasted, without any hopes of seeing a period put unto the Indian tragedies.”
Like most of the Colony, Benjamin Church was infuriated when he heard the news from Deerfield. “His blood boiled within him.” Sixty-five years of age in 1704, Church had seen his fair share of fighting, most of it the impromptu variety of stalking the enemy in their own lairs. As his son put it, “he perfectly understood the manner of the Indians in fighting, and was thoroughly acquainted with their haunts, swamps, and places of refuge.” A true frontiersman, he was the first white to settle what is today’s Little Compton, Rhode Island, an individualist practice many of the clergy frowned upon, seeing such behavior as “forsaking Churches and Ordinances, and all for land and elbow room.” With his ear to the ground, he took pains to treat the Indians who roamed about him with care, and came to know, and appreciate, their qualities as woodsmen and hunters. When hostilities broke out during King Philip’s War, 1675, he used this special insight to great effect, fighting Indians on their own terms. As a man familiar with their nature, he was also particularly effective in recruiting disaffected or Christianized natives in the pursuit of those considered to be “in rebellion.” “They exceed most of our English in hunting and skulking in the woods, being always used to it.”[18] It was an Indian in Church’s troop, after all, who put a bullet into King Philip’s heart whereupon, the guerrilla captain related, the dead chieftain “fell upon his face in the mud and water.” After Philip’s body was quartered, Church granted his killer Philip’s left hand as a reward, “to show to such gentlemen as would bestow gratuities upon him; and accordingly he got many a penny by it.”[19]
Church was subsequently enlisted several times by authorities in Boston to lead various expeditions north, where Abenakis, many led by Jesuit missionaries, continuously raided settlements along the major rivers and coastline of Maine, where the boundaries between French and colonial territories were hotly disputed. This was a no-man’s land of ambiguity, full of rough and ready characters who traded at will with all combatants. One Jarman Bridgway admitted under questioning to supplying Micmacs in Cape Sable, just a short sail east, with “barrels of powder, bullets, shot, spears and knives.” But tangible results remained meager, the prey as elusive as he was vicious. Church recoiled seeing settlers disemboweled, their headless bodies strung up on fence posts, in one case with a pig’s head placed contemptuously on the trunk. Yet when Church’s forces came into view, the Abenaki slunk off into the interior, especially during times of the year when “moose and beaver now being fat,” they could subsist in comfort away from the shore. His goals to “destroy our enemies, ease our taxes,” seemed as far away as ever.
Deerfield, however, stimulated the old veteran, “though ancient and unwieldy,” to offer himself yet again to service. Being, if nothing else, a sort of condottieri, he crisscrossed the Plymouth area that he knew so well, drum beating, to recruit a fresh force of irregulars, many familiar to him from past expeditions. “Treating them with drink convenient,” in his own words, “he told them, that he did not doubt but with God’s blessing to bring them all home again.” Certainly he made further note of the current market in scalp bounties, which could often result in more potential income than regular wages. He also enlisted the usual collection of Indians, which “was a great fatigue and expense, being a people that need much treating,” especially with rum.[20] The ostensible purpose of the expedition, now numbering over five hundred men, was to punish the Abenaki and then take Port Royal. Church attempted to do the former, but mysteriously ignored the latter.
Setting off in May, and equipped with a small flotilla of whaleboats in order to navigate the shoreline, Church found himself in need of pilots. He snared “old Lafaure,” with his two sons and an Indian, harvesting seabird eggs on an offshore island, gave chase and opened fire, wounding the Abenaki. When the men surrendered, Church plied them for information and a pledge to guide his force. Monsieur Lafaure became “surly and cross,” whereupon Church had two stakes erected, with dry wood piled about the base, and tied up the two sons, telling his Indian allies to put on their paint and prepare for the torture. One of the boys caved in immediately, that he would do whatever was desired if Church “would not let the savages roast him. Upon which the Colonel ordered him to be loosed from the stake, and took him by the hand, told him he would be as kind to him as his own father, at which he seemed to be very thankful.” Church then proceeded to hug the Maine coast, rousting a few French officers here and there, uprooting several scattered homesteaders, and conducting elaborate search and destroy missions, some at night, which often resulted in troops firing wildly at each other in confused panic. “I was in an exceeding great passion,” Church wrote after one of these debacles, which often caused reflexive acts of violence on the commander’s part. When several men inside a birch lean-to refused to come out when told to surrender, Church ordered his men to fall upon it with hatchets and put everyone inside to death. He didn’t care whether they were Frenchmen or Abenaki, “they were all enemies alike to me.” This act of brutality actually shocked some people back home in Boston when they heard of it, but Church didn’t care, “he excused himself but indifferently.” Loading his men onto British transports, Church then headed for Nova Scotia, where he didn’t find, or punish, Aboriginals, but instead the Acadians.
