CHAPTER 11
1690.
THE THREE WAR-PARTIES.
MEASURES OF FRONTENAC, EXPEDITION AGAINST SCHENECTADY, THE MARCH, THE DUTCH VILLAGE, THE SURPRISE, THE MASSACRE, PRISONERS SPARED, RETREAT, THE ENGLISH AND THEIR IROQUOIS FRIENDS, THE ABENAKI WAR, REVOLUTION AT BOSTON, CAPTURE OF PEMAQUID, CAPTURE OF SALMON FALLS, CAPTURE OF FORT LOYAL, FRONTENAC AND HIS PRISONER, THE CANADIANS ENCOURAGED.
While striving to reclaim his allies, Frontenac had not forgotten his enemies.  It was of the last necessity to revive the dashed spirits of the Canadians and the troops; and action, prompt and bold, was the only means of doing so.  He resolved, therefore, to take the offensive, not against the Iroquois, who seemed invulnerable as ghosts, but against the English; and by striking a few sharp and rapid blows to teach both friends and foes that Onontio was still alive.  The effect of his return had already begun to appear, and the energy and fire of the undaunted veteran had shot new life into the dejected population.  He formed three war-parties of picked men, one at Montreal, one at Three Rivers, and one at Quebec; the first to strike at Albany, the second at the border settlements of New Hampshire, and the third at those of Maine.  That of Montreal was ready first.  It consisted of two hundred and ten men, of whom ninety-six were Indian converts, chiefly from the two mission villages of Saut Saint Louis and the Mountain of Montreal.  They were Christian Iroquois whom the priests had persuaded to leave their homes and settle in Canada, to the great indignation of their heathen countrymen, and the great annoyance of the English colonists, to whom they were a constant menace.  When Denonville attacked the Senecas, they had joined him; but of late they had shown reluctance to fight their heathen kinsmen, with whom the French even suspected them of collusion.  Against the English, however, they willingly took up the hatchet.  The French of the party were for the most part coureurs de bois.  As the sea is the sailor's element, so the forest was theirs.  Their merits were hardihood and skill in woodcraft; their chief faults were insubordination and lawlessness.  They had shared the general demoralization that followed the inroad of the Iroquois, and under Denonville had proved mutinous and unmanageable.  In the best times, it was a hard task to command them, and one that needed, not bravery alone, but tact, address, and experience.  Under a chief of such a stamp, they were admirable bushfighters, and such were those now chosen to lead them.  D'Aillebout de Mantet and Le Moyne de Sainte-Helene, the brave son of Charles Le Moyne, had the chief command, supported by the brothers Le Moyne d'Iberville and Le Moyne de Bienville, with Repentigny de Montesson, Le Ber du Chesne, and others of the sturdy Canadian noblesse, nerved by adventure and trained in Indian warfare.  

