on the whole was: "It is every day more apparent that nothing will proceed well here till her Majesty will please to name her own Council. The best men in the Province can have no share in the civil government till then.' His action naturally increased the coldness between him and the General Court, and a proposal which he made for the appointment of a Surveyor-General of lands granted by the Province was bluntly rejected.2

Lord Cornbury, the Queen's cousin, who had now succeeded Lord Bellomont as Governor of New York, informed Dudley of his having intelligence from Albany of a meditated attack upon the settlement at Deerfield by a force of French and Indians. For the present this proved a false alarm; but there was only too much reason to expect trouble along the whole northern frontier. Dudley

with the

Indians.

June 20.

invited the eastern chiefs to a conference, which, accompanied by several considerable men of MassachuConference setts and New Hampshire, he held with them at Casco, then the most remote English settlement that was recovering itself from the devastations of King William's war. The savages made the most friendly professions. "As high as the sun is above the earth," protested their chief spokesman, "so far distant shall our designs be of making the least breach between each other "1 Another said that some French priests had been endeavoring to engage them in hostilities against the English, but that they were "as firm as the mountains, and should continue so as long as the sun and moon endured." 2 Some

1 Folsom, History of Saco and II. 41), and at the accession of GovBiddeford, 198 et seq.

2 Penhallow, History of the Wars of New England, &c., 2-4; comp. Niles's History of the Indian and French Wars, in Mass. Hist. Col., XXVI. 247. The former work, of which there is a reprint in N. H. Col., I. 14 et seq., is the great English contemporary authority for the events of this second woful decade. Its titlepage bears the fit motto:—

Nescio tu quibus es, lector, lecturus ocellis; Hoc scio, quod siccis scribere non potui." Samuel Penhallow was an Englishman, a pupil, with Daniel Defoe (see above, Vol. III. 547), of the Rev. Charles Morton, with whom he came to New England in 1686 (extract from Penhallow's Diary, in Mass. Hist. Col., XI. 161), being then twenty-one years old. He became a member of Morton's church at Charlestown, but before long established himself in trade at Portsmouth, where he married a daughter of President Cutt, and accumulated what was then thought a large property. When New Hampshire annexed itself to Massachusetts, after the deposition of Andros, he served as Treasurer of the Province (N. H. Provincial Papers,

ernor Dudley he became a Counsellor (Ibid., 376), in which capacity he was personally cognizant of much of that course of events which he relates. His narrative terminates with the pacification in August, 1726, and he died four months after that time.

Samuel Niles graduated at our Cambridge in 1699, the first native Rhode Islander ever bred at a college. ("I was the first that came to college from Rhode Island government." Mass. Hist. Col., XXVI. 274.) He was settled as minister of Braintree in 1711, and died there in 1762. A little time before his death he spoke of his historical compilation to John Adams; but it continued in manuscript, and was lost sight of, till some time after the year 1830 it was found in a box of papers belonging to the Massachusetts Historical Society, who published it in the twenty-sixth and thirty-fifth volumes of their Collections. The treatise, of which the design is announced to be "to give a narrative of the wars in the land from the year 1634 to this present year, 1760," is, as to all the period down to 1745, of extremely little original value, bearing the

July 8.

July 23.

suspicious circumstances were observed, but the parties separated in apparent friendship, and Dudley returned to congratulate the Court on the happy result of the expedition. The House made a grant to him of three hundred pounds "towards his support in the management of the government.' The Council returned the vote, with a request to have it reconsidered. The House sent it back unaltered. The Council returned it a second time, with the inquiry" whether it was a gratuity, or payment for service, and for what time." The House refused to depart from the ground which it had taken. On the advice of the Council the Governor accepted the grant, and the Court was prorogued.1

July 27.

July 31.

Beginning

war.

