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CHAPTER VIII.

In the last ten years of Oliver Cromwell's life, the rapid succession of important events in the mother country, and the confidence and favor with which the successful party there regarded the colonists of New England, conspired to prevent attempts to control the administration of the Confederacy; and it transacted its business without reference to any superior authority.

Relations to

1632.

1636.

1635, 1639.

1640.

On the recovery by France of the American territory which had been conquered from her by England,1 New France. the region along the St. Lawrence became missionary ground. Champlain, who died four years after the French dominion was restored, was succeeded in the government by Montmagny, who was no less a devotee.2 A Jesuit college and an Ursuline nunnery were established at Quebec. The settlement of Montreal was inaugurated with the rites of the Roman Catholic religion. A number of Recollet fathers and of Jesuits dispersed themselves among the Hurons on the north side of Lake Erie.5 The Hurons and the Iroquois were constantly at war; but among the Iroquois also the missionaries flattered themselves that they sometimes made a convert. The Abenaquis occupied a country which was French or English, according as the disputed boundary of Acadie might be defined. In them was thought to have been found "a nation inferior to no other on the continent in cour

1 See Vol. I. 235, 337, 540.

* Charlevoix, I. 309.

Ibid., 305, 320.

* Ibid., 353.

Ibid., 282 et seq.

Ibid., 326, 430.

6

'See Vol. I. 23; comp. 234, 337.

age, surpassing all others in mildness and docility," and capable of being made "an impregnable barrier for New France."

Some stragglers of the Abenaqui tribe had been in the habit of repairing to one of the French outposts, and after a while they went to Quebec, and asked for a visit from a missionary. "A people reputed brave, and which by its position might eventually afford important help, in case of a rupture with New England, was not an acquisition to be neglected; the messengers were very favora bly received, and the Father Gabriel Druillettes returned with them." Notwithstanding the good accounts which had gone abroad respecting the tribe, he found them so lazy and shiftless as to be suffering from famine at the end of summer.1

The mission

ary Druillettes.

1646.

August.

1649.

While Druillettes was recruiting allies, if not making proselytes, among these people, the Governor of New France was recalled, and Louis D'Ailleboust, pre- 1647. viously commander of the post at Three Rivers, was appointed to succeed him. He had been two or three years in office, when the Iroquois, in large force, invaded the country of the Hurons, and almost exterminated that once powerful tribe, pursuing the fugitives to the very walls of Quebec.2 Alarmed for his colony, D'Ailleboust conceived the hope of obtaining help from Massachusetts. Some communication had previously passed between Boston and Quebec, relating to a reciprocity of trading privileges, and perhaps to some

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1650.

regulation of traffic with the Indians. D'Ailleboust revived this intercourse by sending Druillettes "to October. treat with the Massachusetts and Plymouth Colonies about a league offensive and defensive." The proposal, it was hoped, would find the more favor on account of the relation sustained by Plymouth, through its colony upon the Kennebec, to the Abenaquis, who, it was alleged, were in danger of an invasion from the Mohawks.1

The messenger was told that nothing could be done till the next annual meeting of the Federal Commissioners. He came again in the following year, accompanied by a colleague, named John Godefroy, a member of the Council of New France. To the Commissioners, convened at New Haven, they represented that the war in

cation made by D'Ailleboust in 1650, in which it does not appear that Marie was employed, with the visits of Marie to Boston, in the service of D'Aulnay, in 1644 and 1646, in the former of which he had "proffered terms of peace and amity." (See above, 149, 201.)

Charlevoix says (II. 6, sub an. 1648): "A peu près dans le même tems que ceci se passait chez les Hurons, on vit arriver à Quebec, non sans quelque étonnement, un envoyé de la Nouvelle Angleterre, chargé de proposer une alliance éternelle entre les deux Colonies, indépendemment de toutes les ruptures qui pourraient survenir entre les deux couronnes. M. d'Ailleboust trouva la proposition avantageuse, et de l'avis de son Conseil députa à Boston le P. Druillettes en qualité de plénipotentiare, pour conclure et signer le traité; mais à condition que les Anglais se joindraient à nous pour faire la guerre aux Iroquois."

I presume that Charlevoix had been misinformed respecting the arrival of an envoy from New England at Quebec, and respecting the offer of a "perpetual alliance," or that he had made in

correct inferences from a letter of the French Council at Quebec to the NewEngland Commissioners, which he proceeds to quote, and which, with the exception of one other paper, also cited by him, he declares to be the only document which he had been able to discover relating to the business. As to an overture from New England, the letter says no more than that “il y a déjà quelques années, que messieurs de Baston nous ont proposé de lier le commerce entre la Nouvelle France et la Nouvelle Angleterre." The other paper, which is a record of the appointment of Druillettes and Godefroy (ibid., 10), refers only to advances for a commercial arrangement, made "by letters of the year 1647."

