CHAPTER XII
1686-1687
PIERRE LE MOYNE D’IBERVILLE SWEEPS THE BAY
With Captain Outlaw’s crew adding strength to Albany, and Governor Bridgar’s crew wintering at Rupert River, the Adventurers on Hudson Bay once more felt secure. Like a bolt from the blue came the French raiders into the midst of this security.
It was one of the long summer nights on the 18th of June, 1686, when twilight of the North merges with dawn. Fourteen cannon in all protruded from the embrasures of the four stone bastions round Moose Factory—the southwest corner of the bay; and the eighteen-foot pickets of the palisaded square wall were everywhere punctured with holes for musketry. In one bastion were three thousand pounds of powder. In another, twelve soldiers slept. In a third were stored furs. The fourth bastion served as kitchen. Across the middle of the courtyard was the two-story storehouse and residence of the chief factor. The sentinel had shot the strong iron bolts of the main gate facing the waterway, and had lain down to sleep wrapped in a blanket without loading the cannon it was his duty to guard. Twilight of the long June night—almost the longest day in the year—had deepened into the white stillness that precedes dawn, when two forms took shape in the thicket of underbrush behind the fort, and there stepped forth clad in buckskin cap-à-pie, musket over shoulder, war hatchet, powderhorn, dagger, pistol in belt and unscabbarded sword aglint in hand, two French wood-lopers, the far-famed coureurs des bois, whose scalping raids were to strike terror from Louisiana to Hudson Bay.
At first glance, the two scouts might have been marauding Iroquois come this outrageous distance through swamp and forest from their own fighting ground. Closer scrutiny showed them to be young French noblemen, Pierre le Moyne d’Iberville, age twenty-four, and his brother, Sainte Hélène, native to the roving life of the bushranger, to pillage and raid and ambuscade as the war-eagle to prey. Born in Montreal in 1661 and schooled to all the wilderness perils of the struggling colony’s early life, Pierre le Moyne, one of nine sons of Charles le Moyne, at Montreal, became the Robin Hood of American wilds.
Sending his brother Ste. Hélène round one side of the pickets to peer through the embrasures of the moonlit fortress, Pierre le Moyne d’Iberville skirted the other side himself and quickly made the discovery that not one of the cannon was loaded. The tompion was in every muzzle. Scarcely a cat’s-paw of wind dimpled the waters. The bay was smooth as silk. Not a twig crunched beneath the moccasined tread of the two spies. There was the white silence, the white midnight pallor of Arctic night, the diaphanous play of Northern lights over skyey waters, the fine etched shadows of juniper and fir and spruce black as crayon across the pale-amber swamps.
With a quick glance, d’Iberville and his brother took in every detail. Then they melted back in the pallid half-light like shadows. In a trice, a hundred forms had taken shape in the mist—sixty-six Indians decked in all the war-gear of savage glory from head-dress and vermilion cheeks to naked red-stained limbs lithe as tiger, smooth and supple as satin—sixty-six Indians and thirty-three half-wild French soldiers gay in all the regimentals of French pomp, commanded by old Chevalier de Troyes, veteran of a hundred wars, now commissioned to demand the release of Monsieur Péré from the forts of the English fur traders. Beside De Troyes, stood De la Chesnay, head of the Northern Company of Fur Traders in Quebec, only too glad of this chance to raid the forts of rivals. And well to the fore, cross in hand, head bared, the Jesuit Sylvie had come to rescue the souls of Northern heathendom from hell.
Impossible as it may seem, these hundred intrepid wood-runners had come overland from Montreal. While Grimmington and Smithsend were still in prison at Quebec, d’Iberville and his half-wild followers had set out in midwinter on a voyage men hardly dared in summer. Without waiting for the ice to break up, leaving Montreal in March, they had followed the frozen river bed of the Ottawa northward, past the Rideau and Chaudiere Falls tossing their curtains of spray in midair where the city of Ottawa stands to-day, past the Mattawa which led off to the portages of Michilimackinac and the Great Lakes, up the palisaded shores of the Temiscamingue to Lake Abbittibbi, the half-way watershed between the St. Lawrence and Hudson Bay. French silver mines, which the English did not rediscover to the present century, were worked at Temiscamingue. At Abbittibbi, a stockade was built in the month of May, and three Canadians left to keep guard. Here, too, pause was made to construct canoes for the voyage down the watershed of Moose River to James Bay. Instead of waiting for the ice of the Ottawa to break up, the raiders had forced their march to be on time to float down on the swollen currents of the spring thaw to Moose Factory, four-hundred miles from the height of land.