[912] We encounter Gyles frequently as commander of posts in the eastern country. He lived latterly at Roxbury, Mass., and published at Boston, in 1736, Memoirs of the odd adventures, strange deliverances, etc., in the captivity of John Gyles, Esq., Commander of the garrison on St. George’s River. This book is of great rarity. There is a copy in Harvard College library [5315.14] and a defective one in the Mass. Hist. Soc. library (Catalogue, p. 553). One is noted in S. G. Drake’s Sale Catalogue, 1845, which seems also to have been imperfect. Drake in reprinting the book in his Tragedies of the Wilderness, Boston, 1846 (p. 73), altered the text throughout. It was perhaps Drake’s copy which is noted in the Brinley Catalogue, i. no. 476, selling for $37. It was again reprinted in Cincinnati, by William Dodge, in 1869, but he followed Drake’s disordered text. (Cf. Carter-Brown, iii. no. 547; Mem. Hist. Boston, ii. 336; Church, Entertaining Passages, Dexter’s ed., ii. 163, 203; Johnston, Bristol, Bremen, and Pemaquid, 183; J. A. Vinton’s Gyles Family, 122; N. E. Hist. Geneal. Reg., Jan., 1867, p. 49; Oct., 1867, p. 361.)
[913] Shea’s Charlevoix, iv. 171.
[914] See Vol. IV. p. 62.
[915] There were two governors of Canada of this name, who must not be confounded. This was the earlier.
[916] L’Abbé J. A. Maurault, Histoire des Abénakis, 1866; chapters 9-15 cover “Les Abénakis en Canada et en Acadie, 1701-1755.”
[917] John Marshall’s diary under March, 1707, notes the disinclination of the people to agree with the determination of the General Court to make a descent on Port Royal. (Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., April, 1884, p. 159.) There are in the Collection de Manuscrits, etc. (Quebec, 1884), two papers on this matter: one dated Port Royal, June 26, 1707, “Entreprise des Anglois contre l’Acadie” (vol. ii. p. 464); the other dated July 6, “Entreprise des Bastonnais sur l’Acadie par M. Labat” (p. 477).
[918] Colonels Hutchinson and Townsend, and John Leverett. Letters from the latter respecting the expedition are in C. E. Leverett’s Memoir of John Leverett, and in Quincy’s Hist. of Harvard Univ. Cf. Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, iii. 185, 197; Marshall’s diary in Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., April, 1884, p. 159.
[919] Hannay (Acadia, 269) judges Charlevoix’s stories of hand-to-hand fighting as largely fabulous. Hutchinson (ii. 134) prints a letter from Wainwright, who had succeeded March in command, in which the sorry condition of the men is set forth.
[920] These tracts are: A Memorial of the Present Deplorable State of New England, with the many disadvantages it lyes under by the mall-administration of their present Governor, Joseph Dudley, Esq., and his son Paul ... to which is added a faithful but melancholy account of several barbarities by the French and Indians in the east and west parts of New England, Printed in the year 1707, and sold ... in Boston. Two things seem clear: that Cotton Mather incited, perhaps wrote, this tract, and that the printing was done in London. It is not known that there is a copy in this country, and the reprint was made from one in the British Museum.
Dudley or some friend rejoined in the second tract, not without violent recriminations upon Mather: A modest enquiry into the grounds and occasions of a late pamphlet intituled a Memorial, etc. By a disinterested hand. London, 1707. (Carter-Brown, iii. no. 99; Murphy, i. 327.)