France Loses Acadia
The Peace of Ryswick in 1697 had settled nothing finally. France was
still strong enough to aim at the mastery of Europe and America. England
was torn by internal faction and would not prepare to face her menacing
enemy. Always the English have disliked a great standing army. Now,
despite the entreaties of a king who knew the real danger, they reduced
the army to the pitiable number of seven thousand men. Louis XIV grew
ever more confident. In 1700 he was able to put his own grandson on the
throne of Spain and to dominate Europe from the Straits of Gibraltar to
the Netherlands. Another event showing his resolve soon startled the
world. In 1701 died James II, the dethroned King of England, and Louis
went out of his way to insult the English people. William III was King
by the will of Parliament. Louis had recognized him as such. Yet, on the
death of James, Louis declared that James's son was now the true King of
England. This impudent defiance meant, and Louis intended that it should
mean, renewed war. England had invited it by making her forces weak.
William III died in 1702 and the war went on under his successor, Queen
Anne.
Thus it happened that once more war-parties began to prowl on the
Canadian frontier, and women and children in remote clearings in the
forest shivered at the prospect of the savage scourge. The English
colonies suffered terribly. Everywhere France was aggressive. The
warlike Iroquois were now so alarmed by the French menace that, to
secure protection, they ceded their territory to Queen Anne and became
British subjects, a humiliating step indeed for a people who had once
thought themselves the most important in all the world. By 1703 the
butchery on the frontier was in full operation. The Jesuit historian
Charlevoix, with complacent exaggeration, says that in that year alone
three hundred men were killed on the New England frontier by the Abenaki
Indians incited by the French. The numbers slain were in fact fewer and
the slain were not always men but sometimes old women and young babies.
The policy of France was to make the war so ruthless that a gulf of
hatred should keep their Indian allies from ever making friends and
resuming trade with the English, whose hatchets, blankets, and other
supplies were, as the French well knew, better and cheaper than their
own. The French hoped to seize Boston, to destroy its industries and
sink its ships, then to advance beyond Boston and deal out to other
places the same fate. The rivalry of New England was to be ended by
making that region a desert.
The first fury of the war raged on the frontier of Maine, which was an
outpost of Massachusetts. On an August day in 1703 the people of the
rugged little settlement of Wells were at their usual tasks when they
heard gunshots and war-whoops. Indians had crept up to attack the place.
They set the village on fire and killed or carried off some twoscore
prisoners, chiefly women and children. The village of Deerfield, on the
northwestern frontier of Massachusetts, consisted of a wooden
meeting-house and a number of rough cabins which lodged the two or three
hundred inhabitants. On a February night in 1704 savages led by a young
member of the Canadian noblesse, Hertel de Rouville, approached the
village silently on snowshoes, waited on the outskirts during the dead
of night, and then just before dawn burst in upon the sleeping people.
The work was done quickly. Within an hour after dawn the place had been
plundered and set on fire, forty or fifty dead bodies of men and women
and children lay in the village, and a hundred and eleven miserable
prisoners were following their captors on snowshoes through the forest,
each prisoner well knowing that to fall by the way meant to have his
head split by a tomahawk and the scalp torn off. When on the first night
one of them slipped away, Rouville told the others that, should a
further escape occur, he would burn alive all those remaining in his
hands. The minister of the church at Deerfield, the Reverend John
Williams, was a captive, together with his wife and five children. The
wife, falling by the way, was killed by a stroke of a tomahawk and the
body was left lying on the snow. The children were taken from their
father and scattered among different bands. After a tramp of two hundred
miles through the wilderness to the outlying Canadian settlements, the
minister in the end reached Quebec. Every effort was made, even by his
Indian guard, to make him accept the Roman Catholic faith, but the stern
Puritan was obdurate. His daughter, Eunice, on the other hand, caught
young, became a Catholic so devoted that later she would not return to
New England lest the contact with Protestants should injure her faith.
She married a Caughnawaga Indian and became to all outward appearance a
squaw. Williams himself lived to resume his career in New England and to
write the story of the raid at Deerfield.
It may be that there were men in New England and New York capable of
similar barbarities. It is true that the savage allies of the English,
when at their worst, knew no restraint. There is nothing in the French
raids on a scale as great as that of the murderous raid by the Iroquois
on the French village of Lachine. But the Puritans of New England, while
they were ready to hew down savages, did not like and rarely took part
in the massacre of Europeans.