It was the depth of winter when they began their march, striding on snow-shoes over the vast white field of the frozen St.  Lawrence, each with the hood of his blanket coat drawn over his head, a gun in his mittened hand, a knife, a hatchet, a tobacco pouch, and a bullet pouch at his belt, a pack on his shoulders, and his inseparable pipe hung at his neck in a leather case.  They dragged their blankets and provisions over the snow on Indian sledges.  Crossing the forest to Chambly, they advanced four or five days up the frozen Richelieu and the frozen Lake Champlain, and then stopped to hold a council.  Frontenac had left the precise point of attack at the discretion of the leaders, and thus far the men had been ignorant of their destination.  The Indians demanded to know it.  Mantet and Sainte-Helene replied that they were going to Albany.  The Indians demurred.  "How long is it," asked one of them, "since the French grew so bold?" The commanders answered that, to regain the honor of which their late misfortunes had robbed them, the French would take Albany or die in the attempt.  The Indians listened sullenly; the decision was postponed, and the party moved forward again.  When after eight days they reached the Hudson, and found the place where two paths diverged, the one for Albany and the other for Schenectady, they all without farther words took the latter.  Indeed, to attempt Albany would have been an act of desperation.  The march was horrible.  There was a partial thaw, and they waded knee-deep through the half melted snow, and the mingled ice, mud, and water of the gloomy swamps.  So painful and so slow was their progress, that it was nine days more before they reached a point two leagues from Schenectady.  The weather had changed again, and a cold, gusty snow-storm pelted them.  It was one of those days when the trees stand white as spectres in the sheltered hollows of the forest, and bare and gray on the wind-swept ridges.  The men were half dead with cold, fatigue, and hunger.  It was four in the afternoon of the eighth of February.  The scouts found an Indian hut, and in it were four Iroquois squaws, whom they captured.  There was a fire in the wigwam; and the shivering Canadians crowded about it, stamping their chilled feet and warming their benumbed hands over the blaze.  The Christian chief of the Saut Saint Louis, known as Le Grand Agnie, or the Great Mohawk, by the French, and by the Dutch called Kryn, harangued his followers, and exhorted them to wash out their wrongs in blood.  Then they all advanced again, and about dark reached the river Mohawk, a little above the village.  A Canadian named Gignieres, who had gone with nine Indians to reconnoitre, now returned to say that he had been within sight of Schenectady, and had seen nobody.  Their purpose had been to postpone the attack till two o'clock in the morning; but the situation was intolerable, and the limit of human endurance was reached.  They could not make fires, and they must move on or perish.  Guided by the frightened squaws, they crossed the Mohawk on the ice, toiling through the drifts amid the whirling snow that swept down the valley of the darkened stream, till about eleven o'clock they descried through the storm the snow-beplastered palisades of the devoted village.  Such was their plight that some of them afterwards declared that they would all have surrendered if an enemy had appeared to summon them.  

Schenectady was the farthest outpost of the colony of New York.  Westward lay the Mohawk forests; and Orange, or Albany, was fifteen miles or more towards the south-east.  The village was oblong in form, and enclosed by a palisade which had two gates, one towards Albany and the other towards the Mohawks.  There was a blockhouse near the eastern gate, occupied by eight or nine Connecticut militia men under Lieutenant Talmage.  There were also about thirty friendly Mohawks in the place, on a visit.  The inhabitants, who were all Dutch, were in a state of discord and confusion.  The revolution in England had produced a revolution in New York.  The demagogue Jacob Leisler had got possession of Fort William, and was endeavoring to master the whole colony.  Albany was in the hands of the anti-Leisler or conservative party, represented by a convention of which Peter Schuyler was the chief.  The Dutch of Schenectady for the most part favored Leisler, whose emissaries had been busily at work among them; but their chief magistrate, John Sander Glen, a man of courage and worth, stood fast for the Albany convention, and in consequence the villagers had threatened to kill him.  Talmage and his Connecticut militia were under orders from Albany; and therefore, like Glen, they were under the popular ban.  In vain the magistrate and the officer entreated the people to stand on their guard.  They turned the advice to ridicule, laughed at the idea of danger, left both their gates wide open, and placed there, it is said, two snow images as mock sentinels.  A French account declares that the village contained eighty houses, which is certainly an exaggeration.  There had been some festivity during the evening, but it was now over; and the primitive villagers, fathers, mothers, children, and infants, lay buried in unconscious sleep.  They were simple peasants and rude woodsmen, but with human affections and capable of human woe.

