CHAPTER IV. THE aged and feeble Bradstreet must have been quite as well pleased to retire from the government of the Province as his enterprising successor was to assume it. The management of the war had been too much for his failing strength. The administration of the last three years had been honest and careful, and in the circumstances the degree of good order which was maintained was highly creditable to the people. But it was impossible that a government which from the beginning had been declared itself to be only temporary should be capable of a vigorous rule; and respect for it, though partially reinforced by the royal order in the summer of the Revolution, had been again weakened during the unexpectedly long agitation of the question of a permanent settlement. The war had languished for a time after the defeat of the invasion of Canada. The strenuous Governor French and of that country would have followed up his advan- Indian war. tage by a movement against New York, and he applied to his court for reinforcements for that purpose; but he was told that the King had now employment nearer home for all his forces, and for the present it was necessary that his views for New France should be confined to measures of defence. While the exhausted condition of Massachusetts forbade a renewal of offensive operations on her part, the French Governor's chief immediate solicitude was for the "His Majesty not being in a tenac, of April 7, 1691, in O'Calcondition at present," &c. (Letter laghan, IX. 494; comp. Charlevoix, of the King to the Count de Fron- I. 528, 561.) conduct of the Iroquois Indians; and the year after the repulsed invasion was mostly passed by him in a succession of unsatisfactory negotiations and indecisive hostilities with that crafty, capricious, and formidable confederacy,' though New England was at the same time annoyed with a desultory maritime war. 1690. Nov. 29. Operations in Maine. 1691. Though the result of Colonel Church's expedition into Maine had disappointed expectation, it appeared October. to have been not without a salutary effect in alarming the Indians in that quarter; for it was scarcely over, when some of their chiefs appeared at the town of Wells, with proposals for a pacification. A treaty was accordingly made between three commissioners from Boston and six representatives of the Abenaqui tribes. The Indians restored ten English captives; and agreed to deliver up their remaining prisoners at Wells and contract for a permanent peace at the end of five months, and meanwhile to abstain from hostilities and to give notice of any which they might know to be meditated by the French. On the day appointed, May 1. President Danforth, with some members of his Council and a guard, came to meet the chiefs at Wells; but, the favorable season for their inroads having returned, the savages had changed their minds, and, after waiting for them a sufficient time, Danforth withdrew to York. A reinforcement of thirty-five men sent by him to Wells reached that place in season to repel an attack which, within an hour after their unexpected arrival, was made upon it by a band of two hundred Indians. The defeated party fell upon an outlying settlement of York, which they satisfied their vengeance by burning, along with a vessel anchored there, of which they massacred the greater portion of the crew. Their further movements were for the present arrested by a detachment of four companies who, landing in their rear at the 1 Charlevoix, II. 92 et seq. June 9. July. Sept. 29. head of Casco Bay, went in pursuit of them as far as Pejepscot (Brunswick). Some Indians came in canoes to a detached settlement, now the town of Rye, and carried away twenty-one of the inhabitants. On or about the same day they murdered four men and two women at Dunstable. York and Wells, with Kittery, which was protected by its contiguity to Portsmouth, were still the only towns remaining to the English in Maine.1 Indians at York. 1692. Jan. 25. At York, which was a place of some consequence, having three or four hundred inhabitants, there were several fortified houses. Early in a winter morning the town was surprised by a numerous party of French and Indians, who had made their march on snowshoes. A brave but unorganized defence was overcome. Seventy or eighty of the English were killed. A larger number were miserably dragged away to Canada, freezing, hard driven, and half famished. Four of the houses were resolutely defended, till the enemy were tired out, and, setting on fire the buildings they had taken, withdrew into the woods. The fate of the minister, Mr. Dummer, was much deplored. He was found on the doorstep of his house, dead by a gunshot wound. His wife, one of the prisoners, died of fatigue and misery.2 At Wells, with fifteen soldiers, sent to aid the inhabitants in its defence, was the brave Captain Converse, who 1 Port Royal, Phips's recent conquest, neglected by the English ministry, now fell back again into the hands of the French. Villebon, Governor of Acadia, returning from a visit to France, whither he had been to represent the importance of recovering his lost post, came with a frigate to Port Royal, which he found ungarrisoned, and resumed possession of it (November 26) without firing a gun. (Charlevoix, II. 110; O'Callaghan, IX. 526; Journals of the Board of Trade for Jan. 11, 1692; Privy Council Register for January 14.) 