3 See [above].
| The capture of Schenectady. |
The first started from Montreal in depth of winter, following the familiar route of the Richelieu and Lake Champlain, and intending to strike a blow at Albany. The men were picked for the work, Frenchmen and Indians, about 250 in all, led by the best of Canadian rangers, such as Le Moyne d'Iberville and his brothers. They toiled through ice and snow, and, turning off from the path to Albany, in the darkness of a winter's night they fell upon the Dutch settlement of Schenectady. It was the time of Leisler's movement, when New York was in the throes of revolution. The village was unguarded, its gates were open, its inmates were asleep. A blockhouse manned by eight or nine militiamen from Connecticut was stormed, and the scene was one of helpless massacre.
| The attack on Salmon Falls and Falmouth. |
The second party, smaller in number, consisting of some fifty French and Abenaki Indians, left Three Rivers towards the end of January, and near the end of March made a night attack on the settlement of Salmon Falls, on the borders of New Hampshire and Maine. Again the English, sleeping and unprepared, were murdered in their beds, and the murderers, making good their retreat, joined forces with the third and strongest party, which had set out from Quebec to attack the settlement of Falmouth at Casco Bay. Falmouth stood where the town of Portland in Maine now stands. There was a fort at the place—Fort Loyal—into which the outlying settlers gathered with their families when the attacking force of four or five hundred men appeared. After a short defence the commander, Sylvanus Davies by name, surrendered on solemn promise, according to his own circumstantial account, of quarter and freedom for the whole company. The terms were immediately broken, and all the English were massacred or carried into captivity.
| Effect of the French raids. |
Thus three separate raids on the English colonies, sent out under Frontenac's orders in the year 1690, were all successful. They were well devised, and carried out with skill, courage, and determination. The English and Dutch settlers, on their side, showed the greatest negligence and little stubbornness or competence in self-defence. The immediate result was to invigorate the French and their Indian allies; but the causes of their momentary success were the causes of their ultimate failure; and even at the moment these marauding exploits threatened new danger to Canada. The French succeeded because, leagued with savages, they in all things likened themselves to their companions, they habited themselves in Indian dress, their warriors were ferocious as Indian warriors, their priests hounded on to blood. They succeeded because their trade was war not peace, because they were roving adventurers who had only their lives to lose, ravening among quiet men of substance who had homes and wives and children to be plundered and slain. It was as certain that in course of time the cause of the English colonists would prevail, as that the Highland clans, who in Scotland marauded their southern neighbours, would eventually be broken, or that the Five Nations themselves, if left to fight alone, would eventually go down before the settled life of Canada.
| They tended to unite the English colonists. |
On this occasion three blows were struck, nearly at the same time, at three separate points in a long undefended line. The adoption of this policy by the French, and still more the fact of its success, in reality tended to remove the one great obstacle to British supremacy in North America. When Sylvanus Davies, taken at Fort Loyal and carried prisoner to Quebec, asked Frontenac the reason for the savage raid on the Casco Bay settlement, he was told that it was reprisal for the support given to the Iroquois by New York. His rejoinder, which was to the effect that New England should not be called upon to answer for the doings of New York, showed how little community of sentiment or interest existed in the English colonies. The one great source of weakness to the English cause, the greatest source of strength to the French, was the disunion of the English colonies and their indifference to each other. Consolidation could come only through partnership in suffering, and pressure from a common foe. This was the lesson which Frontenac taught, when his border ruffians carried havoc from the head waters of the Hudson to the sea-coast of Maine.
| The colonies determine to attack Canada. |