Floating on a rip tide up the Minas Basin, Church achieved almost complete surprise. He sent a French-speaking officer ahead to one of the larger villages along the southern shore, stating succinctly that having “already made some beginning of killing and scalping some Canada men,” … we “are now come with a great army of English and Indians, all volunteers, with resolution to subdue you, and make you sensible of your cruelties to us, by treating you after the same manner.” By the time his men were aboard canoes and barks to land on shore, however, the extreme tides of the Bay of Fundy was at the ebb stage, and transports became stuck hundreds of feet from land. Men tried to slog through heavy mud to gain solid footing, but ignominiously returned to their craft, now bogged in muck, to await the next turn in the tide. When they finally reached land, peppered by an occasional shot or two from the woods, they were in a foul mood indeed. This was alleviated when, after looting the few farmhouses they came onto, brandy and claret was uncovered. Whatever discipline may have previously existed, disappeared about as quickly as these liquors were consumed, as a near riot ensued, with soldiers and Indians running to and fro firing off their muskets in every direction, the intended targets, if there were any, being chickens, pigs, and cattle, all running for their lives. Church finally restored order, every casket of rum, cider, and wine being cracked and poured into the lanes. Then the process of destruction began: houses and barns were torched, livestock slaughtered, and, most destructively, “the Colonel gave orders to his men to dig down the dams and let the tide in, to destroy all their corn and everything that was good.” Harrying parties went off in all directions to spread as much havoc as possible. This was a scorched-earth policy in the truest (and wettest) sense of the word.
At every opportunity, Church spread the word. “For the future, if any such hostilities [as had lately been done upon Deerfield] were made upon our frontier towns, he would come out with a thousand savages, and whaleboats convenient, and turn his back upon them, and let his savages scalp, and roast the French; or at least treat them as their savages had treated ours.” Hutchinson, in his History, called all this mere gasconade, or “bluster,” but for the Acadians who were watching the fruit of their laborious industry go up in flames, there was certainly a dose of melancholic reality to what they were watching. After several days of indiscriminate pillage, Church hauled anchor and turned for home. Governor Dudley, in his report to the Massachusetts Assembly, “supposes this expedition struck great terror into the Indians, and drove them from our frontiers; but it appears from Church’s journal that the poor Acadians, who had been so often ravaged before, were the principal sufferers now, and that the Indians were little or nothing annoyed.” So said Hutchinson again.[21]
In practical terms, Church’s expedition had achieved very little. Production of food in and near Minas and Beausejour (where a secondary expedition had been sent) was certainly disrupted. The dykes were repaired, though it took two to three years for the again protected fields to be desalinated, and some months were required to replenish livestock levels, but the colony nevertheless survived. Politically and commercially, however, it was no longer isolated. With every Indian atrocity, and the list grew exponentially every year, the eyes of Massachusetts, and finally London, looked to Acadia and, wistfully, beyond to the St. Lawrence. The two objectives went together. It would serve no purpose, once Quebec was taken, if the asp still lived at the very center of a wicked hive in Port Royal, or Nova Scotia in general. Awareness of the strategic principles involved were now common knowledge in the English court. Maturation of informed opinion, especially when communication was slow and often unreliable, had taken about eighty years in London’s case; but by 1700, ministers and politicians there had fully recognized the importance of its colonies in North America and the desirability of removing the French. This is not to say the English admired or held particular affection for the colonists, particularly those in New England, far from it. They were far too saucy, far too independent, more like “republicans” who ruled themselves through elected councils, people who cared not a farthing for any king’s whim. These were, collectively, an entity that should be brought under proper control.