As the outrages went on year after year the temper of New England
towards the savages grew more ruthless. The General Court, the
Legislature of Massachusetts, offered forty pounds for every Indian
scalp brought in. Indians, like wolves, were vermin to be destroyed. The
anger of New England was further kindled by what was happening on the
sea. Privateers from Port Royal, in Acadia, attacked New England
commerce and New England fishermen and made unsafe the approaches to
Boston. This was to touch a commercial community on its most tender
spot; and a deep resolve was formed that Canada should be conquered and
the menace ended once for all.
It was only an occasional spirit in Massachusetts who made comprehensive
political plans. One of these was Samuel Vetch, a man somewhat different
from the usual type of New England leader, for he was not of English but
of Scottish origin, of the Covenanter strain. Vetch, himself an
adventurous trader, had taken a leading part in the ill-fated Scottish
attempt to found on the Isthmus of Panama a colony, which, in easy touch
with both the Pacific and the Atlantic, should carry on a gigantic
commerce between the East and the West. The colony failed, chiefly,
perhaps, because Spain would not have this intrusion into territory
which she claimed. Tropical disease and the disunion and incompetence of
the colonists themselves were Spain's allies in the destruction. After
this, Vetch had found his way to Boston, where he soon became prominent.
In 1707 Scotland and England were united under one Parliament, and the
active mind of Vetch was occupied with something greater than a Scottish
colony at Panama. Queen Anne, Vetch was resolved, should be "Sole
Empress of the vast North American Continent." Massachusetts was ready
for just such a cry. The General Court took up eagerly the plan of
Vetch. The scheme required help from England and the other colonies. To
England Vetch went in 1708. Marlborough had just won the great victory
of Oudenarde. It was good, the English ministry thought, to hit France
wherever she raised her head. In the spring of 1709 Vetch returned to
Boston with promises of powerful help at once for an attack on Canada,
and with the further promise that, the victory won, he himself should be
the first British Governor of Canada. New York was to help with nine
hundred men. Other remoter colonies were to aid on a smaller scale.
These contingents were to attack Canada by way of Lake Champlain. Twelve
hundred men from New England were to join the regulars from England and
go against Quebec by way of the sea and master Canada once for all.
The plan was similar to the one which Amherst and Wolfe carried to
success exactly fifty years later, and with a Wolfe in command it might
now have succeeded. The troops from England were to be at Boston before
the end of May, 1709. The colonial forces gathered. New Jersey and
Pennsylvania refused, indeed, to send any soldiers; but New York and the
other colonies concerned did their full share. By the early summer
Colonel Francis Nicholson, with some fifteen hundred men, lay fully
equipped in camp on Wood Creek near Lake Champlain, ready to descend on
Montreal as soon as news came of the arrival of the British fleet at
Boston for the attack on Quebec. On the shores of Boston harbor lay
another colonial army, large for the time--the levies from New England
which were to sail to Quebec. Officers had come out from England to
drill these hardy men, and as soldiers they were giving a good account
of themselves. They watched, fasted, and prayed, and watched again for
the fleet from England. Summer came and then autumn and still the fleet
did not arrive. Far away, in the crowded camp on Wood Creek, pestilence
broke out and as time wore on this army slowly melted away either by
death or withdrawal. At last, on October 11, 1709, word came from the
British ministry, dated the 27th of July, two months after the promised
fleet was to arrive at Boston, that it had been sent instead to
Portugal.
In spite of this disappointment the resolution endured to conquer
Canada. New York joined New England in sending deputations to London to
ask again for help. Four Mohawk chiefs went with Peter Schuyler from New
York and were the wonder of the day in London. It is something to have a
plan talked about. Malplaquet, the last of Marlborough's great
victories, had been won in the autumn of 1709 and the thought of a new
enterprise was popular. Nicholson, who had been sent from Boston, urged
that the first step should be to take Port Royal. What the colonies
required for this expedition was the aid of four frigates and five
hundred soldiers who should reach Boston by March.
The help arrived, though not in March but in July, 1710. Boston was
filled with enthusiasm for the enterprise. The legislature made military
service compulsory, quartered soldiers in private houses without consent
of the owners, impressed sailors, and altogether was quite arbitrary and
high-handed. The people, however, would bear almost anything if only
they could crush Port Royal, the den of privateers who seized many New
England vessels. On the 18th of September, to the great joy of Boston,
the frigates and the transports sailed away, with Nicholson in command
of the troops and Vetch as adjutant-general.
