The treaty which had been made with the eastern Indians at Pemaquid had not remained unbroken; during the awful witch-delusion the horrors of Indian warfare were renewed. In 1694 a party of Indians, again instigated by the Jesuit Thury, and led by French officers, surprised the settlement at Oyster Bay, now Durham, and killed or took captive about 100 of the inhabitants. Port Royal was re-captured by Villebon; and soon after the whole of Acadia returned to its ancient allegiance.
In the autumn of 1696 the fort of Pemaquid, being compelled to surrender to a mixed force of French and Indians, was laid in ruins, and the neighbouring country devastated. Colonel Church, on the other hand, destroyed Beau Bassin, a French settlement on the Bay of Fundy.
Still instigated by the French, who excited in the hearts of their Indian allies the utmost hatred of the English, the remoter territory of Massachusetts was overrun by them, and early in 1697 they advanced as far as the towns of Andover and Haverhill, to within twenty-five miles of Boston, killing many of the inhabitants, and carrying others into captivity.
We must be permitted to give here an incident from this terrible frontier life, which will serve to show the horrors of the time and the spirit of the frontier settler. On March 15th, 1697, a party of Indians came to Haverhill, and began to burn and slay as usual, and so reached the house of Hannah Dustan, who had been confined about a week, and was there with her nurse, Mary Neff. Her husband, who was at work in the distant fields with their eight children, hurried home with his loaded gun for her defence. But the Indians were on his threshold; and he, with his eight children, was in a strait what to do; whether to rush to the rescue of his wife and leave the children, or secure their safety and leave his wife and home to the care of Providence. The Indians came up to him also, but he fired, and bidding his children flee, kept them before him, until he had reached a place of safety, about two miles off; here leaving the children, he returned to his home, which by this time was a heap of burning ruins. The Indians, having entered the house, compelled the mother and her infant to rise and prepare to accompany them, together with the nurse and about half a score other English captives. The brains of the infant were dashed out against a tree, that the care of it might not impede the progress of the mother. For many days they were driven on by their savage captors, until they were about 150 miles up the wilderness country. “The good God,” says Cotton Mather, who relates this circumstance, “heard the sighs of the prisoners, and gave them, favour in the eyes of their enemies.” The Indians were converts of the French Jesuits, and very zealous in their devotions, in which they would have compelled the women to join, ever threatening them, as they went along, with having to run the gauntlet in the Indian village to which they were bound. With the two women was a boy from Worcester, Samuel Leonardson by name, and they three planned a scheme of escape. The boy, conversing with his Indian master, inquired how the Indian smote when he intended instant death; the savage warrior instructed him. Accordingly, one night, when the Indians were soundly asleep, the women and the boy arose, each armed with a tomahawk, and smote as the Indian had taught them. Ten out of the twelve who occupied the wigwam were slain; the other two, a boy and a squaw, escaped. After this, embarking in a birchen canoe on the Merrimac which they had followed, the three, with the ten scalps in a bag, and their tomahawks as trophies, arrived at the English settlements, where they were received by their friends as persons returned from the dead; and £50 was voted to them by the General Assembly, while the whole colony rang with the fame of their adventure.
The peace of Ryswick caused a temporary cessation of hostilities and the restoration to each party of the conquests which the other had made.
Peace being established in England, government had now leisure to pay a little attention to the colonies, and that attention, of course, was not of the most agreeable kind. In answer to the reiterated complaints of the English merchants, of the violation of the Acts of Trade, and especially of direct intercourse being carried on between the colonies and Scotland and Ireland, the Board of Trade and Plantations was established, which continued a rigid and jealous oversight of the American colonies until the time of the American Revolution. All direct trade between Ireland and the colonies was now strictly prohibited, on the plea that, if any trade were at all permitted with this unfortunate island, which was just then smarting under the inflictions of the late war, it would be a cover for the smuggling of colonial produce, known under the term “enumerated articles.” The number of revenue officers was increased, and the unpopular Randolph was appointed surveyor-general, and placed at their head.
In 1699 the Earl of Bellamont arrived in Boston from New York. How popular he made himself, we have already related. Bellamont was the first governor who opened the General Assembly by a formal speech, and from his time it has been continued.
“Neither Usher, the lieutenant-governor of New Hampshire, who fled to Boston in alarm for his life; nor his successor, Partridge, who, being a ship-carpenter, had the merit of introducing into that province a profitable timber-trade to Portugal; nor the proprietary, Allen, who presently assumed the government, were more successful than Cranfield had been in extorting quit-rents from the settlers of that sturdy little province. And New Hampshire, now included under Bellamont’s commission, continued for the next forty years to have the same governors as Massachusetts, though generally a lieutenant-governor was at the head of the administration.”[[20]]
On the death of Lord Bellamont, Massachusetts had the mortification of receiving the “apostate” Joseph Dudley, the friend of the hated Andros, as governor, he having obtained the appointment through the influence of Cotton Mather. The popular party, they who had opposed the tyranny of Andros, now set themselves in opposition to the new governor, and refused to comply with the royal instructions, which required them to fix permanently the salaries of the governor and crown officers.
Although “a spirit of latitudinarianism” was gradually narrowing the bounds of the theocratic power in Massachusetts, still her code retained most of its rigid enactments. It was still forbidden “to travel, work, or play, on the Sabbath;” and constables and tithingmen were commanded to “prevent all persons from swimming in the waters; all unnecessary and unreasonable walking in the streets or fields; keeping open of shops, or following secular occasions or recreations on the evening preceding the Lord’s-day, or on any part of the day or evening following.”