With Pennsylvania and New Jersey the case was different. The one, controlled by non-combatant Quakers and safe from French war-parties, refused all aid; while the other, in less degree under the same military blight, would give no men, though granting a slow and reluctant contribution of £3,000, taking care to suppress on the record every indication that the money was meant for military uses. New York, on the other hand, raised her full contingent, and Massachusetts and New Hampshire something more, being warm in the faith that their borders would be plagued with war-parties no longer.
It remained for New York to gain the help of the Five Nations of the Iroquois, to which end Abraham Schuyler went to Onondaga, well supplied with presents. The Iroquois capital was now, as it had been for years, divided between France and England. French interests were represented by the two Jesuits, Mareuil and Jacques Lamberville. The skilful management of Schuyler, joined to his gifts and his rum, presently won over so many to the English party, and raised such excitement in the town that Lamberville thought it best to set out for Montreal with news of what was going on. The intrepid Joncaire, agent of France among the Senecas, was scandalized at what he calls the Jesuit's flight, and wrote to the commandant of Fort Frontenac that its effect on the Indians was such that he, Joncaire, was in peril of his life.[127] Yet he stood his ground, and managed so well that he held the Senecas firm in their neutrality. Lamberville's colleague, Mareuil, whose position was still more critical, was persuaded by Schuyler that his only safety was in going with him to Albany, which he did; and on this the Onondagas, excited by rum, plundered and burned the Jesuit mission-house and chapel.[128] Clearly, the two priests at Onondaga were less hungry for martyrdom than their murdered brethren Jogues, Brébeuf, Lalemant, and Charles Garnier; but it is to be remembered that the Canadian Jesuit of the first half of the seventeenth century was before all things an apostle, and his successor of a century later was before all things a political agent.
As for the Five Nations, that once haughty confederacy, in spite of divisions and waverings, had conceived the idea that its true policy lay, not in siding with either of the European rivals, but in making itself important to both, and courted and caressed by both. While some of the warriors sang the war-song at the prompting of Schuyler, they had been but half-hearted in doing so; and even the Mohawks, nearest neighbors and best friends of the English, sent word to their Canadian kindred, the Caughnawagas, that they took up the hatchet only because they could not help it.
The attack on Canada by way of the Hudson and Lake Champlain was to have been commanded by Lord Lovelace or some officer of his choice; but as he was dead, Ingoldsby, his successor in the government of the province, jointly with the governors of several adjacent colonies who had met at New York, appointed Colonel Nicholson in his stead.[129] Nicholson went to Albany, whence, with about fifteen hundred men, he moved up the Hudson, built a stockade fort opposite Saratoga, and another at the spot known as the Great Carrying Place. This latter he called Fort Nicholson,—a name which it afterwards exchanged for that of Fort Lydius, and later still for that of Fort Edward, which the town that occupies the site owns to this day.[130] Thence he cut a rough roadway through the woods to where Wood Creek, choked with beaver dams, writhed through flat green meadows, walled in by rock and forest. Here he built another fort, which was afterwards rebuilt and named Fort Anne. Wood Creek led to Lake Champlain, and Lake Champlain to Chambly and Montreal,—the objective points of the expedition. All was astir at the camp. Flat-boats and canoes were made, and stores brought up from Albany, till everything was ready for an advance the moment word should come that the British fleet had reached Boston. Vetch, all impatience, went thither to meet it, as if his presence could hasten its arrival.
