* Marie de l'Incarnation says that there were four towns in
all I follow the Acte de prise de possession, made on the
spot. Five are here mentioned.
that the warriors had fled. The last of the savage strongholds was in the hands of the French.
“God has done for us,” says Mother Mary, “what he did in ancient days for his chosen people, striking terror into our enemies, insomuch that we were victors without a blow. Certain it is that there is miracle in all this; for, if the Iroquois had stood fast, they would have given us a great deal of trouble and caused our army great loss, seeing how they were fortified and armed, and how haughty and bold they are.”
The French were astonished as they looked about them. These Iroquois forts were very different from those that Jogues had seen here twenty years before, or from that which in earlier times set Champlain and his Hurons at defiance. The Mohawks had had counsel and aid from their Dutch friends, and adapted their savage defences to the rules of European art. Andaraqué was a quadrangle formed of a triple palisade, twenty feet high, and flanked by four bastions. Large vessels of bark filled with water were placed on the platform of the palisade for defence against fire. The dwellings which these fortifications enclosed were in many cases built of wood, though the form and arrangement of the primitive bark lodge of the Iroquois seems to have been preserved. Some of the wooden houses were a hundred and twenty feet long, with fires for eight or nine families. Here and in subterranean caches was stored a prodigious quantity of Indian-corn and other provisions; and all the dwellings were supplied with carpenters’ tools, domestic utensils, and many other appliances of comfort.
The only living things in Andaraqué, when the French entered, were two old women, a small boy, and a decrepit old man, who, being frightened by the noise of the drums, had hidden himself under a canoe. From them the victors learned that the Mohawks, retreating from the other towns, had gathered here, resolved to fight to the last; but at sight of the troops their courage failed, and the chief was first to run, crying out, “Let us save ourselves, brothers; the whole world is coming against us.”
A cross was planted, and at its side the royal arms. The troops were drawn up in battle array, when Jean Baptiste du Bois, an officer deputed by Tracy, advancing sword in hand to the front, proclaimed in a loud voice that he took possession in the name of the king of all the country of the Mohawks; and the troops shouted three times, Vive le Roi. *
That night a mighty bonfire illumined the Mohawk forests; and the scared savages from their hiding-places among the rocks saw their palisades, their dwellings, their stores of food, and all their possessions, turned to cinders and ashes. The two old squaws captured in the town, threw themselves in despair into the flames of their blazing homes. When morning came, there was nothing left of Andaraqué but smouldering embers, rolling their pale smoke against the painted background of the
* Acte de priss de possession, 17 Oct., 1666.
October woods. Te Deum was sung and mass said; and then the victors began their backward march, burning, as they went, all the remaining forts, with all their hoarded stores of corn, except such as they needed for themselves. If they had failed to destroy their enemies in battle, they hoped that winter and famine would do the work of shot and steel.
While there was distress among the Mohawks, there was trouble among their English neighbors, who claimed as their own the country which Tracy had invaded. The English authorities were the more disquieted, because they feared that the lately conquered Dutch might join hands with the French against them. When Nicolls, governor of New York, heard of Tracy’s advance, he wrote to the governors of the New England colonies, begging them to join him against the French invaders, and urging that, if Tracy’s force were destroyed or captured, the conquest of Canada would be an easy task. There was war at the time between the two crowns; and the British court had already entertained this project of conquest, and sent orders to its colonies to that effect. But the New England governors, ill prepared for war, and fearing that their Indian neighbors, who were enemies of the Mohawks, might take part with the French, hesitated to act, and the affair ended in a correspondence, civil if not sincere, between Nicolls and Tracy. * The treaty of Breda, in the following year, secured peace for a time between the rival colonies.