In coming up the river, Phips had captured two vessels, so that the fleet which two or three days after Frontenac’s arrival slowly emerged into the basin of Quebec counted thirty-four vessels to the anxious eyes of the French. Phips’s prisoners had told him that there were not two hundred men in the works; Frontenac knew that his reinforcements had already made his garrison about twenty-seven hundred men.
Phips promptly sent a summons to surrender. His messenger was blindfolded and tumbled about over the barricades, to impress him with the preparations of defence. Frontenac disdained to take the offered hour for consideration, and sent back his refusal at once. Phips dallied with councils of war till he heard the acclamations with which the Governor of Montreal was received, when he brought several hundred additional men to the garrison. Walley was at last landed with a force of twelve or thirteen hundred, who experienced some fighting, which they conducted courageously enough, but without result, and suffered much from the inclemency of the weather. Without waiting for the land troops to reach a position for assaulting the town, Phips moved up his ships, and began a bombardment, wholly ineffectual, and drew a return which damaged him so considerably, that, after renewing it the following day, he finally drew off. There was another delay in rescuing Walley and his men, who were at last re-embarked under cover of the night. The fleet now fell down the river, stopped to repair, and then made their way back to Boston, straggling along for several months, some of the vessels never reaching home at all. The miseries of mortification and paper money were all that New England had to show for her bravado.[706]
Attack on Quebec.
To Frontenac the success of his defence was a temporary relief, so far as the English were concerned, though the New England cruisers continued to intercept his supplies in the Gulf. But the Iroquois wolves began to prowl again. Taunted by their savage allies for their inertness, the English and Dutch of Albany once more raided towards Montreal, under Peter Schuyler, and, inflicting more damage than they received, successfully broke through an ambuscading force on their retreat. All this irritated Frontenac. He prayed his King for help to destroy New York and Boston; and when a false report reached him that ten thousand “Bastonnais” had sailed to wreak their revenge for Phips’s failure, he set vigorously to work strengthening the vulnerable points of his colony. He varied his activity with continued expeditions against the Iroquois, whether strolling or at home, striking particularly against the Mohawk towns; and he protected a great fleet of canoes which in the troublous times had been kept back in the upper country, and now brought credit and hope to the lower settlements in an ample supply of furs.
But during all this turmoil with public foes, Frontenac was having his old troubles over again with the Bishop and the Intendant. Outward courtesy and secret dislike characterized their intercourse, and discord went in the train of the Bishop as he made his pastoral tours among a people bound in honor and reverence to the Governor.
The reader must turn to another page[707] for the struggle with the “Bastonnais” which Frontenac was watching meanwhile in Acadia; but this did not divert his attention from the grand castigation which at last he was planning for the Iroquois. He had succeeded, in 1694, in inducing them to meet him in general council at Quebec, and had framed the conditions of a truce; but the English at Albany intrigued to prevent the fulfilment, and war was again imminent. Both sides were endeavoring to secure the alliance of the tribes of the upper lakes.[708] These wavered, and Frontenac saw the peril and the remedy. His recourse was to attack the Iroquois in their villages at once, and conquer on the Mohawk the peace he needed at Michillimackinac. It was Frontenac’s last campaign. In July, 1696, he left Montreal with twenty-two hundred men. He went by way of Fort Frontenac, crossed Lake Ontario, landed at Oswego, and struggled up its stream, and at last set sails to his canoes on Lake Onondaga. Then his force marched again, and Frontenac, enfeebled by his years, was borne along in an arm-chair. Eight or nine miles and a day’s work brought them to the Onondagas’ village; but its inhabitants had burned it and fled. Vaudreuil was sent with a detachment, which destroyed the town of the Oneidas. After committing all the devastation of crops that he could, in hopes that famine would help him, Frontenac began his homeward march before the English at Albany were aroused at all. The effect was what Frontenac wished. The Iroquois ceased their negotiations with the western tribes, and sued for peace.
Meanwhile the crowns and diplomats of England and France had concluded the Peace of Ryswick in 1697. Frontenac got word of it from New York as early as February of 1698, and a confirmation from Louis in July. There were still some parries of diplomacy between the old French soldier and the English governor at New York, the Earl of Bellomont, each trying to maintain the show of a paramount authority over the Five Nations. But Frontenac was not destined to see the end. In November he sickened. His adversary, Champigny, mollified at the sight, became reconciled to him, and soothed his last hours. On the twenty-eighth he died, in the seventy-eighth year of his age, and New France sincerely mourned her most distinguished hero.