What we know today as Digby Basin on the east side of the Bay of Fundy,
is a great harbor, landlocked but for a narrow entrance about a mile
wide. Through this "gut," as it is called, the tide rushes in a
torrential and dangerous stream, but soon loses its violence in the
spacious and quiet harbor. Here the French had made their first enduring
colony in America. On the shores of the beautiful basin the
fleurs-de-lis had been raised over a French fort as early as 1605. A
lovely valley opens from the head of the basin to the interior. It is
now known as the Annapolis Valley, a fertile region dotted by the
homesteads of a happy and contented people. These people, however, are
not French in race nor do they live under a French Government. When on
the 24th of September, 1710, the fleet from Boston entered the basin,
and in doing so lost a ship and more than a score of men through the
destructive current, the decisive moment had come for all that region.
Fate had decreed that the land should not remain French but should
become English.
Port Royal was at that time a typical French community of the New World.
The village consisted of some poor houses made of logs or planks, a
wooden church, and, lying apart, a fort defended by earthworks. The
Governor, Subercase, was a brave French officer. He ruled the little
community with a despotism tempered only by indignant protests to the
King from those whom he ruled when his views and theirs did not
coincide. The peasants in the village counted for nothing. Connected
with the small garrison there were ladies and gentlemen who had no light
opinion of their own importance and were so peppery that Subercase
wished he had a madhouse in which to confine some of them. He thought
well of the country. It produced, he said, everything that France
produced except olives. The fertile land promised abundance of grain and
there was an inexhaustible supply of timber. There were many excellent
harbors. Had he a million livres, he would, he said, invest it gladly in
the country and be certain of a good return. His enthusiasm had
produced, however, no answering enthusiasm at Versailles, for there the
interests of Port Royal were miserably neglected. Yet it was a thorn in
the flesh of the English. In 1708 privateers from Port Royal had
destroyed no less than thirty-five English vessels, chiefly from Boston,
and had carried to the fort four hundred and seventy prisoners. Even in
winter months French ships would flit out of Port Royal and bring in
richly laden prizes. Can we wonder at Boston's deep resolve that now at
last the pest should end!
It was an imposing force which sailed into the basin. The four frigates
and thirty transports carried an army far greater than Subercase had
thought possible. The English landed some fourteen hundred men.
Subercase had less than three hundred. Within a few days, when the
English began to throw shells into the town, he asked for terms. On the
16th of October the little garrison, neglected by France and left ragged
and half-starved, marched out with drums beating and colors flying. The
English, drawn up before the gate, showed the usual honors to a brave
foe. The French flag was hauled down and in its place floated that of
Britain. Port Royal was renamed Annapolis and Vetch was made its
Governor. Three times before had the English come to Port Royal as
conquerors and then gone away, but now they were to remain. Ever since
that October day, when autumn was coloring the abundant foliage of the
lovely harbor, the British flag has waved over Annapolis. Because the
flag waved there it was destined to wave over all Acadia, or Nova
Scotia, and with Acadia in time went Canada.
A partial victory, however, such as the taking of Port Royal, was not
enough for the aroused spirit of the English. They and their allies had
beaten Louis XIV on the battlefields of Europe and had so worn out
France that clouds and darkness were about the last days of the Grand
Monarch now nearing his end. In America his agents were still drawing up
papers outlining grandiose designs for mastering the continent and for
proving that England's empire was near its fall, but Europe knew that
France in the long war had been beaten. The right way to smite France in
America was to rely upon England's naval power, to master the great
highway of the St. Lawrence, to isolate Canada, and to strangle one by
one the French settlements, beginning with Quebec.
There was malignant intrigue at the court of Queen Anne. One favorite,
the Duchess of Marlborough, had just been disgraced, and another, Mrs.
Masham, had been taken on by the weak and stupid Queen. The conquest of
Canada, if it could be achieved without the aid of Marlborough, would
help in his much desired overthrow. Petty motives were unhappily at the
root of the great scheme. Who better to lead such an expedition than the
brother of the new favorite whose success might discredit the husband of
the old one? Accordingly General "Jack" Hill, brother of Mrs. Masham,
was appointed to the chief military command and an admiral hitherto
little known but of good habits and quick wit, Sir Hovenden Walker, was
to lead the fleet.
The expedition against Quebec was on a scale adequate for the time.
