The struggle between French and English postponed.
In Champlain's time, while France was busy in crushing Protestant revolts at home, the settlements of Port Royal and Quebec, then wretched hamlets of a few dozen huts each, fell an easy prey to small English naval forces (1628-1629). For a few months France did not hold one foot of ground in North America. But as peace had been declared between France and England before this conquest, the former received back all its possessions, including Acadia (Nova Scotia) and the island of Cape Breton. The inevitable struggle for the mastery of the continent was postponed, and Frenchmen held Canada for four generations longer. By the close of the seventeenth century, men of New France were ranging at will over much of the country beyond the mountains, with visions of empire as extensive as the continent.
English jealousy of the expansion of New France.
The French were not exploring and occupying the western country unwatched. English colonial statesmen understood from the first the import of the movement, and their alarm was frequently expressed in communications to the home government. While Charles II. was a pensioner of Louis XIV., the royal intendant in Canada expressed the situation clearly when he urged Louis (1666) to purchase New York, "whereby he would have two entrances to Canada, and by which he would give to the French all the peltries of the north, of which the English share the profit by the communication which they have with the Iroquois, by Manhattan and Orange." In 1687, Governor Dongan of New York warned the ministry at London: "If the French have all they pretend to have discovered in these parts, the king of England will not have a hundred miles from the sea anywhere."
Extent of French settlement.
With the accession of Protestant William and Mary (1689), the Palatinate war broke out between England and France, and at once spread to America, where it was styled King William's War. The French had at that time colonies in the undefined region of Acadia, on Cape Breton, and along the north bank of the St. Lawrence as far up as Montreal. There were a few small stockades scattered at long intervals through the Illinois country, upon the banks of the upper Mississippi, at Chequamegon Bay of Lake Superior, at Sault Ste. Marie, on the St. Joseph's River, and elsewhere; with here and there a lonely Jesuit mission, and the movable camps of coureurs de bois. Elsewhere, north and west of the Atlantic plain, the grim solitude was broken only by bands of red savages, who roved to and fro through the dark woodlands, intent on war or the chase.
The population of New France, in this wide region, was not, in 1690, more than twelve thousand, against one hundred thousand in New England and New York. Had it not been for the help of her Indian allies, the military strength of many of her more important stations, and the fighting qualities of her commanders, aided by division in the councils of the English colonists, New France would from the first have made a feeble defence against the overpowering resources of her southern neighbors.
King William's War.
King William's (or Frontenac's) War was costly to the colonists, and resulted in no material advantage to either side. The French, under Governor Frontenac, conducted their operations with vigor. Three winter expeditions, composed almost entirely of Indians, were sent out (1690) against the English frontier line, furiously attacking it at widely separated points,—New York, New Hampshire, and Maine. In consequence of the alarm created by these raids, the first colonial congress was held at New York (1690). A fleet commanded by Sir William Phipps (page [177]), with eighteen hundred New England militiamen on board, captured Acadia and Port Royal that summer, but Acadia was retaken by the French the following season. During the five ensuing years fighting was confined to bushranging along the New York and New England border. The struggle was without further incident until Newfoundland yielded to the French (1696), and a party of French and Indians sacked the little village of Andover, Mass. (1697), but twenty-five miles out of Boston. Later in the year came the treaty of Ryswick, under which each belligerent recovered what he possessed at the outset of the war.
112. Frontier Wars (1702-1748).