The Crown now began direct contributions to the effort to subdue New Canada, with the advice and input of a continuous stream of colonists who now were a regular presence within polite society, of whom many, unsurprisingly, were motivated by self-interest. A whirl of conflicting advice was also now flooding the nascent bureaucracy of Whitehall. Letters, reports, charges and countercharges filled the correspondence trays of powerful courtiers, to be passed along the information tree as time, circumstance, and opportunity allowed. Royal appointees in Boston were praised to the sky or pilloried via each arriving merchant vessel from Boston Harbor. A new governor like Joseph Dudley was a welcome breath of Anglican fresh air when he took up his duties in 1702, but he was condemned by the old Puritan theocracy, who thought him “as black as his hat,” and members of the Established “High” Church little better than “ceremony-mongers.” Factions thrived in Boston along religious and economic lines. Everyone wanted to see Acadia crushed and permanent peace established, but then again, war was good for business. Dudley was even accused of selling powder and shot to Port Royal, even as he was supervising expeditions to overrun the place. There would appear to have been some truth to the charge. Cotton Mather recalled the mystery surrounding Church’s orders from three years previously, wherein the Colonel had rifled the Acadian coast everywhere but Port Royal. Mather, who detested the governor, saw profiteering, even treason, in Dudley’s behavior, and accused him of such in a most intemperate letter. Church “could easily have taken the fort, or done anything in the world, but the reason which he has often given for his not doing it is because you absolutely forbad him, you peremptorily forbad him … The story grows now too black a story for me to meddle with --- The expedition baffled – The fort never so much as demanded ---A nest of hornets provoked to fly out upon us -- A shame cast upon us that will never be forgotten – I dare not, I cannot meddle with these mysteries.” In 1707 six Boston merchants were arrested and tried for trading with the enemy, and all six were convicted. The most infamous was one William Rowse, who had been sent to Port Royal under a flag of truce to negotiate a transfer of prisoners then in French custody. Such human trafficking between French and Bostonnaise authorities had by now become a regular feature of administrative life in both colonies, and a serious commercial occasion, as some prisoners could fetch considerable ransom. Rowse, however, while being away an inordinate amount of time, returned with just seventeen former captives. A second trip resulted in only seven. Clearly, something was afoot, and trade in illicit war materials was proven against him. The judges hemmed and hawed over possible sentences, thinking perhaps that fines, some imprisonment and, for Rowse at least, an afternoon standing on the gallows with a rope around his neck might send home the appropriate message, but Dudley intervened and helped secure their release. The governor’s reputation was further damaged when an expedition to Port Royal of about one thousand men, under the command of a gentleman from Newbury, failed miserably in “a confusion of Babel.” Rather than “insulting” the place as intended, the combined militias “went about our business like fools,” to the embarrassment of all involved.
The ambiguity of business relationships between the Bay Colony and Acadia, along with the frequency of transoceanic missions and emissaries, many conducted by men whose loyalties were often questioned, produced several careers along the lines of Samuel Vetch’s. Vetch, a Scotsman, was a born imperialist along the lines of Cecil Rhodes, the nineteenth-century adventurer who carved Rhodesia out of a welter of African tribe lands. Some would dismiss the aspirations that such men held as nothing more than wild dreams and self-deluded fantasias, but somehow, as the history of human affairs has constantly demonstrated, salesmen like Rhodes and Vetch had the ability to convince others to sign on, provide financing, and, when confronted with abysmal failure, to try again. Second nature to all those who develop and propagate Grand Visions has usually been a skill in amorous affairs as well, and Vetch, hitherto a professional soldier and veteran of several battles in Flanders, managed to woe and marry the daughter of Robert Livingston, a name resonant, then and even now, with political influence in the colony of New York. This new-found aura of respectability enabled Vetch to prosper as a merchant and trader, much of it in the ill-defined border zone of dubious ethics, involving as it did doing business with Indians and the French. Vetch was one of those six merchants tried in Boston, and alluded to above.