Britain dispatched seven regiments of regulars, numbering in all five
thousand five hundred men, and there were besides in the fleet some
thousands of sailors and marines. Never before had the English sent to
North America a force so great. On June 24, 1711, Admiral Walker arrived
at Boston with his great array. Boston was impressed, but Boston was
also a little hurt, for the British leaders were very lofty and superior
in their tone towards colonials and gave orders as if Boston were a
provincial city of England which must learn respect and obedience to His
Majesty's officers "vested with the Queen's Royal Power and Authority."
More than seventy ships, led by nine men-of-war, sailed from Boston for
the attack on Canada. On board were nearly twelve thousand men. Compared
with this imposing fleet, that of Phips, twenty-one years earlier, seems
feeble. Phips had set out too late. This fleet was in good time, for it
sailed on the 30th of July. Vetch, always competent, was in command of
the colonial military forces, but never had any chance to show his
mettle, for during the voyage the seamen were in control. The Admiral
had left England with secret instructions. He had not been informed of
the task before him and for it he was hardly prepared. There were no
competent pilots to correct his ignorance. Now that he knew where he was
going he was anxious about the dangers of the northern waters. The St.
Lawrence River, he believed, froze solidly to the bottom in winter and
he feared that the ice would crush the sides of his ships. As he had
provisions for only eight or nine weeks, his men might starve. His mind
was filled, as he himself says, with melancholy and dismal horror at the
prospect of seamen and soldiers, worn to skeletons by hunger, drawing
lots to decide who should die first amidst the "adamantine frosts" and
"mountains of snow" of bleak and barren Canada.
The Gulf and River St. Lawrence spell death to an incompetent sailor.
The fogs, the numerous shoals and islands, make skillful seamanship
necessary. It is a long journey from Boston to Quebec by water. For
three weeks, however, all went well. On the 22d of August, Walker was
out of sight of land in the Gulf where it is about seventy miles wide
above the Island of Anticosti. A strong east wind with thick fog is
dreaded in those waters even now, and on the evening of that day a storm
of this kind blew up. In the fog Walker lost his bearings. When in fact
he was near the north shore he thought he was not far from the south
shore. At half-past ten at night Paddon, the captain of the Edgar,
Walker's flag-ship, came to tell him that land was in sight. Walker
assumed that it was the south shore and gave a fatal order for the fleet
to turn and head northward, a change which turned them straight towards
cliffs and breakers. He then went to bed. Soon one of the military
officers rushed to his cabin and begged him to come on deck as the ships
were among breakers. Walker, who was an irascible man, resented the
intrusion and remained in bed. A second time the officer appeared and
said the fleet would be lost if the Admiral did not act. Why it was left
for a military rather than a naval officer to rouse the Admiral in such
a crisis we do not know. Perhaps the sailors were afraid of the great
man. Walker appeared on deck in dressing gown and slippers. The fog had
lifted, and in the moonlight there could be seen breaking surf to
leeward. A French pilot, captured in the Gulf, had taken pains to give
what he could of alarming information. He now declared that the ships
were off the north shore. Walker turned his own ship sharply and
succeeded in beating out into deep water and safety. For the fleet the
night was terrible. Some ships dropped anchor which held, for happily
the storm abated. Fog guns and lights as signals of distress availed
little to the ships in difficulty. Eight British transports laden with
troops and two ships carrying supplies were dashed to pieces on the
rocks. The shrieks of drowning men could be heard in the darkness. The
scene was the rocky Isle aux Œufs and adjacent reefs off the north
shore. About seven hundred soldiers, including twenty-nine officers, and
in addition perhaps two hundred sailors, were lost on that awful night.
The disaster was not overwhelming and Walker might have gone on and
captured Quebec. He had not lost a single war-ship and he had still some
eleven thousand men. General Hill might have stiffened the back of the
forlorn Admiral, but Hill himself was no better. Vetch spoke for going
on. He knew the St. Lawrence waters for he had been at Quebec and had
actually charted a part of the river and was more familiar with it, he
believed, than were the Canadians themselves. What pilots there were
declared, however, that to go on was impossible and the helpless
captains of the ships were of opinion that, with the warning of such a
disaster, they could not disregard this counsel. Though the character of
the English is such that usually a reverse serves to stiffen their
backs, in this case it was not so. A council of war yielded to the panic
of the hour and the great fleet turned homeward. Soon it was gathered in
what is now Sydney harbor in Cape Breton. From here the New England
ships went home and Walker sailed for England. At Spithead the Edgar,
the flag-ship, blew up and all on board perished. Walker was on shore at
the time. So far was he from being disgraced that he was given a new
command. Later, when the Whigs came in, he was dismissed from the
service, less, it seems, in blame for the disaster than for his Tory
opinions. It is not an unusual irony of life that Vetch, the one wholly
efficient leader in the expedition, ended his days in a debtor's prison.