The French and Indians stood before the open gate, with its blind and dumb warder, the mock sentinel of snow.  Iberville went with a detachment to find the Albany gate, and bar it against the escape of fugitives; but he missed it in the gloom, and hastened back.  The assailants were now formed into two bands, Sainte-Helene leading the one and Mantet the other.  They passed through the gate together in dead silence: one turned to the right and the other to the left, and they filed around the village between the palisades and the houses till the two leaders met at the farther end.  Thus the place was completely surrounded.  The signal was then given: they all screeched the war-whoop together, burst in the doors with hatchets, and fell to their work.  Roused by the infernal din, the villagers leaped from their beds.  For some it was but a momentary nightmare of fright and horror, ended by the blow of the tomahawk.  Others were less fortunate.  Neither women nor children were spared.  "No pen can write, and no tongue express," wrote Schuyler, "the cruelties that were committed." There was little resistance, except at the block-house, where Talmage and his men made a stubborn fight; but the doors were at length forced open, the defenders killed or taken, and the building set on fire.  Adam Vrooman, one of the villagers, saw his wife shot and his child brained against the door-post; but he fought so desperately that the assailants promised him his life.  Orders had been given to spare Peter Tassemaker, the domine or minister, from whom it was thought that valuable information might be obtained; but he was hacked to pieces, and his house burned.  Some, more agile or more fortunate than the rest, escaped at the eastern gate, and fled through the storm to seek shelter at Albany or at houses along the way.  Sixty persons were killed outright, of whom thirty-eight were men and boys, ten were women, and twelve were children.  The number captured appears to have been between eighty and ninety.  The thirty Mohawks in the town were treated with studied kindness by the victors, who declared that they had no quarrel with them, but only with the Dutch and English.

The massacre and pillage continued two hours; then the prisoners were secured, sentinels posted, and the men told to rest and refresh themselves.  In the morning, a small party crossed the river to the house of Glen, which stood on a rising ground half a mile distant.  It was loopholed and palisaded; and Glen had mustered his servants and tenants, closed his gates, and prepared to defend himself.  The French told him to fear nothing, for they had orders not to hurt a chicken of his; whereupon, after requiring them to lay down their arms, he allowed them to enter.  They urged him to go with them to the village, and he complied; they on their part leaving one of their number as a hostage in the hands of his followers.  Iberville appeared at the gate with the Great Mohawk, and, drawing his commission from the breast of his coat, told Glen that he was specially charged to pay a debt which the French owed him.  On several occasions, he had saved the lives of French prisoners in the hands of the Mohawks; and he, with his family, and, above all, his wife, had shown them the greatest kindness.  He was now led before the crowd of wretched prisoners, and told that not only were his own life and property safe, but that all his kindred should be spared.  Glen stretched his privilege to the utmost, till the French Indians, disgusted at his multiplied demands for clemency, observed that everybody seemed to be his relation.

Some of the houses had already been burned.  Fire was now set to the rest, excepting one, in which a French officer lay wounded, another belonging to Glen, and three or four more which he begged the victors to spare.  At noon Schenectady was in ashes.  Then the French and Indians withdrew, laden with booty.  Thirty or forty captured horses dragged their sledges; and a troop of twenty-seven men and boys were driven prisoners into the forest.  About sixty old men, women, and children were left behind, without farther injury, in order, it is said, to conciliate the Mohawks in the place, who had joined with Glen in begging that they might be spared.  Of the victors, only two had been killed.  

At the outset of the attack, Simon Schermerhorn threw himself on a horse, and galloped through the eastern gate.  The French shot at and wounded him; but he escaped, reached Albany at daybreak, and gave the alarm.  The soldiers and inhabitants were called to arms, cannon were fired to rouse the country, and a party of horsemen, followed by some friendly Mohawks, set out for Schenectady.  The Mohawks had promised to carry the news to their three towns on the river above; but, when they reached the ruined village, they were so frightened at the scene of havoc that they would not go farther.  Two days passed before the alarm reached the Mohawk towns.  Then troops of warriors came down on snow-shoes, equipped with tomahawk and gun, to chase the retiring French.  Fifty young men from Albany joined them; and they followed the trail of the enemy, who, with the help of their horses, made such speed over the ice of Lake Champlain that it seemed impossible to overtake them.  They thought the pursuit abandoned; and, having killed and eaten most of their horses, and being spent with fatigue, they moved more slowly as they neared home, when a band of Mohawks, who had followed stanchly on their track, fell upon a party of stragglers, and killed or captured fifteen or more, almost within sight of Montreal.

