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the conquest of
Canada was resolved on; but
the fleet designed for the expedition, after a repulse at
Martinique, sailed for
Boston, freighted with the yel-
low fever, which destroyed two thirds of the mariners and soldiers on board.
For a season, hostilities in
Maine were suspended by a treaty of peace with the Abenakis; but, in less than a year, solely through the influence of the Jesuits, they were again in the field,
led by Villieu, the
French commander on the
Penobscot; and the village at
Oyster River, in New Hampshire, was the victim of their fury.
Ninety-four persons were killed and carried away.
The young wife of Thomas Drew was taken to the tribe at
Norridgewock: there, in midwinter, in the open air, during a storm of snow, she gave birth to her first-born, doomed by the savages to instant death.
In
Canada, the chiefs of the Micmacs presented to
Frontenac the scalps of English killed on the
Piscataqua.
Nor did the thought occur that such inroads were atrocious.
The Jesuit historian of
France relates, with pride, that they had their origin in the counsels and influence of the missionaries
Thury and Bigot; and, extolling the hardihood and the success of the foray, he passes a eulogy on the daring of Taxus, the bravest of the Abenakis.
Such is self-love; it has but one root, with a thousand branches.
The despot believed his authority from God, and his own personality to constitute the stale; the mistresses of kings were, without scruple, made by patent the mothers of hereditary legislators; the
English monopolist had no self-reproach for prohibiting the industry of the colonists; Louis XIV., James II., and his successors, Queen Anne, Bolingbroke, and
Lady Masham, thought it no harm to derive money from the slave-trade; and, in the pages of
Charlevoix, the unavailing