Quebec had shivered before a menace, the greatest in its history.
Through the long months of the summer of 1711 there had been prayer and
fasting to avert the danger. Apparently trading ships had deserted the
lower St. Lawrence in alarm, for no word had arrived at Quebec of the
approach of Walker's fleet. Nor had the great disaster been witnessed by
any onlookers. The island where it occurred was then and still remains
desert. Up to the middle of October, nearly two months after the
disaster, the watchers at Quebec feared that they might see any day a
British fleet rounding the head of the Island of Orleans. On the 19th of
October the first news of the disaster arrived and then it was easy for
Quebec to believe that God had struck the English wretches with a
terrible vengeance. Three thousand men, it was said, had reached land
and then perished miserably. Many bodies had been found naked and in
attitudes of despair. Other thousands had perished in the water.
Vessel-loads of spoil had been gathered, rich plate, beautiful swords,
magnificent clothing, gold, silver, jewels. The truth seems to be that
some weeks after the disaster the evidences of the wrecks were
discovered. Even to this day ships are battered to pieces in those
rock-strewn waters and no one survives to tell the story. Some fishermen
landing on the island had found human bodies, dead horses and other
animals, and the hulls of seven ships. They had gathered some
wreckage--and that was the whole story. Quebec sang Te Deum. From
attacks by sea there had now been two escapes which showed God's love
for Canada. In the little church of Notre Dame des Victoires,
consecrated at that time to the memory of the deliverance from Phips and
Walker, daily prayers are still poured out for the well-being of Canada.
God had been a present help on land as well as on the sea. Nicholson,
with more than two thousand men, had been waiting at his camp near Lake
Champlain to descend on Montreal as soon as Walker reached Quebec. When
he received the news of the disaster he broke up his force and retired.
For the moment Canada was safe from the threatened invasion.
In spite of this apparent deliverance, the long war, now near its end,
brought a destructive blow to French power in America. Though France
still possessed vigor and resources which her enemies were apt to
underrate, the war had gone against her in Europe. Her finest armies had
been destroyed by Marlborough, her taxation was crushing, her credit was
ruined, her people were suffering for lack of food. The allies had begun
to think that there was no humiliation which they might not put upon
France. Louis XIV, they said, must give up Alsace, which, with Lorraine,
he had taken some years earlier, and he must help to drive his own
grandson from the Spanish throne. This exorbitant demand stirred the
pride not only of Louis but of the French nation, and the allies found
that they could not trample France under their feet. The Treaty of
Utrecht, concluded in 1713, shows that each side was too strong as yet
to be crushed. In dismissing Marlborough, Great Britain had lost one of
her chief assets. His name had become a terror to France. To this day,
both in France and in French Canada, is sung the popular ditty "Monsieur
Malbrouck est mort," a song of delight at a report that Marlborough was
dead. When in place of Marlborough leaders of the type of General Hill
were appointed to high command, France could not be finally beaten. The
Treaty of Utrecht was the outcome of war-weariness. It marks, however, a
double check to Louis XIV. He could not master Europe and he could not
master America. France now ceded to Britain her claim to Acadia,
Newfoundland, and Hudson Bay. She regarded this, however, as only a
temporary set-back and was soon planning and plotting great designs far
surpassing the narrower vision of the English colonies.
It was with a wry face, however, that France yielded Acadia. To retain
it she offered to give up all rights in the Newfoundland fisheries, the
nursery of her marine. Britain would not yield Acadia, dreading chiefly
perhaps the wrath of New England which had conquered Port Royal.
Britain, however, compromised on the question of boundaries in a way so
dangerous that the long war settled finally no great issues in America.
She took Acadia "according to its ancient limits,"--but no one knew
these limits. They were to be defined by a joint commission of the two
nations which, after forty years, reached no agreement. The Island of
Cape Breton and the adjoining Ile St. Jean, now Prince Edward Island,
remained to France. Though Britain secured sovereignty over
Newfoundland, France retained extensive rights in the Newfoundland
fisheries. The treaty left unsettled the boundary between Canada and the
English colonies. While it yielded Hudson Bay to Britain, it settled
nothing as to frontiers in the wilderness which stretched beyond the
Great Lakes into the Far West and which had vast wealth in furs.