2 Mather, Magnalia, VII. 76, 78. - Mather's epitaph on Dummer is as follows: "Dummer, the Shepherd Sacrific'd By Wolves, because the Sheep he priz'd. Shot, and Flown thither in a Trice." Indians at June 9. had repulsed the Indians from it just a year before. The Sachem Moxus, then defeated, was brother of Madockawando, who was reported by a redeemed captive to have strongly resented that mishap, and to have threatened a bloody vengeance. At Wells, as at York, there were several fortified houses, built of timber, with angles adjusted with some skill. Five hundred French and Indians now came against the place, guided by the two brother chiefs. The day before, three small English vessels had arrived, bringing the relief of their freight of provisions and ammunition, besides the seasonable reinforcement of the fourteen men who navigated them. Two days the enemy pushed the June 10, 11. assault. They fired from behind breastworks of timber filled in with hay. They attempted the vessels unsuccessfully with blazing rafts. They rolled up to within a few yards of the fortification a large cart, faced with thick planks, which gave protection from musketry. But the English had two or three twelve-pound cannon, which were gallantly served, the men loading and pointing them, and the women, who brought ammunition, lighting the fuse. On the evening of the second day the assailants were discouraged and withdrew. They had sustained considerable loss, while they had killed only one Englishman, a seaman, who accidentally fell into their hands as he went on shore from one of the vessels. Out of temper by reason of their disappointment, they treated him ferociously, hacking him in pieces with their knives, and inserting lighted splinters into the wounds. In the mean time Lieutenant Wilson, with eighteen men, had destroyed a party which had imprudently made another attack on Dover.1 1 Mather, Magnalia, VII. 78-81. Charlevoix is silent upon this affair, as well as upon the calamity of York in January. Comp. Niles, History of the French and Indian Wars, in Mass. Hist. Col., XXVI. 225-230. Such was the state of the war at the time of the accession of the new Governor. In other respects there had been little change in the outward appearance of affairs since his departure eighteen months before. But there was as yet no beginning of a recovery from the Depression orders. great depression and embarrassments which had and disbeen experienced; and, though a certainty had now succeeded to the grievous anxieties respecting the fate of the charter, it was by no means attended with a universal sense of relief. The bankruptcy of the treasury, in consequence of the expenses of the ill-fated expedition to Quebec, was a fact but too well ascertained. The public creditors, including all persons employed by the public alike without as with their own consent, had to put up with paper money in payment of their dues. As time proceeded, bearing with it the necessity of further outlays, there was a multiplication of public promises to pay in the form of treasury bills, and a continually deteriorating currency came into the place of whatever coin had been in circulation. In the general poverty the payment of heavy \ taxes was extremely burdensome, and, as has been before told, the collecting of them sometimes required compulsion, which was sometimes resisted. Military service against the French and Indians was in the circumstances indispensable, but the prevailing discouragement rendered it unattractive, and sometimes it was refused, and could only be obtained by the use of force. The authority of the tribunals of justice was disputed, and a sort of mutiny, got up by a court which had been commissioned before the Revolution, was for a while obstinately maintained. In this disturbed and enfeebled condition of the Colony, there were well-founded apprehensions of an attack in force from the French, much more serious than the annoyance of the cruisers which through the last two years had been marauding in Massachusetts Bay and Long Island Sound. Industry, in every form except the mere tilling of the |