Three of these prisoners, examined by Schuyler, declared that Frontenac was preparing for a grand attack on Albany in the spring.  In the political confusion of the time, the place was not in fighting condition; and Schuyler appealed for help to the authorities of Massachusetts.  "Dear neighbours and friends, we must acquaint you that nevir poor People in the world was in a worse Condition than we are at Present, no Governour nor Command, no money to forward any expedition, and scarce Men enough to maintain the Citty.  We have here plainly laid the case before you, and doubt not but you will so much take it to heart, and make all Readinesse in the Spring to invade Canida by water." The Mohawks were of the same mind.  Their elders came down to Albany to condole with their Dutch and English friends on the late disaster.  "We are come," said their orator, "with tears in our eyes, to lament the murders committed at Schenectady by the perfidious French.  Onontio comes to our country to speak of peace, but war is at his heart.  He has broken into our house at both ends, once among the Senecas and once here; but we hope to be revenged.  Brethren, our covenant with you is a silver chain that cannot rust or break.  We are of the race of the bear; and the bear does not yield, so long as there is a drop of blood in his body.  Let us all be bears.  We will go together with an army to ruin the country of the French.  Therefore, send in all haste to New England.  Let them be ready with ships and great guns to attack by water, while we attack by land." Schuyler did not trust his red allies, who, however, seem on this occasion to have meant what they said.  He lost no time in sending commissioners to urge the several governments of New England to a combined attack on the French.

New England needed no prompting to take up arms; for she presently learned to her cost that, though feeble and prostrate, Canada could sting.  The war-party which attacked Schenectady was, as we have seen, but one of three which Frontenac had sent against the English borders.  The second, aimed at New Hampshire, left Three Rivers on the twenty-eighth of January, commanded by Francois Hertel.  It consisted of twenty-four Frenchmen, twenty Abenakis of the Sokoki band, and five Algonquins.  After three months of excessive hardship in the vast and rugged wilderness that intervened, they approached the little settlement of Salmon Falls on the stream which separates New Hampshire from Maine; and here for a moment we leave them, to observe the state of this unhappy frontier.

It was twelve years and more since the great Indian outbreak, called King Philip's War, had carried havoc through all the borders of New England.  After months of stubborn fighting, the fire was quenched in Massachusetts, Plymouth, and Connecticut; but in New Hampshire and Maine it continued to burn fiercely till the treaty of Casco, in 1678.  The principal Indians of this region were the tribes known collectively as the Abenakis.  The French had established relations with them through the missionaries; and now, seizing the opportunity, they persuaded many of these distressed and exasperated savages to leave the neighborhood of the English, migrate to Canada, and settle first at Sillery near Quebec and then at the falls of the Chaudiere.  Here the two Jesuits, Jacques and Vincent Bigot, prime agents in their removal, took them in charge; and the missions of Saint Francis became villages of Abenaki Christians, like the village of Iroquois Christians at Saut Saint Louis.  In both cases, the emigrants were sheltered under the wing of Canada; and they and their tomahawks were always at her service.  The two Bigots spared no pains to induce more of the Abenakis to join these mission colonies.  They were in good measure successful, though the great body of the tribe still clung to their ancient homes on the Saco, the Kennebec, and the Penobscot.  

There were ten years of critical and dubious peace along the English border, and then the war broke out again.  The occasion of this new uprising is not very clear, and it is hardly worth while to look for it.  Between the harsh and reckless borderer on the one side, and the fierce savage on the other, a single spark might at any moment set the frontier in a blaze.  The English, however, believed firmly that their French rivals had a hand in the new outbreak; and, in fact, the Abenakis told some of their English captives that Saint-Castin, a French adventurer on the Penobscot, gave every Indian who would go to the war a pound of gunpowder, two pounds of lead, and a supply of tobacco.  The trading house of Saint-Castin, which stood on ground claimed by England, had lately been plundered by Sir Edmund Andros, and some of the English had foretold that an Indian war would be the consequence; but none of them seem at this time to have suspected that the governor of Canada and his Jesuit friends had any part in their woes.  Yet there is proof that this was the case; for Denonville himself wrote to the minister at Versailles that the successes of the Abenakis on this occasion were due to the "good understanding which he had with them," by means of the two brothers Bigot and other Jesuits.  