Before it met again in the autumn, the Indians had committed outrages, which turned out to be the beginning of another terrible ten years' war. No act of the colonists provoked it. A party of English vaga- of a new bonds on the Penobscot plundered a house belonging to a half-breed son of the Baron de Castine, who was now in France; but the action of the government of Massachusetts on the son's complaint was such that he expressed himself fully satisfied, and it was not pretended that this incident had any connection with more serious disorders

2

Magnalia, VII. 82-84); or an omission (Ibid., 85, 86). And the same was his treatment of Penhallow's narrative, not only of the second ten years' war in Queen Anne's time, but of the disturbances (1719–1726) in the next reign (Penhallow, 81135; comp. Hist. Soc. Col., XXXV. 337-365), when he might seem to have reached an age to be capable of better work than that of a mere copyist.

same relation to Morton's Memorial, a condensation (Ibid., 231, 232; comp. Church's Entertaining Passages, Hubbard's Indian Wars, Mather's Magnalia, and Penhallow's History, as that which exists between the Histories of Hubbard and Winthrop. The reader who will compare Niles's account of the woful decade in King William's time (Hist. Col., XXVI. 206-245) with Mather's of the same events (Magnalia, VII. 64-93) will find the former to be to a great extent a mere transcript of the latter, with occasionally an interpolation. (Hist. Col., XXVI. 220-224); a strain of reflection (Ibid., 233, 234); II. 42.

1 Collection of Proceedings, 10.
2 Williamson, History of Maine,

which broke out in the eastern country about the same time.

French intrigues

with the Indians.

1698.

Oct. 3.

1

The calamities which were impending had a quite different source. Neither at the French court, nor by its military or ecclesiastical servants in Canada, had it been supposed that the war between New England and New France had been any thing more than suspended by the treaty of Ryswick. In the five years that had since elapsed, preparations for the renewal of hostilities had at no time been remitted by the soldiers and priests at Quebec and Montreal. "In the present juncture," thought the Count de Frontenac, when he had had six months to reflect on the news of peace, "there August. is nothing better to be done than to inspire the Iroquois with distrust of the New-Englanders." Villebon, Governor of Nova Scotia, wrote home to the French ministry that he had not force enough to obstruct the restoration by the English of the fort at Pemaquid, and of the settlements along the Kennebec, but that he hoped to accomplish that object by means of the neighboring savages. Frontenac died, and the Nov. 28. inconstant Iroquois, relieved from the terror of his name, showed a disposition to withdraw from engagements which they had made with him.3 De Callières, his successor, pursued with scarcely less skill his method of alternate intimidation and caresses. He piqued the savages with the assurance that the English claimed them as subjects, while the French respected them as voluntary 4 allies. He invited some of their chiefs to MonSept. 8. treal, and obtained their consent to a sort of treaty which he persuaded them need not disturb their friendly relations with the English. He lost no opportunity for establishing priests and missionary stations among them,

1700.

5

2

4 Ibid., 242, 247, 364.

5 Ibid., 252.

"not so much because they appeared disposed for religious instruction," but because of the utility of having persons among them "who should inform the GovernorGeneral of their movements, and disconcert the intrigues of the English, who were little to be feared in that part of the country, unless they had the Five Nations for allies." 1 De Callières died, and again the advantage of the personal influence of an able statesman was lost. The most that could be done by his successor, De Vaudreuil, lately Governor of Montreal, was to obtain an engagement from the Iroquois of neutrality in the existing war.2

1703.

May 26.

With the Abenaquis on the north of New England the solicitations of the French had been more successful, and a close friendship had been established. Some families of these savages, converts to Romanism, were collected in two villages, called Beçancour and St. François, on the south side of the river St. Lawrence, near to the town of Three Rivers.3 At Norridgewock, on the Kennebec, close to the old English settlements, only thirty miles from the present capital of Maine, was another station, an important centre of communication and influence, superintended by the Jesuit, Sebastian Rasle.

eastern

Relieved for the present from anxiety about the Iroquois, the new French Governor turned his attention towards the northern frontier of New England. Two months had not passed since the treaty of Casco, when on one day Hostilities six or seven bands of savages, some of them led in the by French officers, fell upon the scattered settle- country. ments. "They committed," says the calm French Aug. 10. historian, Charlevoix, "some ravages of little consequence. They killed about three hundred men. But the essential point was to engage the Abenaquis in such a manner that

1 Charlevoix, II. 285.

2 Ibid., 289.

8 Williamson, History of Maine, II. 40.