Captain Allen now retaliated on the French for their cruelty to English captives by taking the entire garrison prisoners. Loaded with furs to the water-line, the English ships left Bailey and Kelsey at Nelson and sailed slowly for England. Just at the entrance to the straits—the place already made so famous by Indian attack on Hudson’s crew, and French raid on The Perpetuana, a swift-sailing French privateer bore down on the fleet, singled out Allen’s ship which was separated from the other, poured a volley of shot across her decks which killed Allen on the spot, and took to flight before the other ship could come to the rescue. Was this Iberville’s brother—Serigny—on his way home? It will never be known, for as the ships made no capture, the action is not reported in French records.
The war had reduced the Hudson’s Bay Company to such straits that several of the directors had gone bankrupt advancing money to keep the ships sailing. No more money could be borrowed in England, and agents were trying to raise funds in Amsterdam. Nevertheless, the Company presented the captains—Smithsend and Grimmington—with £100 each for capturing York. The captured furs replenished the exhausted finances and preparation was made to dispatch a mighty fleet that would forever settle mastery of the bay.
Two hundred extra mariners were to be engaged. On The Dering, Grimmington, now a veteran campaigner, was to take sixty fighting men. Captain Moon was to have eighteen on the little frigate, Perry. Edgecombe’s Hudson’s Bay, frigate, was to have fifty-five; Captain Fletcher’s Hampshire, sixty; the fire ship Prosperous another thirty under a new man, Captain Batty. These mariners were in addition to the usual seamen and company servants. On The Hudson’s Bay also went Smithsend as adviser in the campaign. Every penny that could be raised on sales of beaver, all that the directors were able to pledge of their private fortunes, and all the money that could be borrowed by the Adventurers as a corporate company, went to outfit the vessels for what was to be the deciding campaign. With Bailey in control at Nelson and old Governor Knight down at Albany—surely the French could be driven completely from the bay.
Those captives that Allen’s ship had brought to England, lay in prison five months at Portsmouth before they were set free. Released at last, they hastened to France where their emaciated, ragged condition spoke louder than their indignant words. Frenchmen languishing in English prison! Like wildfire ran the rumor of the outrage! Once before when Péré, the Frenchman, had been imprisoned on Hudson Bay, Iberville had thrust the sword of vengeance into the very heart of the English fastness. France turned again to the same Robin Hood of Canada’s rude chivalry. Iberville was at this time carrying havoc from hamlet to hamlet of Newfoundland, where two hundred English had already fallen before his sword and seven hundred been captured.
On the 7th of April, 1697, Scrigny, his brother, just home from Nelson, was dispatched from France with five men-of-war—The Pelican, The Palmier, The Profound, The Violent, The Wasp—to be placed under Iberville’s command at Placentia, Newfoundland, whence he was to proceed to Hudson Bay with orders, “to leave not a vestige remaining” of the English fur trade in the North.
The squadron left Newfoundland on July 8. By the 25th, the ships had entered the straits amid berg and floe, with the long, transparent daylight, when sunset merges with sunrise. Iberville was on The Pelican with Bienville, his brother, two hundred and fifty men and fifty guns. The other brother, Serigny, commanded The Palmier, and Edward Fitzmaurice of Kerry, a Jacobite, had come as chaplain. A gun gone loose in the hold of The Wasp, created a panic during the heavy seas of the Upper Narrows in the straits—the huge implement of terror rolling from side to side of the dark hold with each wash of the billows in a way that threatened to capsize the vessel—not a man daring to risk his life to stop the cannon’s roll; and several gunners were crushed to death before The Wasp could come to anchor in a quiet harbor to mend the damage. On The Pelican, Iberville’s ship, forty men lay in their berths ill of scurvy. The fleet was stopped by ice at Digges’ Island at the west end of the straits—a place already famous in the raiders’ history. Here, the icepans, contracted by the straits, locked around the vessels in iron grip. Fog fell concealing the ships from one another, except for the ensigns at the mastheads, which showed all the fleet anchored southward except Iberville’s Pelican. For eighteen days the impatient raider found himself forcibly gripped to the ice floes in fog, his ship crushed and banged and bodily lifted until a powder blast relieved pressure, or holes drilled and filled with bombs broke the ice crush, or unshipping the rudder, his own men disembarked and up to the waist in ice slush towed The Pelican forward.
On the 25th of August at four in the morning, the fog suddenly lifted. Iberville saw that The Palmier had been carried back in the straits. The Wasp and Violent had disappeared, but straight to the fore, ice-jammed, were The Profound, and—Iberville could scarcely believe the evidence of his eyes—three English men-of-war, The Hampshire, and Dering, and Hudson’s Bay closing in a circle round the ill-fated and imprisoned French ship. Just at that moment, the ice loosened. Iberville was off like a bird in The Pelican, not waiting to see what became of The Profound, which escaped from the ice that night after a day’s bombardment when the English were in the act of running across the ice for a hand-to-hand fight.