The year 1710 opened with rumors from Albany about preparations in Canada for an onset along the frontier, and it was not till July (15) that flags and guns at the Castle and Sconce, with drum-beats throughout the streets, told the expectant Bostonians that General Nicholson, who was to head a new expedition, had arrived. It was candle-light before he landed, and the letters and despatches at once busied the government. A little later the council (July 24) entertained that commander, with Vetch and Hobby, at the Green Dragon Tavern; and four days afterwards Governor Saltonstall, from Connecticut, reached Boston, and the contingent of that colony, three hundred men, was on the spot in four weeks from the warning. In September the armament sailed,—twelve ships-of-war and twenty-four transports, of which fourteen carried Massachusetts troops, two New Hampshire, three Rhode Island, and five those of Connecticut. On the 26th of October (1710), Nicholson and his force were back in Boston, flushed with the triumph which the capitulation of Port Royal had given them.[203] The town had need of some such divertissement. There had been a scarcity of grain, and when Captain Belcher attempted to despatch a ship laden with it the mob cut her rudder, and the excitement had not passed without more or less inflaming of the passions. The circle of Matherites had also disturbed the equanimity of the liberals in theology by an anonymous document, Question and Proposals, which aimed at ecclesiasticising everybody and everything,—a stroke of a dying cause. There was an antagonist equal to the occasion in John Wise, of Ipswich, and the Mather dynasty had less chance of revival after Wise’s book The Churches’ Quarrel Espoused was launched upon the town.[204]
Nicholson, again in England, had urged the new tory government under Bolingbroke to make a more determined assault on Canada, and Dummer had united with him in a petition to the queen[205] for a royal armament to be sent for the work. Their plea was recognized and what seemed a great force was despatched. Nicholson, with the van of the fleet, arrived on the 6th of June, 1711,[206] and a convention of the New England governors was straightway called at New London to arrange for the campaign. The plan was for Nicholson to lead four thousand men by way of Albany, and the Connecticut contingent of three hundred and sixty men was to make part of this force. The royal ships came straggling into Boston harbor. On the 24th General Hill, who brought under his command seven of Marlborough’s veteran regiments, arrived, and the next day Sewall and others of the council boarded the “Devonshire” and exchanged courtesies with Hill and the admiral of the fleet, Sir Hovenden Walker. The Boston regiments mustered and escorted them to the town house, and the veterans were thrown into a camp on Noddle’s Island. The next six weeks were busy ones, with preparations and entertainments. Mr. Borland, a wealthy merchant, took Hill into his house. The governor offered official courtesies. The transports as they came up into the inner harbor presented a “goodly, charming prospect,” as Sewall thought.[207]
Commencement at Cambridge came on July 4, and all the dignitaries were there. One day some Connecticut Indians exhibited themselves before the admiral, and on another some Mohawks danced on board the flag-ship. By the end of the month, everything was as nearly ready as could be,[208] and the fleet sailed (July 30). They went proudly away, hastened somewhat by large desertions, which the patrolling of the roads leading from Boston had not prevented.
BRITISH SOLDIERS, 1701-1714.
Fac-simile of a cut (pl. xxviii.) in Luard’s Hist. of the Dress of the British Soldier, London, 1852, p. 94. It represents the soldiers of Marlborough’s wars.
Nicholson dallied in Boston for a week or two, eating good dinners, and then started for New York, to take the conduct of the land expedition, Saltonstall accompanying the Connecticut troops as far as Albany. Much farther no one of the land forces went, for word reached them of the sad disaster on the St. Lawrence and of the withdrawal of Walker’s fleet. The New England part of it came straggling back to Boston in October to find the town suffering under the loss of a great fire, which had happened on the night of October 2-3; most unmistakably the result, as Increase Mather told them in a sermon,—and perhaps believed,—of the way in which, during the fitting of the fleet, they had carried bundles on the Lord’s Day, and done other servile work! The cause of the expedition’s failure can be more reasonably indicated: delay in starting, an ill-organized method of supplies, bad pilotage, and incompetent leaders. Walker and Hill sailed direct for England, and in October, while the deputies of the province were bolstering their courage in asking the monarch for another attempt, the English mind was being filled with charges of want of proper coöperation on the part of the New Englanders as the all-sufficient cause of the disaster. Dummer, in London, vindicated his people as well as he could in a Letter to a Noble Lord concerning the late expedition to Canada.[209]