Vetch certainly had his eye on Canada. In 1708 he secured an audience with Queen Mary in London, something of a public relations coup given that he had just survived a trial for treason ten months before in Boston.[22] With a glib tongue, and a printed treatise he had written entitled Canada survey’d, he secured her approval for the by now standard invasion scheme of New France. Land forces would set off along the Hudson for Montreal, while sea forces embarked for the St. Lawrence and Canada. Details might vary, but such plans were a standard set piece in English (and then American) circles right on through to the War of 1812. Vetch hurried back to Boston, urged and organized the colonial component to the proposed expedition, then looked the fool as the promised fleet never arrived. Affairs in Portugal, he was informed, were rather more pressing. With Boston crawling with colonial troops, devouring every foodstuff to be seen, a desperate Vetch tried to fall back on a secondary plan, the capture of Port Royal, which required the assistance of two Royal Navy frigates lying in anchor at Boston Harbor. Their captains, apprised of the new scheme, saw no honor or profit in it for themselves, and slipped off “without taking leave of anybody.” The militia were then disbanded, the entire scheme a financial disaster. As Hutchinson dryly put it, “This was a heavy charge upon the province, without any good effect.”
Vetch, however, was a resourceful man. The next year a second expedition was planned. Troops were assembled from the countryside, other colonies sent contingents, and the difficult task of assembling enough food pressed forward. As usual, plans went awry, the royal fleet arrived far too late in the year to assay Quebec, and Port Royal again became the proposed target. This time the flotilla, comprising thirty-six vessels and including a floating bomb platform, set sail, arriving through the gut of Port Royal on September 24. There they found a dispirited French garrison that numbered less than three hundred men, a falling-down fort, and a commander who intimated that “a decent pretence for surrender was all that was desired.” Vetch arranged for a desultory bombardment, the French went through the motions of reply, and articles of capitulation were quickly offered and signed. Aside from twenty-six men who had drowned, the colonial force lost only fifteen soldiers to enemy fire. As is so often the case, the purported strength of Port Royal had proven illusory, a revelation that encouraged authorities in London to press again for a surge up the St. Lawrence. In June of 1711, unbeknownst to the provincial government in Boston, a fleet of ten ships of the line appeared with barely a fore notice in Boston Harbor. That shock was followed by another: ten weeks of provisions were to be provided by Boston and the other colonies immediately. With secrecy almost unheard of for the times, British commanders had decided to tell no one of the expedition in order to secure complete surprise. They certainly achieved that goal.
The mercantile and farming communities around the Bay slipped into a state of apprehension, followed by anger, as authorities scooped up supplies and paid less than going rates for what they took. Merchants locked their warehouses and tried to spirit merchandise into hiding. The sudden demand of royal authorities, they argued, should reasonably raise prices (and profits), “the common chance in trade, which every merchant was justly entitled to.” Admiral Hovenden Walker, in charge of the enterprise, was appalled at such “hypocrisy,” as were his officers. New Englanders, an artillery commander wrote home, were “ill natured and sour.” Goods were therefore seized as needed, and able-bodied men impressed into service, such people who, “it must be owned, would have preferred a prison on shore to a man of war at sea.” (As Dr. Johnson pointed out, “A man in jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company.”) The general hostility of provincial authorities against the French, however carried the day. Vetch told Samuel Sewall about a fire he had witnessed in Quebec, where a Romish chapel had burned to the ground, its crucifix falling into the conflagration at a decidedly dramatic moment. Sewall could not resist writing a short Latin couplet in celebration:
The bawdy, bloody Cross, at length
Was forc’d to taste the flame:
The cheating Saviour, to the fire
Savoury food became.
Certainly Boston had never seen such a prodigious collection of men and material. “Curious townspeople and staring rustics” could count over seventy vessels in harbor, ready to depart with a complement of almost 12,000 soldiers, marines, sailors and victualers. Samuel Vetch and other speculators could only see in this vast armada a vision of their dreams come true.