Whatever were the influences that kindled and maintained the war, it spread dismay and havoc through the English settlements.  Andros at first made light of it, and complained of the authorities of Boston, because in his absence they had sent troops to protect the settlers; but he soon changed his mind, and in the winter went himself to the scene of action with seven hundred men.  Not an Indian did he find.  They had all withdrawn into the depths of the frozen forest.  Andros did what he could, and left more than five hundred men in garrison on the Kennebec and the Saco, at Casco Bay, Pemaquid, and various other exposed points.  He then returned to Boston, where surprising events awaited him.  Early in April, news came that the Prince of Orange had landed in England.  There was great excitement.  The people of the town rose against Andros, whom they detested as the agent of the despotic policy of James II.  They captured his two forts with their garrisons of regulars, seized his frigate in the harbor, placed him and his chief adherents in custody, elected a council of safety, and set at its head their former governor, Bradstreet, an old man of eighty-seven.  The change was disastrous to the eastern frontier.  Of the garrisons left for its protection the winter before, some were partially withdrawn by the new council; while others, at the first news of the revolution, mutinied, seized their officers, and returned home.  

These garrisons were withdrawn or reduced, partly perhaps because the hated governor had established them, partly through distrust of his officers, some of whom were taken from the regulars, and partly because the men were wanted at Boston.  The order of withdrawal cannot be too strongly condemned.  It was a part of the bungling inefficiency which marked the military management of the New England governments from the close of Philip's war to the peace of Utrecht.

When spring opened, the Indians turned with redoubled fury against the defenceless frontier, seized the abandoned stockades, and butchered the helpless settlers.  Now occurred the memorable catastrophe at Cocheco, or Dover.  Two squaws came at evening and begged lodging in the palisaded house of Major Waldron.  At night, when all was still, they opened the gates and let in their savage countrymen.  Waldron was eighty years old.  He leaped from his bed, seized his sword, and drove back the assailants through two rooms; but, as he turned to snatch his pistols, they stunned him by the blow of a hatchet, bound him in an arm-chair, and placed him on a table, where after torturing him they killed him with his own sword.  The crowning event of the war was the capture of Pemaquid, a stockade work, mounted with seven or eight cannon.  Andros had placed in it a garrison of a hundred and fifty-six men, under an officer devoted to him.  Most of them had been withdrawn by the council of safety; and the entire force of the defenders consisted of Lieutenant James Weems and thirty soldiers, nearly half of whom appear to have been absent at the time of the attack.  The Indian assailants were about a hundred in number, all Christian converts from mission villages.  By a sudden rush, they got possession of a number of houses behind the fort, occupied only by women and children, the men being at their work.  Some ensconced themselves in the cellars, and others behind a rock on the seashore, whence they kept up a close and galling fire.  On the next day, Weems surrendered, under a promise of life, and, as the English say, of liberty to himself and all his followers.  The fourteen men who had survived the fire, along with a number of women and children, issued from the gate, upon which some were butchered on the spot, and the rest, excepting Weems and a few others, were made prisoners.  In other respects, the behavior of the victors is said to have been creditable.  They tortured nobody, and their chiefs broke the rum barrels in the fort, to prevent disorder.  Father Thury, a priest of the seminary of Quebec, was present at the attack; and the assailants were a part of his Abenaki flock.  Religion was one of the impelling forces of the war.  In the eyes of the Indian converts, it was a crusade against the enemies of God.  They made their vows to the Virgin before the fight; and the squaws, in their distant villages on the Penobscot, told unceasing beads, and offered unceasing prayers for victory.  

The war now ran like wildfire through the settlements of Maine and New Hampshire.  Sixteen fortified houses, with or without defenders, are said to have fallen into the hands of the enemy; and the extensive district then called the county of Cornwall was turned to desolation.  Massachusetts and Plymouth sent hasty levies of raw men, ill-armed and ill-officered, to the scene of action.  At Casco Bay, they met a large body of Indians, whom they routed after a desultory fight of six hours; and then, as the approaching winter seemed to promise a respite from attack, most of them were withdrawn and disbanded.