Reports of Nicholson's march to Wood Creek had reached Canada, and Vaudreuil sent Ramesay, governor of Montreal, with fifteen hundred troops, Canadians, and Indians, to surprise his camp. Ramesay's fleet of canoes had reached Lake Champlain, and was halfway to the mouth of Wood Creek, when his advance party was discovered by English scouts, and the French commander began to fear that he should be surprised in his turn; in fact, some of his Indians were fired upon from an ambuscade. All was now doubt, perplexity, and confusion. Ramesay landed at the narrows of the lake, a little south of the place now called Crown Point. Here, in the dense woods, his Indians fired on some Canadians whom they took for English. This was near producing a panic. "Every tree seemed an enemy," writes an officer present. Ramesay lost himself in the woods, and could not find his army. One Deruisseau, who had gone out as a scout, came back with the report that nine hundred Englishmen were close at hand. Seven English canoes did in fact appear, supported, as the French in their excitement imagined, by a numerous though invisible army in the forest; but being fired upon, and seeing that they were entering a hornet's nest, the English sheered off. Ramesay having at last found his army, and order being gradually restored, a council of war was held, after which the whole force fell back to Chambly, having accomplished nothing.[131]
Great was the alarm in Canada when it became known that the enemy aimed at nothing less than the conquest of the colony. One La Plaine spread a panic at Quebec by reporting that, forty-five leagues below, he had seen eight or ten ships under sail and heard the sound of cannon. It was afterwards surmised that the supposed ships were points of rocks seen through the mist at low tide, and the cannon the floundering of whales at play.[132] Quebec, however, was all excitement, in expectation of attack. The people of the Lower Town took refuge on the rock above; the men of the neighboring parishes were ordered within the walls; and the women and children, with the cattle and horses, were sent to hiding-places in the forest. There had been no less consternation at Montreal, caused by exaggerated reports of Iroquois hostility and the movements of Nicholson. It was even proposed to abandon Chambly and Fort Frontenac, and concentrate all available force to defend the heart of the colony. "A most bloody war is imminent," wrote Vaudreuil to the minister, Ponchartrain.
Meanwhile, for weeks and months Nicholson's little army lay in the sultry valley of Wood Creek, waiting those tidings of the arrival of the British squadron at Boston which were to be its signal of advance. At length a pestilence broke out. It is said to have been the work of the Iroquois allies, who thought that the French were menaced with ruin, and who, true to their policy of balancing one European power against the other, poisoned the waters of the creek by throwing into it, above the camp, the skins and offal of the animals they had killed in their hunting. The story may have some foundation, though it rests only on the authority of Charlevoix. No contemporary writer mentions it; and Vaudreuil says that the malady was caused by the long confinement of the English in their fort. Indeed, a crowd of men, penned up through the heats of midsummer in a palisaded camp, ill-ordered and unclean as the camps of the raw provincials usually were, and infested with pestiferous swarms of flies and mosquitoes, could hardly have remained in health. Whatever its cause, the disease, which seems to have been a malignant dysentery, made more havoc than the musket and the sword. A party of French who came to the spot late in the autumn, found it filled with innumerable graves.
The British squadron, with the five regiments on board, was to have reached Boston at the middle of May. On the twentieth of that month the whole contingent of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island was encamped by Boston harbor, with transports and stores, ready to embark for Quebec at ten hours' notice.[133] When Vetch, after seeing everything in readiness at New York, returned to Boston on the third of July, he found the New England levies encamped there still, drilled diligently every day by officers whom he had brought from England for the purpose. "The bodies of the men," he writes to Lord Sunderland, "are in general better than in Europe, and I hope their courage will prove so too; so that nothing in human probability can prevent the success of this glorious enterprise but the too late arrival of the fleet."[134] But of the fleet there was no sign. "The government here is put to vast expense," pursues Vetch, "but they cheerfully pay it, in hopes of being freed from it forever hereafter. All that they can do now is to fast and pray for the safe and speedy arrival of the fleet, for which they have already had two public fast-days kept."
If it should not come in time, he continues, "it would be the last disappointment to her Majesty's colonies, who have so heartily complied with her royal order, and would render them much more miserable than if such a thing had never been undertaken." Time passed, and no ships appeared. Vetch wrote again: "I shall only presume to acquaint your Lordship how vastly uneasy all her Majesty's loyall subjects here on this continent are. Pray God hasten the fleet."[135] Dudley, scarcely less impatient, wrote to the same effect. It was all in vain, and the soldiers remained in their camp, monotonously drilling day after day through all the summer and half the autumn. At length, on the eleventh of October, Dudley received a letter from Lord Sunderland, informing him that the promised forces had been sent to Portugal to meet an exigency of the European war. They were to have reached Boston, as we have seen, by the middle of May. Sunderland's notice of the change of destination was not written till the twenty-seventh of July, and was eleven weeks on its way, thus imposing on the colonists a heavy and needless tax in time, money, temper, and, in the case of the expedition against Montreal, health and life.[136] What was left of Nicholson's force had fallen back before Sunderland's letter came, making a scapegoat of the innocent Vetch, cursing him, and wishing him hanged.
In New England the disappointment and vexation were extreme; but, not to lose all the fruits of their efforts, the governors of Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island met and resolved to attack Port Royal if the captains of several British frigates then at New York and Boston would take part in the enterprise. To the disgust of the provincials, the captains, with one exception, refused, on the score of the late season and the want of orders.