Unfortunately for such grandiose expectations, Admiral Walker, though a veteran seaman and participant in many complicated actions, proved utterly incompetent in this particular command. The fleet managed to sail, unmolested, into the Bay of St. Lawrence, but as they approached the river’s mouth, with Anticosti Island off the port bows, the flotilla was bedeviled by heavy fog and winds “blowing very fresh.” Various men recruited (if English) or impelled (if French) to act as pilots, either purposely distorted the route to be followed or, more likely, became as confused and disoriented as everyone else on board. On the stormy night of August 22, thinking he was off the southern shore of the St. Lawrence, with seventy miles of open water between himself and the northern edge of the bay, Walker went to bed. When he was awakened by an army officer who claimed to see breaking surf on all sides, he angrily showed him the door. When the officer returned for a second round of abuse, “desiring me for the Lord’s sake to come up upon deck myself, or we should certainly be lost,” the admiral “put on my gown and slippers,” ascended to the deck, and viewed with horror a “hurly burly,” the entire fleet running aground on an ugly assemblage of reefs surrounding Isles aux Oeufs (or Isles of Eggs), which lay like a “slab of granite” off the northern shore of the St. Lawrence. Walker had enough sailing room to get away, but the anchors of at least ten vessels broke under the surging strains of gale-tossed waves and broke apart, sending close to a thousand men to their deaths, a tragedy local fisherman exploited as they looted dead bodies washed up on shore for the next several days, and scrounged for salvage. Vetch recorded hearing the “lamentable” cries of those drowning, along with the signal shots of fog guns as ships blundered about trying to gauge position or evade danger.[23] Walker was so unhinged the next day that he allowed his council of war to wallow in despair. Instead of exhibiting any sort of leadership, he succumbed to the growing sense of misery and defeatism that understandably had infected his underlings. Vetch grew desperate, and allegedly volunteered to pilot the fleet upriver himself, even though “I was never bred to sea.” Too late in the season, Walker determined, and the entire invasion force went their separate ways, the New Englanders back to Boston (yet another attempt to Canada “blasted”), the Admiral and his red coats to England. One New Englander, while thinking about the lame excuse always used when aborting missions to take Quebec (season and approaching winter), had occasion to recall Caesar’s most famous remark, Veni, vidi, vici. Romans understood “the want of time,” they acted quickly and decisively, which never seemed the case anywhere near the St. Lawrence River.
When Walker finally arrived back in England, after considering and then rejecting the notion of attacking French settlements in Newfoundland, he took leave of his flagship, the seventy-gun Edgar, sitting in harbor at Spithead. He then had the melancholy surprise of hearing a gigantic explosion as his back was turned. Some spark or other carelessness had ignited the store of gunpowder on board, and the entire man of war was destroyed, a fitting end to the entire trans-Atlantic fiasco. Though not his last employ in the Royal Navy, he lost his position on the Active list, had his half pay revoked, and was forced to seek fortunes abroad, on a plantation in South Carolina, being as he was “a drowning man, catching in haste at any twig to save himself.” There he lived on “Indian corn and potatoes (because I could not afford to buy plum cake in London”).
Samuel Vetch fell to hard times. He received several minor appointments, such as Governor of Nova Scotia, with headquarters at a more or less impoverished Port Royal (now called Annapolis Royal), but the golden touch now eluded him. He returned to England seeking redress for the many expenses incurred in his service to the crown (or so he claimed), but he died in debtor’s prison in 1732. As for his compatriots in Boston, “Some pious minds gave over all hopes of reducing Canada.”
References
1 This watery “bridge” lies at the head of Chignecto Bay, and is partially traversed by the Missaguash River.
2 Cotton Mather resented the inference that a disparity in numbers of combatants in any way diminished the value of New England’s struggles. “’Tis true, the European campaigns, for the numbers of men appearing in them, compared with the little numbers that appear in these American actions, may tempt the reader to make a very diminutive business of our whole Indian war.” Not so! “We think our story as considerable as that silly business of the invading and conquering of Florida by the Spaniards under Fernando de Soto; and yet that story the world has thought worthy to be read in divers languages.”
