Up the Main Route to Canada

Great was the alarm in Canada when it became known that the enemy aimed at nothing less than the conquest of the colony.

Our special project presenting the definitive account of France in Canada by Francis Parkman, one of America’s greatest historians.

Previously in A Half-Century of Conflict, Volume 1. Continuing Chapter 7.

The attack on Canada by way of the Hudson and Lake Champlain was to have been commanded by Lord Lovelace or some officer of his choice; but as he was dead, Ingoldsby, his successor in the government of the province, jointly with the governors of several adjacent colonies who had met at New York, appointed Colonel Nicholson in his stead.[1] Nicholson went to Albany, whence, with about fifteen hundred men, he moved up the Hudson, built a stockade fort opposite Saratoga, and another at the spot known as the Great Carrying Place. This latter he called Fort Nicholson, — a name which it afterwards exchanged for that of Fort Lydius, and later still for that of Fort Edward, which the town that occupies the site owns to this day.[2] Thence he cut a rough roadway through the woods to where Wood Creek, choked with beaver dams, writhed through flat green meadows, walled in by rock and forest. Here he built another fort, which was afterwards rebuilt and named Fort Anne. Wood Creek led to Lake Champlain, and Lake Champlain to Chambly and Montreal, — the objective points of the expedition. All was astir at the camp. Flat-boats and canoes were made, and stores brought up from Albany, till everything was ready for an advance the moment word should come that the British fleet had reached Boston. Vetch, all impatience, went thither to meet it, as if his presence could hasten its arrival.

[1: “If I had not accepted the command, there would have been insuperable difficulties” (arising from provincial jealousies). — Nicholson to Sunderland, 8 July, 1709.]

[2: Forts Nicholson, Lydius, and Edward were not the same, but succeeded each other on the same ground.]

Reports of Nicholson’s march to Wood Creek had reached Canada, and Vaudreuil sent Ramesay, governor of Montreal, with fifteen hundred troops, Canadians, and Indians, to surprise his camp. Ramesay’s fleet of canoes had reached Lake Champlain, and was halfway to the mouth of Wood Creek, when his advance party was discovered by English scouts, and the French commander began to fear that he should be surprised in his turn; in fact, some of his Indians were fired upon from an ambuscade. All was now doubt, perplexity, and confusion. Ramesay landed at the narrows of the lake, a little south of the place now called Crown Point. Here, in the dense woods, his Indians fired on some Canadians whom they took for English. This was near producing a panic. “Every tree seemed an enemy,” writes an officer present. Ramesay lost himself in the woods, and could not find his army. One Deruisseau, who had gone out as a scout, came back with the report that nine hundred Englishmen were close at hand. Seven English canoes did in fact appear, supported, as the French in their excitement imagined, by a numerous though invisible army in the forest; but being fired upon, and seeing that they were entering a hornet’s nest, the English sheered off. Ramesay having at last found his army, and order being gradually restored, a council of war was held, after which the whole force fell back to Chambly, having accomplished nothing.

[Mémoire sur le Canada, Année 1709. This paper, which has been ascribed to the engineer De Léry, is printed in Collection de Manuscrits relatifs à la Nouvelle France, i. 615 (Quebec, 1883), printed from the MS. Paris Documents in the Boston State House. The writer of the Mémoire was with Ramesay’s expedition. Also Ramesay à Vaudreuil, 19 Octobre, 1709, and Vaudreuil au Ministre, 14 Novembre, 1709. Charlevoix says that Ramesay turned back because he believed that there were five thousand English at Wood Creek; but Ramesay himself makes their number only one thousand whites and two hundred Indians. He got his information from two Dutchmen caught just after the alarm near Pointe à la Chevelure (Crown Point). He turned back because he had failed to surprise the English, and also, it seems, because there were disagreements among his officers.]

Great was the alarm in Canada when it became known that the enemy aimed at nothing less than the conquest of the colony. One La Plaine spread a panic at Quebec by reporting that, forty-five leagues below, he had seen eight or ten ships under sail and heard the sound of cannon. It was afterwards surmised that the supposed ships were points of rocks seen through the mist at low tide, and the cannon the floundering of whales at play.[132] Quebec, however, was all excitement, in expectation of attack. The people of the Lower Town took refuge on the rock above; the men of the neighboring parishes were ordered within the walls; and the women and children, with the cattle and horses, were sent to hiding-places in the forest. There had been no less consternation at Montreal, caused by exaggerated reports of Iroquois hostility and the movements of Nicholson. It was even proposed to abandon Chambly and Fort Frontenac, and concentrate all available force to defend the heart of the colony. “A most bloody war is imminent,” wrote Vaudreuil to the minister, Ponchartrain.

