CHAPTER IX
FROM 1686 TO 1698
War with the Iroquois—The year of the massacre—Frontenac returns—The heroine of Verchères—Indian raid and counter-raid—Massacre and Schenectady—The massacre at Fort Loyal—Boston roused to action—Quebec besieged—Phips and Frontenac—Retreat of the English—Iberville's gallant sea fight—Nelson surrenders
For ten years Hudson Bay becomes the theater of northern buccaneers and bushraiders. A treaty of neutrality in 1686 provides that the bay shall be held in common by the fur traders of England and France; but the adventurers of England and the bushrovers of Quebec have no notion of leaving things so uncertain. Spite of truce, both fit out raiders, and the King of France, according to the shifting diplomacy of the day, issues secret orders "to permit not a vestige of English possession on the northern bay."
Maricourt Le Moyne held the newly captured forts on the south shore of James Bay till Iberville came back overland in 1687. The fort at Rupert had been completely abandoned after the French victory of the previous summer, and the Hudson's Bay Company sloop, the Young, had just sailed into the port to reëstablish the fur post. Iberville surrounded the sloop by his bushrovers, captured it with all hands, and dispatched four spies across to Charlton Island, where another sloop, the Churchill, swung at anchor. Here Iberville's run of luck turned. Three of his four spies were captured, fettered, and thrown into the hold of the vessel for the winter. In the spring of 1688 one was brought above decks to help the English sailors. Watching his chance, the grizzled bushrover waited till six of the English crew were up the ratlines. Quick as flash the Frenchman tiptoed across decks in his noiseless moccasins, took one precautionary glance over his shoulder, brained two Englishmen with an ax, liberated his comrades, and at pistol point kept the other Englishmen up the masts till he and his fellows had righted the ship and steered the vessel across to Rupert River, where the provisions were just in time to save Iberville's party from starvation.
This episode is typical of what went on at the Hudson's Bay forts for ten years. Each year, when the English ships came out to Nelson on the west coast, armed bands were sent south to wrest the forts on James Bay from the French; and each spring, when Iberville's bushrovers came gliding down the rivers in their canoes from Canada, there was a fight to drive out the English. Then the Indians would scatter to their hunting grounds. No more loot of furs for a year! The English would sail away in their ships, the French glide away in their canoes; and for a winter the uneasy quiet of calm between two thunderclaps would rest over the waters of Hudson Bay.
In the spring of 1688, about the time that the brave bush-rovers had brought the English ship from Charlton Island across to Rupert River, two English frigates under Captain Moon, with twenty-four soldiers over and above the crews, had come south from Nelson to attack the French fur traders at Albany. As ill luck would have it, the ice floes began driving inshore. The English ships found themselves locked in the ice before the besieged fort. Across the jam from Rupert River dashed Iberville with his Indian bandits, portaging where the ice floes covered the water, paddling where lanes of clear way parted the floating drift. Iberville hid his men in the tamarack swamps till eighty-two Englishmen had landed and all unsuspecting left their ships unguarded. Iberville only waited till the furs in the fort had been transferred to the holds of the vessels. The ice cleared. The Frenchman rushed his bushrovers on board, seized the vessel with the most valuable cargo, and sailed gayly out of Albany for Quebec. The astounded English set fire to the other ship and retreated overland.
But the dare-devil bushrovers were not yet clear of trouble. As the ice drive jammed and held them in Hudson Straits, they were aghast to see, sailing full tilt with the roaring tide of the straits, a fleet of English frigates, the Hudson's Bay Company's annual ships; but Iberville sniffed at danger as a war horse glories in gunpowder. He laughed his merriest, and as the ice drive locked all the ships within gunshot, ran up an English flag above his French crew and had actually signaled the captains of the English frigates to come aboard and visit him, when the ice cleared. Hoisting sail, he showed swift heels to the foe. Iberville's ambition now was to sweep all the English from Hudson Bay, in other words, to capture Nelson on the west coast, whence came the finest furs; but other raids called him to Canada.
It will be recalled that La Salle's enemies had secretly encouraged the Iroquois to attack the tribes of the Illinois; and now the fur traders of New York were encouraging the Iroquois to pillage the Indians of the Mississippi valley, in order to divert peltries from the French on the St. Lawrence to the English at New York. Savages of the north, rallied by Perrot and Duluth and La Motte Cadillac, came down by the lakes to Fort Frontenac to aid the French; but they found that La Barre, the new governor, foolish old man, had been frightened into making peace with the Iroquois warriors, abandoning the Illinois to Iroquois raid and utterly forgetful that a peace which is not a victory is not worth the paper it is written on.
For the shame of this disgraceful peace La Barre was recalled to France and the Marquis de Denonville, a brave soldier, sent out as governor. Unfortunately Denonville did not understand conditions in the colony. The Jesuit missionaries were commissioned to summon the Iroquois to a conference at Fort Frontenac, but when the deputies arrived they were seized, tortured, and fifty of them shipped to France by the King's order to serve as slaves on the royal galleys. It was an act of treachery heinous beyond measure and exposed the Jesuit missionaries among the Five Nations to terrible vengeance; but the Iroquois code of honor was higher than the white man's. "Go home," they warned the Jesuit missionary. "We have now every right to treat thee as our foe; but we shall not do so! Thy heart has had no share in the wrong done to us. We shall not punish thee for the crimes of another, tho' thou didst act as the unconscious tool. But leave us! When our young men chant the song of war they may take counsel only of their fury and harm thee! Go to thine own people"; and furnishing him with guides, they sent him to Quebec.