It was a false and fatal security.  Through snow and ice and storm, Hertel and his band were moving on their prey.  On the night of the twenty-seventh of March, they lay hidden in the forest that bordered the farms and clearings of Salmon Falls.  Their scouts reconnoitred the place, and found a fortified house with two stockade forts, built as a refuge for the settlers in case of alarm.  Towards daybreak, Hertel, dividing his followers into three parties, made a sudden and simultaneous attack.  The settlers, unconscious of danger, were in their beds.  No watch was kept even in the so-called forts; and, when the French and Indians burst in, there was no time for their few tenants to gather for defence.  The surprise was complete; and, after a short struggle, the assailants were successful at every point.  They next turned upon the scattered farms of the neighborhood, burned houses, barns, and cattle, and laid the entire settlement in ashes.  About thirty persons of both sexes and all ages were tomahawked or shot; and fifty-four, chiefly women and children, were made prisoners.  Two Indian scouts now brought word that a party of English was advancing to the scene of havoc from Piscataqua, or Portsmouth, not many miles distant.  Hertel called his men together, and began his retreat.  The pursuers, a hundred and forty in number, overtook him about sunset at Wooster River, where the swollen stream was crossed by a narrow bridge.  Hertel and his followers made a stand on the farther bank, killed and wounded a number of the English as they attempted to cross, kept up a brisk fire on the rest, held them in check till night, and then continued their retreat.  The prisoners, or some of them, were given to the Indians, who tortured one or more of the men, and killed and tormented children and infants with a cruelty not always equalled by their heathen countrymen.  

Hertel continued his retreat to one of the Abenaki villages on the Kennebec.  Here he learned that a band of French and Indians had lately passed southward on their way to attack the English fort at Casco Bay, on the site of Portland.  Leaving at the village his eldest son, who had been badly wounded at Wooster River, he set out to join them with thirty-six of his followers.  The band in question was Frontenac's third war-party.  It consisted of fifty French and sixty Abenakis from the mission of Saint Francis; and it had left Quebec in January, under a Canadian officer named Portneuf and his lieutenant, Courtemanche.  They advanced at their leisure, often stopping to hunt, till in May they were joined on the Kennebec by a large body of Indian warriors.  On the twenty-fifth, Portneuf encamped in the forest near the English forts, with a force which, including Hertel's party, the Indians of the Kennebec, and another band led by Saint-Castin from the Penobscot, amounted to between four and five hundred men.  Fort Loyal was a palisade work with eight cannon, standing on rising ground by the shore of the bay, at what is now the foot of India Street in the city of Portland.  Not far distant were four block-houses and a village which they were designed to protect.  These with the fort were occupied by about a hundred men, chiefly settlers of the neighborhood, under Captain Sylvanus Davis, a prominent trader.  Around lay rough and broken fields stretching to the skirts of the forest half a mile distant.  Some of Portneuf's scouts met a straggling Scotchman, and could not resist the temptation of killing him.  Their scalp-yells alarmed the garrison, and thus the advantage of surprise was lost.  Davis resolved to keep his men within their defences, and to stand on his guard; but there was little or no discipline in the yeoman garrison, and thirty young volunteers under Lieutenant Thaddeus Clark sallied out to find the enemy.  They were too successful; for, as they approached the top of a hill near the woods, they observed a number of cattle staring with a scared look at some object on the farther side of a fence; and, rightly judging that those they sought were hidden there, they raised a cheer, and ran to the spot.  They were met by a fire so close and deadly that half their number were shot down.  A crowd of Indians leaped the fence and rushed upon the survivors, who ran for the fort; but only four, all of whom were wounded, succeeded in reaching it.  