[3: Monseigneur de Saint-Vallier et l’Hôpital Général de Québec, 203.]

Meanwhile, for weeks and months Nicholson’s little army lay in the sultry valley of Wood Creek, waiting those tidings of the arrival of the British squadron at Boston which were to be its signal of advance. At length a pestilence broke out. It is said to have been the work of the Iroquois allies, who thought that the French were menaced with ruin, and who, true to their policy of balancing one European power against the other, poisoned the waters of the creek by throwing into it, above the camp, the skins and offal of the animals they had killed in their hunting. The story may have some foundation, though it rests only on the authority of Charlevoix. No contemporary writer mentions it; and Vaudreuil says that the malady was caused by the long confinement of the English in their fort. Indeed, a crowd of men, penned up through the heats of midsummer in a palisaded camp, ill-ordered and unclean as the camps of the raw provincials usually were, and infested with pestiferous swarms of flies and mosquitoes, could hardly have remained in health. Whatever its cause, the disease, which seems to have been a malignant dysentery, made more havoc than the musket and the sword. A party of French who came to the spot late in the autumn, found it filled with innumerable graves.

The British squadron, with the five regiments on board, was to have reached Boston at the middle of May. On the twentieth of that month the whole contingent of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island was encamped by Boston harbor, with transports and stores, ready to embark for Quebec at ten hours’ notice.[4] When Vetch, after seeing everything in readiness at New York, returned to Boston on the third of July, he found the New England levies encamped there still, drilled diligently every day by officers whom he had brought from England for the purpose. “The bodies of the men,” he writes to Lord Sunderland, “are in general better than in Europe, and I hope their courage will prove so too; so that nothing in human probability can prevent the success of this glorious enterprise but the too late arrival of the fleet.”[5] But of the fleet there was no sign. “The government here is put to vast expense,” pursues Vetch, “but they cheerfully pay it, in hopes of being freed from it forever hereafter. All that they can do now is to fast and pray for the safe and speedy arrival of the fleet, for which they have already had two public fast-days kept.”

[4: Dudley to Sunderland, 14 August, 1709.]

[5: Vetch to Sunderland, 2 August, 1709. The pay of the men was nine shillings a week, with eightpence a day for provisions; and most of them had received an enlistment bounty of £12.]

If it should not come in time, he continues, “it would be the last disappointment to her Majesty’s colonies, who have so heartily complied with her royal order, and would render them much more miserable than if such a thing had never been undertaken.” Time passed, and no ships appeared. Vetch wrote again: “I shall only presume to acquaint your Lordship how vastly uneasy all her Majesty’s loyall subjects here on this continent are. Pray God hasten the fleet.”[6] Dudley, scarcely less impatient, wrote to the same effect. It was all in vain, and the soldiers remained in their camp, monotonously drilling day after day through all the summer and half the autumn. At length, on the eleventh of October, Dudley received a letter from Lord Sunderland, informing him that the promised forces had been sent to Portugal to meet an exigency of the European war. They were to have reached Boston, as we have seen, by the middle of May. Sunderland’s notice of the change of destination was not written till the twenty-seventh of July, and was eleven weeks on its way, thus imposing on the colonists a heavy and needless tax in time, money, temper, and, in the case of the expedition against Montreal, health and life.[7] What was left of Nicholson’s force had fallen back before Sunderland’s letter came, making a scapegoat of the innocent Vetch, cursing him, and wishing him hanged.

[6: Vetch to Sunderland, 12 August, 1709. Dudley writes with equal urgency two days later.]

[7: Letters of Nicholson, Dudley, and Vetch, 20 June to 24 October, 1709.]

In New England the disappointment and vexation were extreme; but, not to lose all the fruits of their efforts, the governors of Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island met and resolved to attack Port Royal if the captains of several British frigates then at New York and Boston would take part in the enterprise. To the disgust of the provincials, the captains, with one exception, refused, on the score of the late season and the want of orders.

