HERTEL DE ROUVILLE
"We must keep things stirring towards Boston," declared Vaudreuil, the French governor. Midwinter of 1704 Hertel de Rouville and his four brothers set out on snowshoes with fifty-one bushrovers and two hundred Indians for Massachusetts. Dressed in buckskin, with musket over shoulder and dagger in belt, the forest rangers course up the frozen river beds southward of the St. Lawrence, and on over the height of land towards the Hudson, two hundred and fifty miles through pine woods snow padded and silent as death. Two miles from Deerfield the marchers run short of food. It is the last day of February, and the sun goes down over rolling snowdrifts high as the slab stockades of the little frontier town whose hearth-fire smoke hangs low in the frosty air, curling and clouding and lighting to rainbow colors as the ambushed raiders watch from their forest lairs. Snowshoes are laid aside, packs unstrapped, muskets uncased and primed, belts reefed tighter. Twilight gives place to starlight. Candles on the supper tables of the settlement send long gleams across the snow. Then the villagers hold their family prayers, all unconscious that out there in the woods are the bushrovers on bended knees, uttering prayers of another sort. Lights are put out. The village lies wrapped in sleep. Still Rouville's raiders lie waiting, shivering in the snow, till starlight fades to the gray darkness that precedes dawn. Then the bushrovers rise, and at moccasin pace, noiseless as tigers, skim across the snow, over the drifts, over the tops of the palisades, and have dropped into the town before a soul has awakened. There is no need to tell the rest. It was not war. It was butchery. Children were torn from their mother's breast to be brained on the hearthstone. Women were hacked to pieces. Houses were set on fire, and before the sun had risen thirty-eight persons had been slaughtered, and the French rovers were back on the forest trail, homeward bound with one hundred and six prisoners. Old and young, women of frail health and children barely able to toddle, were hurried along the trail at bayonet point. Those whose strength was unequal to the pace were summarily knocked on the head as they fagged, or failed to ford the ice streams. Twenty-four perished by the way. Of the one hundred and six prisoners scattered as captives among the Indians, not half were ever heard of again. The others were either bought from the Indians by Quebec people, whose pity was touched, or placed round in the convents to be converted to the Catholic faith. These were ultimately redeemed by the government of Massachusetts.
New England's fury over such a raid in time of peace knew no bounds. Yet how were the English to retaliate? To pursue an ambushed Indian along a forest trail was to follow a vanishing phantom.
From earliest times Boston had kept up trade with Port Royal, and of late years Port Royal had been infested with French pirates, who raided Boston shipping. Colonel Ben Church of Long Island, a noted bushfighter, of gunpowder temper and form so stout that his men had always to hoist him over logs in their forest marches, went storming from New York to Boston with a plan to be revenged by raiding Acadia.
Rouville's bushrovers had burned Deerfield the first of March. By May, Church had sailed from Boston with six hundred men on two frigates and half a hundred whaleboats, on vengeance bent. First he stopped at Baron St. Castin's fort in Maine. St. Castin it was who led the Indians against the English of Maine. The baron was absent, but his daughter was captured, with all the servants, and the fort was burned to the ground. Then up Fundy Bay sailed Church, pausing at Passamaquoddy to knock four Frenchmen on the head; pausing at Port Royal to take eight men prisoners, kill cattle, ravage fields; pausing at Basin of Mines to capture forty habitants, burn the church, and cut the dikes, letting the sea in on the crops; pausing at Beaubassin, the head of Fundy Bay, in August, to set the yellow wheat fields in flames! Then he sailed back to Boston with French prisoners enough to insure an exchange for the English held at Quebec.
No sooner had English sails disappeared over the sea than the French came out of the woods. St. Castin rebuilt his fort in Maine. The local Governor, who had held on with his gates shut and cannon pointed while Church ravaged Port Royal village, now strengthened his walls. Acadia took a breath and went on as before,—a little world in itself, with the pirate ships slipping in and out, loaded to the water line with Boston booty; with the buccaneer Basset throwing his gold round like dust; with the brave soldier Bonaventure losing his head and losing his heart to the painted lady, Widow Freneuse, who came from nobody knew where and lived nobody knew how, and plied her mischief of winning the hearts of other women's husbands. "She must be sent away," thundered the priest from the pulpit, straight at the garrison officer whose heart she dangled as her trophy. "She must be sent away," thundered the King's mandate; but the King was in France, and Madame Freneuse wound her charms the tighter round the hearts of the garrison officers, and bided her time, to the scandal of the parish and impotent rage of the priest. Was she vixen or fool, this fair snake woman with the beautiful face, for whose smile the officers risked death and disgrace? Was she spy or adventuress? She signed herself as "Widow Freneuse," and had applied to the King for a pension as having grown sons fighting in the Indian wars. She will come into this story again, snakelike and soft-spoken, and appealing for pity, and fair to look upon, but leaving a trail of blood and treachery and disgrace where she goes.
The fur trade of Port Royal at this time was controlled by a family ring of La Tours and Charnisays, descendants of the ancient foes; and they lived a life of reckless gayety, spiced with all the excitement of war and privateering and matrimonial intrigue. Such was life inside Port Royal. Outside was the quiet peace of a home-loving, home-staying peasantry. Few of the farmers could read or write. The houses were little square Norman cottages,—"wooden boxes" the commandant called them,—with the inevitable porch shaded by the fruit trees now grown into splendid orchards. By diking out the sea the peasants farmed the marsh lands and saved themselves the trouble of clearing the forests. Trade was carried on with Boston and the West Indies. No card money here! The farmers of Acadia demanded coin in gold from the privateers who called for cargo, and it is said that in time of such raids as Colonel Church's, great quantities of this gold were carried out by night and buried in huge pots,—as much as 5000 louis d'ors (pounds) in one pot,—to be dug up after the raiders had departed. Naturally, as raids grew frequent, men sometimes made the mistake of digging up other men's pots, and one officer lost his reputation over it. All his knowledge of the outside world, of politics, of religion, the Acadian farmer obtained from his parish priest; and the word of the curé was law.
Encouraged by Church's success and stung by the raids of French corsairs from Port Royal, New England set herself seriously to the task of conquering Acadia. Colonel March sailed from Boston with one thousand men and twenty-three transports, and on June 6, 1707, came into Port Royal. Misfortunes began from the first. March's men were the rawest of recruits,—fishermen, farmers, carpenters, turned into soldiers. Unused to military discipline, they resisted command. A French guardhouse stood at the entrance to Port Royal Basin, and fifteen men at once fled to the fort with warning of the English invasion. Consequently, when Colonel March and Colonel Appleton attempted to land their men, they were serenaded by the shots of an ambushed foe. Also French soldiers deserted to the English camp with fabulous stories about the strength of the French under Subercase. These yarns ought to have discredited themselves, but they struck terror to the hearts of March's green fighters. Then came St. Castin from St. John River with bushrovers to help Subercase. To the amazement of the French the English hoisted sail and returned, on June 16, without having fired more than a round of shot. The truth is, March's carpenters and fishermen refused to fight, though reënforcements joined them halfway home and they made a second attempt on Port Royal in August. March returned to Boston heartbroken, for his name had become a byword to the mob, and he was greeted in the streets with shouts of "Old Wooden Sword!"