The deposition of François de Marganne, Sieur de la Valterie, before Paul Dupuy, Esquire, king's councillor, on October 19th, relates that, "he had descended the St. Lawrence in a canoe, with two Frenchmen and an Indian, till landing at the Ile aux Oeufs on the 1st of October, they met two French sailors or fishermen loaded with plunder and presently discovered the wrecks of seven English ships, with, as they declared, fifteen or sixteen hundred dead bodies, on the strand hard by, besides dead horses, sheep, dogs and hens, three or four hundred large iron-hooped casks, a barrel of wine and a barrel and keg of brandy, cables, anchors, chains, planks, boards, shovels, picks, mattocks and piles of old iron three feet high." (Parkman, "A Half Century of Conflict.") Later visits to the wrecks brought back news that, though the autumn tides had swept away many corpses, more than two thousand lay on the rocks, naked and in attitudes of despair. Denys de la Ronde, writing to the minister on December 30, 1711, says that nearly one thousand men were drowned, and about two thousand died of injuries. Whatever there is of exaggeration in this, still Colonel Lee of the Rhode Island contingent, writing to Governor Cranston, September 12, 1711, says that a day or two after the wreck, he saw "the bodies of twelve or thirteen hundred brave men, with women and children, lying in heaps."
So perished the ill-fated expedition under Admiral Sir Hovenden Walker, that was to have subjugated Canada. The fleet, which set sail from Boston on July 30th "consisted of nine ships of war and two bomb ketches with about sixty transports, store ships, hospital ships and other vessels, British and Provincial. They carried the seven British regiments, numbering with the artillery train about five thousand five hundred men, besides 600 marines and 1,500 provincials; counting with the sailors nearly twelve thousand in all." Samuel Vetch commanded the provincials—the same who had boasted of his knowledge of the Canadian coasts; but he was no sailor, and the pilots with the fleet had little serious knowledge of the St. Lawrence after all.
How this mighty expedition met disaster at the mercy of the elements leads us too far from Montreal to tell. Suffice it to say that Quebec and Montreal were saved. [163]
The dramatic routing of their enemies was regarded by Canadians as a manifest effect of Divine Providence watching over them. M. de Vaudreuil, writing to the minister on October 22, and November 6, 1712, says: "We are going to give thanks to God for the visible protection which he benignantly granted to this country. All our people, though well determined to defend themselves, agree that God has granted them great favours in the destruction of the English fleet, without it costing a single drop of blood to this colony." In his "Life of Sieur LeBer," M. de Belmont claimed that the Mother of God obtained for the Canadians this greatest miracle, "which has happened since the time of Moses when the Egyptians were swallowed up in the waters of the Red Sea." At Montreal, in thanksgiving, the ladies set about to procure the necessary funds to redeem their vows. The Sisters of the Congregation gave a plot of ground within their enclosure, near to their church, and in 1718 the foundation stone of the little shrine of "Our Lady of Victories" was ceremoniously laid. [164]
CHURCH OF OUR LADY OF VICTORY
Peace for the two great rival nations was obtained by the treaty of Utrecht on April 13, 1713. But it was not without a pang for the old King Louis XIV, who lost fair jewels from his crown, in then ceding to the English, Acadia, Newfoundland, Hudson's Bay and the Iroquois country. To France was reserved only Prince Edward Island and the adjoining islands, and Cape Breton. "The treaty of Utrecht," says Ganneau, "was followed by a period of peace almost without example in the annals of Canada." The whole colony increased in population, the Island of Montreal growing from 3,492 souls in 1710 to 7,710 in 1740.
Montreal profited by the peace less advantageously than Quebec and Three Rivers. Formerly this town was the principal headquarters of the fur trade, as we have seen. But after the treaty of Utrecht, by the loss to the French of the Hudson's Bay trade, New York at last gained considerably over Montreal. Yet none the less, prosperity ruled there.