The men in the blockhouses withdrew under cover of night to Fort Loyal, where the whole force of the English was now gathered along with their frightened families.  Portneuf determined to besiege the place in form; and, after burning the village, and collecting tools from the abandoned blockhouses, he opened his trenches in a deep gully within fifty yards of the fort, where his men were completely protected.  They worked so well that in three days they had wormed their way close to the palisade; and, covered as they were in their burrows, they lost scarcely a man, while their enemies suffered severely.  They now summoned the fort to surrender.  Davis asked for a delay of six days, which was refused; and in the morning the fight began again.  For a time the fire was sharp and heavy.  The English wasted much powder in vain efforts to dislodge the besiegers from their trenches; till at length, seeing a machine loaded with a tar-barrel and other combustibles shoved against their palisades, they asked for a parley.  Up to this time, Davis had supposed that his assailants were all Indians, the French being probably dressed and painted like their red allies.  "We demanded," he says, "if there were any French among them, and if they would give us quarter.  They answered that they were Frenchmen, and that they would give us good quarter.  Upon this, we sent out to them again to know from whence they came, and if they would give us good quarter for our men, women, and children, both wounded and sound, and (to demand) that we should have liberty to march to the next English town, and have a guard for our defence and safety; then we would surrender; and also that the governour of the French should hold up his hand and swear by the great and ever living God that the several articles should be performed: all which he did solemnly swear."

The survivors of the garrison now filed through the gate, and laid down their arms.  They with their women and children were thereupon abandoned to the Indians, who murdered many of them, and carried off the rest.  When Davis protested against this breach of faith, he was told that he and his countrymen were rebels against their lawful king, James II.  After spiking the cannon, burning the fort, and destroying all the neighboring settlements, the triumphant allies departed for their respective homes, leaving the slain unburied where they had fallen.  

Davis with three or four others, more fortunate than their companions, was kept by the French, and carried to Canada.  "They were kind to me," he says, "on my travels through the country.  I arrived at Quebeck the 14th of June, where I was civilly treated by the gentry, and soon carried to the fort before the governour, the Earl of Frontenack." Frontenac told him that the governor and people of New York were the cause of the war, since they had stirred up the Iroquois against Canada, and prompted them to torture French prisoners.  Davis replied that New York and New England were distinct and separate governments, each of which must answer for its own deeds; and that New England would gladly have remained at peace with the French, if they had not set on the Indians to attack her peaceful settlers.  Frontenac admitted that the people of New England were not to be regarded in the same light with those who had stirred up the Indians against Canada; but he added that they were all rebels to their king, and that if they had been good subjects there would have been no war.  "I do believe," observes the captive Puritan, "that there was a popish design against the Protestant interest in New England as in other parts of the world." He told Frontenac of the pledge given by his conqueror, and the violation of it.  "We were promised good quarter," he reports himself to have said, "and a guard to conduct us to our English; but now we are made captives and slaves in the hands of the heathen.  I thought I had to do with Christians that would have been careful of their engagements, and not to violate and break their oaths.  Whereupon the governour shaked his head, and, as I was told, was very angry with Burniffe (Portneuf)."

Frontenac was pleased with his prisoner, whom he calls a bonhomme.  He told him in broken English to take courage, and promised him good treatment; to which Davis replied that his chief concern was not for himself, but for the captives in the hands of the Indians.  Some of these were afterwards ransomed by the French, and treated with much kindness, as was also Davis himself, to whom the count gave lodging in the chateau.

The triumphant success of his three war-parties produced on the Canadian people all the effect that Frontenac had expected.  This effect was very apparent, even before the last two victories had become known.  "You cannot believe, Monseigneur," wrote the governor, speaking of the capture of Schenectady, "the joy that this slight success has caused, and how much it contributes to raise the people from their dejection and terror."

One untoward accident damped the general joy for a moment.  A party of Iroquois Christians from the Saut Saint Louis had made a raid against the English borders, and were returning with prisoners.  One evening, as they were praying at their camp near Lake Champlain, they were discovered by a band of Algonquins and Abenakis who were out on a similar errand, and who, mistaking them for enemies, set upon them and killed several of their number, among whom was Kryn, the great Mohawk, chief of the mission of the Saut.  This mishap was near causing a rupture between the best Indian allies of the colony; but the difference was at length happily adjusted, and the relatives of the slain propitiated by gifts.