3 The word “lobbyist” comes from the Latin lobium, meaning lodge, anteroom, or hallway. It came to mean an area where the general public could mingle, intercept, or plead with a person of influence as he or she made their way into an inner sanctum, royal chamber, or more formal legislative venue.
4 There were distinct differences between the two colonies. The first, Plymouth Plantation, had been settled by an extremist wing of the Dissenter or Non-Conformist Protestant community, many of whom had fled England for the Dutch cities of Amsterdam and Leyden beginning in 1608. The second, more numerous, had sent a “feeler” community to Salem in 1626; it was followed by John Winthrop four years later. While also Dissenters, they were more religiously moderate in approach than the Plymouth radicals. By the end of the seventeenth century, with its Indian wars, ruinous taxation, and the gradual secularization of life around Massachusetts Bay, formal government in Plymouth virtually dissolved, and the new charter of 1691 saw the “Old Colony” absorbed by its more powerful neighbor to the north in Boston. This “debacle” was witnessed by two surviving members of the historic Mayflower voyage of seventy-one years before.
5 A typical instance occurred when colonists, mopping up after an assault on the Narragansett tribe in 1675, began separating their captives into groups – those marketable as slaves, those who were not. One ancient Indian “was so decrepit he could not go. Some would have had him devoured by dogs, but the tenderness of some of them prevailed to cut off his head.”
6 Horses were beginning to appear in New France by the 1660s. The Indians, predictably amazed, referred to them as “French moose.”
7 Many of the first colonists had tried their hand in Ireland first, such as John Winthrop (Increase Mather received his B.A. from Trinity College in Dublin). It is not surprising to see many of the earliest commentators draw comparisons between the various savages they had encountered, be they Celt or Aboriginal, and to equate their similarities of experience. Nathaniel Saltonstall found the dark and wet lairs of Indians to be the same thing as Irish bogs … quagmires which ensnared the brave soldiers trying to root our their subhuman enemies.
8 Beaver were hunted out by 1650. When unmolested, beaver stocks can recover with incredible speed. Commercial fur farms were established on the remote Argentinean island of Tierra del Fuego in the 1950s. When fur prices collapsed and breeding stocks remained unculled, population numbers soared, so much so that the ecological balance of the island collapsed as some 100,000 beaver decimated fragile woodlots and forests. Halfhearted eradication attempts are ongoing.
9 By the 1740s, 25% of the colonial budget for New France would be spent on Indian-related supplies and payments.
10 “Mr. Mather preaches the Lecture from Mat. 24., and appoint his portion with the Hypocrites,” he wrote in a 1690 entry. “To be zealous against an innocent fashion, taken up and used by the best of men; and yet make no Conscience of being guilty of great Immoralities. Tis supposed he means wearing of Perriwigs: said would deny themselves in anything but parting with an opportunity to do God service; that so might not offend good Christians. Meaning, I suppose, was fain to wear a Perriwig for his health. I expected not to hear a vindication of Perriwigs in Boston pulpit from Mr. Mather.”
11 One of the worst items in his baggage was a new charter. Among many features odious to the Old Guard of Puritanism was a provision that guaranteed liberty of conscience for all Protestants. The Bay Colony since its inception had used governmental authority to coerce its residents into Puritan orthodoxy. Those who resisted were harangued, abused, punished, and often expelled, as Roger Williams was in 1635, who fled to present-day Rhode Island. This judicial ability was rendered impotent in the new charter, and “true” Puritans realized it. “The symptoms of death are on us,” Sewall noted. Increase Mather, who had negotiated the new charter as best he could, realized its defects but could do nothing to ameliorate what were, to him, draconian alterations. He was told, in effect, that the Colony’s approval was “neither expected nor desired.” Such Imperial disdain would, broadly speaking, result in the Revolutionary War of 1775-1781. Mather received substantial personal criticism back in Boston, which he keenly resented.
12 The Salem hysteria has, for good reason, been a much-discussed subject in the history of New England, but the number of unfortunates pale in comparison with statistics from the mother country at approximately the same time. It has been estimated that four thousand people, mostly women, were either hanged or burned to death in seventeenth century England for witchcraft.
