Quaint and Historic Forts of North America

by John Martin Hammond

In August, 1689, the war party, led by Castine in person, landed on the eastern shore of Pemaquid Peninsula without being discovered. The attack was planned with care. The main village lay about a quarter of a mile from the fort. The farms where most of the inhabitants were at work were three miles from the fort. One band of the assailants was to throw itself upon the fort and village, and another to cut off the village from the farms.

The plan was carried out without a hitch. The men at the farms ran for the fort and were shot down or taken prisoners. The assailants next turned their attention to the fort. The big rock in back of the fort, which makes so conspicuous a feature of the locality to-day, was occupied by savages, who fired down upon the defenders of the stronghold, and the attack was pressed fiercely from other quarters. For twenty-four hours Weems, the commander, held out. Then, when fourteen out of his garrison of thirty had been wounded, he surrendered on condition that the occupants should be free to leave unmolested. Fort and village were set on fire and Pemaquid for the second time had been swept out of existence.

Under Sir William Phips, who acted by royal instruction, Pemaquid was rebuilt and regarrisoned in 1692. Unlike the old fortress, the new one was built of stone in a most substantial and enduring fashion, and so enlarged as to take in the high ledge of rock which had been the vulnerable point of the old defences. The new work was known as Fort William Henry. Cotton Mather, the indefatigable chronicler of that period, speaks of it as follows:

William Henry was built of stone in a quadrangular figure, being about 737 foot in compass without the walls and 108 foot square within the inner ones. Twenty-eight ports it had and fourteen (if not eighteen) guns mounted, whereof six were eighteen-pounders. The wall on the south line, fronting to the sea, was twenty-two foot high and more than six foot thick at the ports, which were eight foot from the ground. The greater flanker, or round tower, at the western end of this line, was twelve foot high. The wall on the east line was twelve foot high, on the north it was ten, on the west it was eighteen.

Impoverished Massachusetts demurred at having to pay the bills for the work, but Phips drove the State to meet the obligation.

The ruler of New France at this time was the energetic and far-sighted Frontenac, who believed that he must reduce the new English fortress or himself lose his hold on his Indian allies. With characteristic promptness he set out about the task that he had visioned. Two ships and some hundreds of savages were despatched to take the fort. The fort had been forewarned through the heroism of a young New Englander, John Nelson, who faced the Bastile or death by the headsman’s hands to get word to his brethren in New England of the expected expedition. The garrison was on its guard and so the expedition miscarried.

Frontenac was not the man to be put off with one reverse, however, as the New Englanders should have realized but did not. In August, 1696, Iberville, with two war-ships and a mixed force of French and Indians, appeared before Fort William Henry and took the garrison completely by surprise.

There were about one hundred men in the fort under the command of Captain Pascho Chubb. Castine and his Indians who are supposed to have landed at New Harbor, two miles away, set up entrenchments in the rear of the fortress (where the cemetery is), thus cutting off the garrison on the land side. Cannon were landed and batteries erected on adjacent shores and islands. With so much energy did the besiegers work that their batteries opened fire at three o’clock of the afternoon following the day on which they appeared before the fort.

To the first summons to surrender Chubb returned a defiant answer, but when the first shells began to burst within his lines he seems to have lost his courage. Intimidated, in addition, by Iberville’s threat to show no quarter if he persisted in resistance, he hastened to throw open his gates to the foe. The Indians, hard enough to keep in order, anyhow, found one of their race in irons in the prison of the fortress and immediately began a slaughter of the surrendered English. This outbreak was restrained with difficulty, and the English were loaded on ships and sent to Boston.