1 The reader scarcely needs to be reminded that the Five Nations, otherwise known by the collective name of Iroquois, were the Senecas, Cayugas, Onondagas, Oneidas, and Mohawks. The Mohawks being nearest to the New-Englanders, the whole confederacy to which they belonged is constantly called by their name in the NewEngland documents.

which they desired military aid had been provoked by the perfidy and cruelty of the Mohawks; that the Abenaquis, who were now threatened with invasion, were Christian converts; and that an interruption of the trade with them would be a prejudice alike to English and French. They urged the New-England Colonies to "join in the war." But if that were refused, they requested "that the French might have liberty to take up volunteers in the English jurisdiction, and be furnished with victuals for that service; at least, that they might pass through the Colonies by water and land as occasion should require.'

Refusal of aid

against the

1651.

Sept. 6.

In a letter "to the Governor and Council of New France," the Commissioners declined all these proposals. They said that "the English engaged to the French not in any war before they had full and satisfy- Mohawks. ing evidence, that, in all respects and considerations, it was just, and before peace upon just terms had been offered and refused;" that the Mohawks had done them no harm, but, on the contrary, had "shown a real respect to them" during their quarrel with the Pequots; and that to permit the passage of a foreign force through their country would be to "expose both the Christian and other Indians, and some of the small English plantations, to danger." In these circumstances, they said, they must await "a fitter season" for a treaty of commerce, since the envoys had no authority to make it except in connection with an alliance.1

1 Records, &c., in Hazard, II. 182-lettes, during his first visit to Boston, 185; Hutch. Coll., 239-242; comp. has lately been discovered at Montreal Charlevoix, II. 6-11. "It was expect- among some papers belonging to the ing too much," says Charlevoix, "from Jesuit Mission, and has been printed the English, to suppose that they would through the liberality of Mr. James engage in a war with the Iroquois, Lenox, of New York. In September, when they were so distant from that 1650, Druillettes came from Quebec to confederacy as to be in no danger from Norridgewock, on the Kennebec, about it, and were engrossed by their agri- thirty leagues from the mouth of that culture and commerce." river, and half that distance above the A copy of a journal kept by Druil- highest Plymouth factory, at what is

Relations to

land.

Meanwhile the dispute between the western Colonies and the New-Netherlanders seemed to have been brought to an amicable issue. The hope of settling it New Nether- by an agreement between the mother countries had been abandoned, in consequence of their estrangement from each other after the execution of King Charles. His fugitive sons were harbored by their brother-in-law, the Prince of Orange; Dorislaus, an envoy of the Parliament, was murdered at the Hague by some royalists, who escaped punishment; the Dutch ambassador was refused audience at London; and for the present the two nations were without diplomatic communication.2

now Augusta. (Narré du Voyage faict pour la Mission des Abnaquious, &c., 1, 2.) Still travelling by land to Maremiten (Merry-Meeting Bay), he there took to the water. On the 5th of December, he was off Kepane (Cape Ann), and in three days more reached Boston. Here he was received by "MajorGeneral Gebin" (Gibbons), who carried his hospitality so far that, writes the journalist, "he gave me the key of an apartment in his house, where I might freely pray and go through the services' of my religion; and he besought me to make his house my home while I continued at Boston."

Gibbons took him to wait upon Governor Dudley, at "a village called Rogsbray [Roxbury]." The Governor (though an old French soldier) had to employ an interpreter in mastering his letter of credence. (Ibid., 6-8.) Endicott, whom he visited the next month, was more accessible. "I went to Salem to speak to the Sieur Indicott, who speaks and understands French well, and is a good friend of the nation, and very desirous to have his children entertain this sentiment. Finding I had no money, he supplied me, and gave me an invitation to the Magistrates' table." (Ibid., 15.) At Plymouth,

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John Brentford (Governor Bradford) entertained him at a dinner of fish, in consideration of the day being Friday. Returning as far as Roxbury, he was there the guest of "Maistre Heliot [John Eliot]," who invited him to stay and pass the winter. (Ibid., 10, 11.)

Druillettes left Boston in a coasting vessel, January 5th, 1651, and in five weeks disembarked on the Kennebec, where "the English received him with every mark of affection.” (Ibid., 14, 19.) He had come home with a conviction that Plymouth would zealously promote a war with the Iroquois for the safety of her Abenaqui protégés, and that Massachusetts would at least permit the enlistment of volunteers, as she had done in the case of La Tour. (Ibid., 20, 22.) As to the temper of Plymouth, he was especially in error. (Plym. Rec., II. 169.)

Some of his observations on the route are interesting, though they are not to be entirely relied upon. "Four thousand men," he says, "can be raised in There the single colony of Boston. are at least forty thousand souls in the four Colonies." (Ibid., 27.) 1 See above, p. 204.

Basnage, Annales des Provinces Unies, I. 141, 145.

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