13 William’s brother helped finance the foundation of an even better-known institution of higher learning, the College of New Haven, today’s Yale.
14 Elizabeth Emerson, Hannah’s sister, is remembered under less auspicious circumstances. She was executed on June 8, 1693 for the crime of infracide, having murdered illegitimate twins that she had just given birth to, then burying them in the garden behind her parent’s home. The man she identified as their father (they were allegedly conceived in the “inn house” of Haverhill), a husband with five children of his of his own, was never questioned, prosecuted, or punished, though he did later die in yet another Indian attack. It was customary for a condemned man or woman to endure a sermon before their hanging. Cotton Mather preached Elizabeth’s, entitled “They Die in Youth, and Their Life is Among the Unclean.”
15 Williams died in 1729 and never saw his daughter again. But eleven years later Eunice visited Deerfield with her husband, who had taken the English family name Williams. She came as a squaw. Persuaded to put on a dress and attend church, she quickly reverted to Indian attire after the service. Eunice came to Deerfield on three other occasions, bringing her “half-breed” children in tow. Her grandson, one Eleazer Williams, attended Dartmouth College.
16 In the Old Testament book of Judges, an angel of the Lord rebuked the Israelites at a village called Bochim “for not obeying me” and “breaking my covenant with you;” as punishment, “I will not clear [enemies] out of your way, they shall oppose you and their gods shall become a snare to you.” After this threat, “the people wept aloud.”
17 When he died in 1728, Mather left behind “the longest bibliography yet achieved, or likely ever to be achieved, by an American author.”
18 One Puritan recorded the annoyance an Indian scout found in leading a group of white men into the forest to track down hostiles. The creaking leather of one soldier was such a giveaway that the Indian stopped the column, gave the offending individual his own pair of moccasins, and continued the pursuit barefoot, the boots hanging around his neck by their shoestrings. Some early Puritans were offended by the thought of fighting Indians on their own terms, sensing, perhaps, a form of racial regression that diminished their moral standing. The early colonial historian William Hubbard, condemned as a “gross mistake” the behavior of one militia group that fought a running style battle with renegades that resulted in many deaths among “a choice company of young men, the flower of the county of Essex.”
19 King Philip’s various body parts were separately displayed throughout the region. His head was spiked and mounted in Plymouth, where Cotton Mather, some years later, detached the jaw bone as a souvenir.
20 Liquor was not only helpful in recruiting Indians for military expeditions, but apparently for their conversion as well, Mather complaining in 1704 about a missionary “mining his Bottle more than his Bible.”
21 Church dictated these memoirs to his son. He died after falling off his horse in 1718, following “a friendly and pious visit” with a sister. His great-grandson, also named Benjamin, achieved notoriety during the Revolutionary War when, as the fledging nation’s first surgeon general, he was caught sending letters in cipher to British General Thomas Gage, outlining colonial defensive measure in Boston. George Washington himself conducted the court martial, wherein Church was lucky to escape with his life.
22 The dynastic succession to the English throne, as per usual, had become quite the maze. James II, a Stuart and, fatally, a Catholic, had been removed from the throne after a reign of only three years during the Glorious Revolution of 1688. His several attempts to regain the crown, the most formidable of which was the Irish expedition of the next year, all proved futile. His opponent had been the Dutchman William of Orange, married to James’s eldest daughter, Mary, both Protestants. Mary died of smallpox in 1694, William was assassinated in the Netherlands, 1702. He was succeeded by James’s second daughter Anne, also Protestant. Anne is probably best known for her attachment to Sarah Churchill, wife to the Duke of Marlborough. James II lived until 1701. He regarded both his daughters with loathing.
23 The famous pilgrimage church of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupre, first established in 1658 in the town of that name some twenty miles downriver from Quebec City, was principally built by sailors who had been shipwrecked off the Isles aux Oeufs, long a dangerous spot on the river’s passage, St. Anne being one of many patron saints for those who go down to the sea. (She is also the protectress of Quebec City and Micmac Indians.) The well-known Gothic basilica of 1926 stands on the original site.