A tenacious energy has always been a characteristic of New England, and the hopes of the colonists had been raised too high to be readily abandoned. Port Royal was in their eyes a pestilent nest of privateers and pirates that preyed on the New England fisheries; and on the refusal of the naval commanders to join in an immediate attack, they offered to the court to besiege the place themselves next year, if they could count on the help of four frigates and five hundred soldiers, to be at Boston by the end of March.[8] The Assembly of Massachusetts requested Nicholson, who was on the point of sailing for Europe, to beg her Majesty to help them in an enterprise which would be so advantageous to the Crown, “and which, by the long and expensive war, we are so impoverished and enfeebled as not to be in a capacity to effect.”[9]

[8: Joint Letter of Nicholson, Dudley, Vetch, and Moody to Sunderland, 24 October, 1709; also Joint Letter of Dudley, Vetch, and Moody to Sunderland, 25 October, 1709; Abstracts of Letters and Papers relating to the Attack of Port Royal, 1709 (Public Record Office); Address of ye Inhabitants of Boston and Parts adjacent, 1709. Moody, named above, was the British naval captain who had consented to attack Port Royal.]

[9: Order of Assembly, 27 October, 1709. Massachusetts had spent about £22,000 on her futile expedition of 1707, and, with New Hampshire and Rhode Island, a little more than £46,000 on that of 1709, besides continual outlay in guarding her two hundred miles of frontier, — a heavy expense for the place and time.]

Nicholson sailed in December, and Peter Schuyler soon followed. New York, having once entered on the path of war, saw that she must continue in it; and to impress the Five Nations with the might and majesty of the Queen, and so dispose them to hold fast to the British cause, Schuyler took five Mohawk chiefs with him to England. One died on the voyage; the rest arrived safe, and their appearance was the sensation of the hour. They were clad, at the Queen’s expense, in strange and gay attire, invented by the costumer of one of the theatres; were lodged and feasted as the guests of the nation, driven about London in coaches with liveried servants, conducted to dockyards, arsenals, and reviews, and saluted with cannon by ships of war. The Duke of Shrewsbury presented them to Queen Anne, — one as emperor of the Mohawks, and the other three as kings, — and the Archbishop of Canterbury solemnly gave each of them a Bible. Steele and Addison wrote essays about them, and the Dutch artist Verelst painted their portraits, which were engraved in mezzotint.[10] Their presence and the speech made in their name before the court seem to have had no small effect in drawing attention to the war in America and inclining the ministry towards the proposals of Nicholson. These were accepted, and he sailed for America commissioned to command the enterprise against Port Royal, with Vetch as adjutant-general.[11]

[10: See J. R. Bartlett, in Magazine of American History, March, 1878, and Schuyler, Colonial New York, ii. 34-39. The chiefs returned to America in May on board the “Dragon.” An elaborate pamphlet appeared in London, giving an account of them and their people. A set of the mezzotint portraits, which are large and well executed, is in the John Carter Brown collection at Providence. For photographic reproductions, see Winsor, Nar. and Crit. Hist., v. 107. Compare Smith, Hist. N. Y., i. 204 (1830).]

[11: Commission of Colonel Francis Nicholson, 18 May, 1710. Instructions to Colonel Nicholson, same date.]

From A Half-Century of Conflict, Volume 1, Chapter 7. by Francis Parkman

Volume 6 of Parkman’s History of France in North America titled “A Half-Century of Conflict” was itself published in two volumes. This means that “Volume 6” (consistent with how past books published on this website were called) must be called “Part 6”, instead – to avoid confusion. This book is Volume 1 of “A Half-Century of Conflict”. The next book in the series will be called “Part 6, A Half-Century of Conflict, Volume 2”.

The below is from Francis Parkman’s Preface to this book.

This book, forming Part VI. of the series called France and England in North America, fills the gap between Part V., “Count Frontenac,” and Part VII., “Montcalm and Wolfe;” so that the series now forms a continuous history of the efforts of France to occupy and control this continent.

In the present volumes the nature of the subject does not permit an unbroken thread of narrative, and the unity of the book lies in its being throughout, in one form or another, an illustration of the singularly contrasted characters and methods of the rival claimants to North America.

Like the rest of the series, this work is founded on original documents. The statements of secondary writers have been accepted only when found to conform to the evidence of contemporaries, whose writings have been sifted and collated with the greatest care. As extremists on each side have charged me with favoring the other, I hope I have been unfair to neither.

The manuscript material collected for the preparation of the series now complete forms about seventy volumes, most of them folios. These have been given by me from time to time to the Massachusetts Historical Society, in whose library they now are, open to the examination of those interested in the subjects of which they treat. The collection was begun forty-five years ago, and its formation has been exceedingly slow, having been retarded by difficulties which seemed insurmountable, and for years were so in fact. Hence the completion of the series has required twice the time that would have sufficed under less unfavorable conditions.

BOSTON, March 26, 1892

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