The men whom La Plaque had seen near Lake George were a part of the combined force of Connecticut and New York, destined to attack Montreal. They had made their way along Wood Creek to the point where it widens into Lake Champlain, and here they had stopped. Disputes between the men of the two colonies, intestine quarrels in the New York militia, who were divided between the two factions engendered by the late revolution, the want of provisions, the want of canoes, and the ravages of small-pox, had ruined an enterprise which had been mismanaged from the first. There was no birch bark to make more canoes, and owing to the lateness of the season the bark of the elms would not peel. Such of the Iroquois as had joined them were cold and sullen; and news came that the three western tribes of the confederacy, terrified by the small-pox, had refused to move. It was impossible to advance; and Winthrop, the commander, gave orders to return to Albany, leaving Phips to conquer Canada alone. [23] But first, that the campaign might not seem wholly futile, he permitted Captain John Schuyler to make a raid into Canada with a band of volunteers. Schuyler left the camp at Wood Creek with twenty-nine whites and a hundred and twenty Indians, passed Lake Champlain, descended the Richelieu to Chambly, and fell suddenly on the settlement of La Prairie, whence Frontenac had just withdrawn with his forces. Soldiers and inhabitants were reaping in the wheat-fields. Schuyler and his followers killed or captured twenty-five, including several women. He wished to attack the neighboring fort, but his Indians refused; and after burning houses, barns, and hay-ricks, and killing a great number of cattle, he seated himself with his party at dinner in the adjacent woods, while cannon answered cannon from Chambly, La Prairie, and Montreal, and the whole country was astir. "We thanked the Governor of Canada," writes Schuyler, "for his salute of heavy artillery during our meal." [24]
[23] On this expedition see the Journal of Major General Winthrop, in N. Y. Col. Docs., IV. 193; Publick Occurrences, 1690, in Historical Magazine, I. 228; and various documents in N. Y. Col. Docs., III. 727, 752, and in Doc. Hist. N. Y., II. 266, 288. Compare La Potherie, III. 126, and N. Y. Col. Docs., IX. 513. These last are French statements. A Sokoki Indian brought to Canada a greatly exaggerated account of the English forces, and said that disease had been spread among them by boxes of infected clothing, which they themselves had provided in order to poison the Canadians. Bishop Laval, Lettre du 20 Nov., 1690, says that there was a quarrel between the English and their Iroquois allies, who, having plundered a magazine of spoiled provisions, fell ill, and thought that they were poisoned. Colden and other English writers seem to have been strangely ignorant of this expedition. The Jesuit Michel Germain declares that the force of the English alone amounted to four thousand men (Relation de la Défaite des Anglois, 1690). About one tenth of this number seem actually to have taken the field.
[24] Journal of Captain John Schuyler, in Doc. Hist. N. Y., II. 285. Compare La Potherie, III. 101, and Relation de Monseignat.
The English had little to boast in this affair, the paltry termination of an enterprise from which great things had been expected. Nor was it for their honor to adopt the savage and cowardly mode of warfare in which their enemies had led the way. The blow that had been struck was less an injury to the French than an insult; but, as such, it galled Frontenac excessively, and he made no mention of it in his despatches to the court. A few more Iroquois attacks and a few more murders kept Montreal in alarm till the tenth of October, when matters of deeper import engaged the governor's thoughts.
A messenger arrived in haste at three o'clock in the afternoon, and gave him a letter from Prévost, town major of Quebec. It was to the effect that an Abenaki Indian had just come over land from Acadia, with news that some of his tribe had captured an English woman near Portsmouth, who told them that a great fleet had sailed from Boston to attack Quebec. Frontenac, not easily alarmed, doubted the report. Nevertheless, he embarked at once with the intendant in a small vessel, which proved to be leaky, and was near foundering with all on board. He then took a canoe, and towards evening set out again for Quebec, ordering some two hundred men to follow him. On the next day, he met another canoe, bearing a fresh message from Prévost, who announced that the English fleet had been seen in the river, and that it was already above Tadoussac. Frontenac now sent back Captain de Ramsay with orders to Callières, governor of Montreal, to descend immediately to Quebec with all the force at his disposal, and to muster the inhabitants on the way. Then he pushed on with the utmost speed. The autumnal storms had begun, and the rain pelted him without ceasing; but on the morning of the fourteenth he neared the town. The rocks of Cape Diamond towered before him; the St. Lawrence lay beneath them, lonely and still; and the Basin of Quebec outspread its broad bosom, a solitude without a sail. Frontenac had arrived in time.
He landed at the Lower Town, and the troops and the armed inhabitants came crowding to meet him. He was delighted at their ardor. [25] Shouts, cheers, and the waving of hats greeted the old man as he climbed the steep ascent of Mountain Street. Fear and doubt seemed banished by his presence. Even those who hated him rejoiced at his coming, and hailed him as a deliverer. He went at once to inspect the fortifications. Since the alarm a week before, Prévost had accomplished wonders, and not only completed the works begun in the spring, but added others to secure a place which was a natural fortress in itself. On two sides, the Upper Town scarcely needed defence. The cliffs along the St. Lawrence and those along the tributary river St. Charles had three accessible points, guarded at the present day by the Prescott Gate, the Hope Gate, and the Palace Gate. Prévost had secured them by barricades of heavy beams and casks filled with earth. A continuous line of palisades ran along the strand of the St. Charles, from the great cliff called the Saut au Matelot to the palace of the intendant. At this latter point began the line of works constructed by Frontenac to protect the rear of the town. They consisted of palisades, strengthened by a ditch and an embankment, and flanked at frequent intervals by square towers of stone. Passing behind the garden of the Ursulines, they extended to a windmill on a hillock called Mt. Carmel, and thence to the brink of the cliffs in front. Here there was a battery of eight guns near the present Public Garden; two more, each of three guns, were planted at the top of the Saut au Matelot; another at the barricade of the Palace Gate; and another near the windmill of Mt. Carmel; while a number of light pieces were held in reserve for such use as occasion might require. The Lower Town had no defensive works; but two batteries, each of three guns, eighteen and twenty-four pounders, were placed here at the edge of the river. [26]
[25] Frontenac au Ministre, 9 et 12 Nov., 1690.
[26] Relation de Monseignat; Plan de Québec, par Villeneuve, 1690; Relation du Mercure Galant, 1691. The summit of Cape Diamond, which commanded the town, was not fortified till three years later, nor were any guns placed here during the English attack.
Two days passed in completing these defences under the eye of the governor. Men were flocking in from the parishes far and near; and on the evening of the fifteenth about twenty-seven hundred, regulars and militia, were gathered within the fortifications, besides the armed peasantry of Beauport and Beaupré, who were ordered to watch the river below the town, and resist the English, should they attempt to land. [27] At length, before dawn on the morning of the sixteenth, the sentinels on the Saut au Matelot could descry the slowly moving lights of distant vessels. At daybreak the fleet was in sight. Sail after sail passed the Point of Orleans and glided into the Basin of Quebec. The excited spectators on the rock counted thirty-four of them. Four were large ships, several others were of considerable size, and the rest were brigs, schooners, and fishing craft, all thronged with men.
[27] Diary of Sylvanus Davis, prisoner in Quebec, in Mass. Hist. Coll. 3, I. 101. There is a difference of ten days in the French and English dates, the New Style having been adopted by the former and not by the latter.