In August the Jesuit father Thury, having established “a perpetual rosary” in the chapel of the Indian village of Banibas, a hundred Indian warriors, “purified by confession,” paddled in their birch-bark canoes from the Penobscot towards Pemaquid, and surprised the settler Thomas Gyles, who, with his sons, was at work in his fields at noontide, getting up his hay. The struggle was short; the wounded father asked merely leave to pray for his children, and then, commending them to God, sank beneath the hatchets of the impatient Indians, who left his body in the field covered with boughs. Hastening to Pemaquid, they took it after two days’ resistance, and then, carrying away many prisoners, returned to Penobscot.
Alarmed by this outrage, commissioners were sent from New England to the Mohawks at Albany, asking their assistance. “We have burnt Montreal,” returned the proud warriors; “we are allies of the English, and we will keep the chain unbroken;” but they refused to march against the eastern tribes, from whom the English were now suffering.
We have related already how a party of combined French and Indians in the following January surprised the village of Schenectady. In March, a party from Three Rivers, headed by Hertelle, consisting but of fifty-three persons, three of whom were his sons and two his nephews, surprised the settlement at Salmon Falls on the Piscataqua, and after a bloody encounter, in which most of the men of the settlement were killed, burnt the place, houses, barns, and cattle in their stalls, and carried away fifty-four prisoners, mostly women and children. The progress of the march was marked by outrage and murder. A more direful chronicle does not exist; but we will not relate its horrors.
By the way, Hertelle met with another party from Quebec, which he joined, and a successful attack was made in May on the settlement of Casco Bay, in Maine.
Massachusetts was roused, and an expedition was hastily fitted out, under the command of Sir William Phipps, against Nova Scotia. Sir William Phipps was a native of Pemaquid, one of twenty-six children by the same mother. His history, as one of the early “self-made men” of America, is interesting and instructive. In his boyhood he kept sheep; as he grew older, he worked as a ship-carpenter; then he was a sailor; after which he rose to be a ship-master. He received knighthood from the hand of James II. in consequence of his success in raising, by means of the diving-bell, the buried treasure of an old Spanish galleon, on the coast of St. Domingo, which produced a large fortune to himself and several noblemen who were partners in the enterprise. Thus become a man of rank and consequence, he returned to Boston, and now, in May 1690, set sail against Acadia. The conquest of Port Royal was easy, and the plunder of the neighbouring settlements defrayed the expenses of the expedition. This success determined the people of New York and New England to combine for the conquest of Canada. An armament destined for the reduction of Quebec was placed under the command of Sir William Phipps, and the land troops in two separate bodies marched to Montreal; but the expedition was altogether unsuccessful. Sir William was compelled to return from before Quebec, and of the land forces, one party was repulsed, and the other stopped by the way, owing to small-pox having broken out among them. Canada was triumphant, and the event was celebrated in France by a medal struck for the occasion. But so great, it is said, had been the fear of the French on the rumour of this intended invasion, that the aged Frontenac “himself placed the hatchet in the hands of his allies, and with the tomahawk in his grasp chanted the war-song and danced the war-dance,” to inspire them with the frenzy of war.
This unfortunate expedition involved Massachusetts in a great amount of debt, and gave rise to the first paper money in the British colonies, though “card money,” as we have said before, had already been made use of by Canada.
During the summer, Colonel Church, so famous in King Philip’s war, led a party against the eastern tribes, and attacked an Indian settlement, at what is now Lewistown, where he burnt the corn and killed many, not sparing women and children. But this only led to retaliation, which the Indians understood but too well. Terror and dismay spread through all the frontier settlements. The Indians lay in ambush, and the ploughman was shot in the furrow by the unseen foe; it was necessary to go armed to gather in the crop; every house became a garrison liable to attack at any moment. The women were taught not only to load the musket, but to fire it.
Sometimes the Indians killed all who fell into their hands, but most generally their object was to make prisoners, especially of women and children, who were sold as servants in Canada. These unhappy captives, in their long and dreary travels through the woods in midwinter, often with infants in their arms, suffered dreadfully, not only from hunger and fatigue, but from the wanton cruelty of their captors. Arrived in Canada, they were frequently treated with great kindness by their French purchasers; partly from humane motives, but more commonly from a desire to make converts of them to the catholic faith. Many who returned, related that this was one of their sorest trials and temptations. Some yielded; some children, captives among the Indians, became so accustomed to the wild and adventurous life of the woods, as to return unwillingly to civilised life when ransomed.[[16]]
Massachusetts continued to be governed by the aged Bradstreet until 1692, when the king refusing to confirm the restoration of the former government, granted a new charter, which extended the limits of the province, but restricted its privileges. Sir William Phipps, who had been sent over to England to solicit aid in prosecuting the war against Canada, as well as to second the other envoys in obtaining the restoration of the charter, was returned to the colony as governor under this new charter, which embraced under the title of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, besides the former territory of Massachusetts, Plymouth, Maine, and Nova Scotia. Plymouth, always anxious for a separate government, was thus, contrary to her wishes, joined to Massachusetts; and New Hampshire, which had only lately placed herself under her protection, was forcibly dissevered, and that in consequence of Mason’s claim to the soil having been purchased by a London merchant of the name of Allen, who appointed as governor, his son-in-law, Usher, the same bookseller and merchant of Boston who had been employed to purchase Maine; and hence followed for New Hampshire a long, uneasy time of disputed claims and lawsuits.
Almost the only privilege which the new charter allowed to the people, was that of choosing their own representatives. The king reserved to himself the right of appointing a governor, lieutenant-governor, and secretary; and of repealing all laws within three years of their passage.[[17]] Toleration was secured to all sects excepting Roman Catholics, the hatred against whom was greatly increased by the cruelties of the French and their Indian converts. Increase Mather, who, unlike his colleagues, had yielded to the force of circumstances in London, and accepted the charter spite of its curtailment of liberties, was permitted to nominate the officers to be appointed by the crown. By him Sir William Phipps, who was a member of Mather’s church, was named as governor, and Stoughton his lieutenant.