Orator. We are pleased that your Excellency is ready to hear our complaints when wrong is done us.
Governor. They must not pretend to lands that belong to the English.
Orator. We beg leave to go on in order with our answer.
Governor. Tell him to go on.
Orator. If there should be any quarrel and bloodshed, we will not avenge ourselves, but apply to your Excellency. We will embrace in our bosoms the English that have come to settle on our land.
Governor. They must not call it their land, for the English have bought it of them and their ancestors.
Orator. We pray leave to proceed with our answer, and talk about the land afterwards.
Wiwurna, then, with much civility, begged to be excused from receiving the Bible and the minister, and ended by wishing the governor good wind and weather for his homeward voyage.
There was another meeting in the afternoon, in which the orator declared that his people were willing that the English should settle on the west side of the Kennebec as far up the river as a certain mill; on which the governor said to the interpreter: "Tell them we want nothing but our own, and that that we will have;" and he ordered an old deed of sale, signed by six of their chiefs, to be shown and explained to them. Wiwurna returned that though his tribe were uneasy about their lands, they were willing that the English should keep what they had got, excepting the forts. On this point there was a sharp dialogue, and Shute said bluntly that if he saw fit, he should build a fort at every new settlement. At this all the Indians rose abruptly and went back to their camp, leaving behind an English flag that had been given them.
Rale was at the Indian camp, and some of them came back in the evening with a letter from him, in which he told Shute that the governor of Canada had asked the King of France whether he had ever given the Indians' land to the English, to which the King replied that he had not, and would help the Indians to repel any encroachment upon them. This cool assumption on the part of France of paramount right to the Abenaki country incensed Shute, who rejected the letter with contempt.