So ended in complete failure the attempt of Massachusetts to take Quebec. Yet it was a bold and masterful effort on the part of one undeveloped English colony. It had in it the elements of strength, and under different conditions might have earned success. As it was, the citizen soldiers and sailors of Boston, led by an ex-ship-carpenter, faced Count Frontenac and all the trained strength of New France, their retreat was unmolested, and their failure was hailed as a miraculous deliverance for Quebec.4
4 Phipps, before he made his attack, was told by French prisoners of the path up the cliff above the town, by which Wolfe subsequently took Quebec; but he preferred to attack from Beauport.
| Death of Phipps. |
Phipps had not proved himself to be a great commander. He failed too as Governor of Massachusetts, to which post he was appointed in the following year; but he had the merit of dogged determination to fight the French in Canada; and, had he lived longer, he might again have tried his hand at besieging Quebec. A few weeks after his repulse and return to Boston, he sailed to England to urge upon the home Government an active policy against New France, and that policy he continued to advocate until he died, in 1695, at the early age of forty-four.
| Wheeler's abortive expedition. |
On either side, the true line of defence was to carry war into the enemy's country. It was thus that Frontenac defended Canada. It was by constant raids that the Iroquois maintained their position; and the counsel which those astute savages gave to their English friends was to combine and attack Quebec. 'Strike at Quebec,' urged Phipps on the English Government; 'strike at Boston and New York' was the advice which the leaders of Canada one after another tendered to King Louis. No help had been sent from England to the late expedition against Quebec, but Phipps' subsequent representations led to an English fleet being dispatched to the West Indies in the winter of 1692, under command of Admiral Wheeler. The ships were intended to take Martinique, then to go on to Boston, and embarking a force of New Englanders under Phipps to sail for Quebec. Again there was a failure. Wheeler lost more than half his soldiers and sailors in the West Indies from yellow fever; and, when he reached Boston in midsummer of 1693, bringing the sickness with him, the Massachusetts Government decided that it was hopeless to attempt to carry out the scheme.
| Fighting on the New York frontier. New York protected by the Iroquois. |
In spite of the massacre at Schenectady, New York suffered less than New England from border war. In 1691, in a second attack on the French settlement of La Prairie over against Montreal, the English and Dutch colonists achieved some success, carrying out the raid which they had planned, and cutting their way back hand to hand through a party of French troops who tried to bar their retreat. The Iroquois were the salvation of New York. Their raids into Canada safeguarded the rival colony, and when the Five Nations were not on the warpath, the French hesitated to attack their English allies, for fear of provoking a fresh incursion of savages. It has been seen that the Iroquois tended more and more to a policy of neutrality, worn by constant fighting, tired of English inaction, and discerning that their true interest lay in siding with neither French nor English. Still, with the exception of their converted countrymen settled in Canada, they were not likely to band with the French against the English. To do so would have been to break with old ties and traditions, to close their best market, to combine with their deadliest foes against friends of long standing, whose faults had been after all but faults of omission. This the French knew well: they were content to leave New York alone, provided they themselves were left alone by the Iroquois, and so long as the traders of New York did not seriously threaten their command of the West.
| The Abenakis on the borders of New England. |
It was otherwise in the case of New England. The Abenaki Indians on the borders of the New England colonies had always been in the French interest. Jesuit influence was strong among them: they had been taught that Christianity could go hand in hand with ferocity, and that murder of white heretics might be not only a pleasure but a duty. Here the object of the French was not to keep the Indians quiet, but to spur them on. As they dreaded lest their Indian allies on the upper lakes should come to terms with the Iroquois,5 and enforced barbarities to make peace impossible, so in the closing years of the seventeenth century and the early years of the eighteenth, they incited the Abenaki warriors against the border settlements of Maine and New Hampshire, butchering, looting, carrying into captivity, their one object being to keep alive the taste of blood, lest, lured by the prospect of peaceful and profitable trade with the neighbouring English, the Abenakis should drift apart from New France.