The White and the Gold (72 page)

It may be assumed that this particular officer had been selected for two reasons. The first was to demonstrate the belief held in New England that one man was as good as another and a subaltern as worthy of respect as an admiral. The second was the capacity of this particular underling to face a situation with aplomb. At any rate, he
refused to be put out of countenance. Saluting the governor with a flourish, he looked about him at the assembled company with a not at all respectful eye before handing a letter to Count Frontenac. If the governor read English (which was very unlikely), he refused to acknowledge it. The letter was turned over to an interpreter.

It was a demand for the surrender of Quebec, couched in far from gracious terms; in fact, the kind of communication which could have been expected from a man as completely self-made as stout Sir William. He insisted on the relinquishment “of your forts and castles undemolished, and the King’s and other stores unimbezzled, together with a surrender of all your persons and estates to my dispose.… Your answer positive in an hour returned by your own trumpet, with the return of mine, is required upon the peril that will arise.”

As the interpreter finished the letter, the English subaltern drew a watch from his pocket, pointed a caloused forefinger at the time, and then handed the timepiece to the governor.

“It is now ten o’clock,” he declared. “The answer must be had before eleven.”

There was an angry clamor in the room at this, and one voice demanded loudly that, inasmuch as Sir William Phips was a pirate (this referred to an attack he had made on Acadia), the messenger should be hanged in full view of the English fleet.

The governor raised a hand for silence. He said in a calm voice that he would not keep the messenger waiting as long as an hour for his answer. The English colonists, he declared, were no better than rebels against their rightful King, and it was the intention of his master, the King of France, to replace King James on the British throne by force of arms. “Even if I had a mind to accept these far from gracious conditions,” he continued, “would these brave gentlemen give their consent?”

The messenger asked if the governor would put his refusal in writing.

“No!” cried Frontenac in a voice which had suddenly lost all graciousness, and throwing the communication from Phips to the floor. “I will answer your general only by the mouths of my cannon.”

The carefully staged scene came to an end. The subaltern was blindfolded a second time and he was escorted with the same roundabout pretenses to the waterfront where his boat was waiting.

The struggle which ensued was to prove a far from palatable but a highly useful lesson to the English colonists. Convinced of the
justice of their cause—for the ravaging of their frontiers by fire and sword had been unprovoked—and obsessed with the belief that men of free democratic training could not be withstood, they had planned the campaign with all the carelessness that such optimism breeds. There was no leader of much military experience with either the land forces or the fleet. Sir William Phips might be brave and bluff and lucky (they seem to have counted on his proverbial good fortune), but he had no knowledge of naval tactics. He now found himself faced with the same situation which almost undid a splendid general named James Wolfe three quarters of a century later, and the truth must have been plain to him that he would not find success as easy here as locating a sunken ship on a shark-toothed reef.

The preparations for the expedition had been made with amateurish dispatch and unconcern. There was nothing but the hastiest organization, no established plan for co-ordination among the ships. There was a desperate shortage of ammunition, the food supplies were inadequate, no pilot had been provided for the St. Lawrence. Go out and fight, seems to have been the tenor of the instructions, and may the God Who makes men free make you victorious.

Sir William did the best he could, although he wasted a great deal of time in a nervous tendency to hold interminable councils of war. As a result of this delaying, a force of eight hundred men arrived from Quebec in time to help in the defense, marching in with much beating of jubilant drums and loud acclaim from the people and the garrison. Phips did not allow himself to be discouraged by these unexpected reinforcements (by the over-all plan Montreal should have been in English hands by this time) but decided to make a two-pronged effort. He landed troops at Beauport first to make an attack on the rear of the city. He seems to have known of the path which Wolfe took later but preferred the other approach. He did not know, however, that Frontenac had built a wall along the back entrance to the town and that strong forces would be needed to carry it. The second half of the plan was to bombard the town from the water at the same time.

While the New Englanders planned their attack Frontenac was organizing his defense with a vigor unusual in a man of his years. Even the most Plutarchian of men (and the old count deserved this appellation) are subject to the limitations of age. They must have their sleep lest they fall into naps at councils of war and startle their
subordinates with their snoring and they tire quickly of the effort involved in the personal supervision of detail. The governor was as much subject to these symptoms as any other general of seventy, but for the period of the siege he managed to rise above them. He saw to everything himself: he inspected the guns, he mingled with the troops, he went on tours of reconnaissance and often at night drew a startled
Qui vive?
from the men who stood at sentry on the new palisade around the heights.

He knew that the self-made commander of the English expedition was making all the mistakes which might be expected of an amateur soldier: that the land attack was to be launched openly and with no attempt at surprise, that the bombardment of the town could be expected at any moment and so would precede the landing of forces along the St. Charles. He was aware also, however, that thirty-four ships of war were in the harbor and that the invading force far outnumbered the garrison. Unexpected things can happen under these circumstances, and the governor did not allow himself the usually costly luxury of overconfidence.

This was the apotheosis of the venerable leader, the supreme moment of his career. He seemed to slough off the years, his gray mustaches seemed to bristle with energy, and his eyes burned with fighting spirit.

The land attack was bravely carried out under the command of Major Walley, but a defending force under Ste. Hélène, the second of the Le Moyne brothers, waged a successful delaying action and it inflicted losses on the invaders. When it became certain that the attack was going to bog down in the mud and the underbrush, Ste. Hélène was transferred to Lower Town to command the batteries there. Phips had opened fire prematurely, as Frontenac had expected, with all his guns. The batteries of the town replied in kind. Much damage was done on both sides, but the supplies of ammunition on the ships ran out quickly and their fire diminished and finally ceased.

In the meantime the land forces had not yet crossed the St. Charles and were now making an effort to get over the ford. Ste. Hélène, who moved from one point of need to another, had taken charge of the fighting along the river again and was mortally wounded at the same moment that his elder brother Charles was hit by a spent bullet. The death of the gallant Ste. Hélène was the worst loss the
French cause sustained, for the English effort was suspended the next day and the spent troops taken back to the ships.

The fleet, badly riddled by the fire from the batteries on the rock, withdrew behind the Island of Orleans to refit for the return voyage. The effort to capture Quebec had failed.

Frontenac had gambled and won. Convinced that only audacity would restore French prestige, he had risked the consequences of a direct attack on the New England colonies and had now successfully countered the angry reprisals. He had accomplished what he had been sent out to do. The white and gold standard still floated above the Château of St. Louis.

October 22, 1692

The particular section of Canada which was most open to Indian attack lay along the banks of the St. Lawrence from Three Rivers to Montreal and beyond. In this vulnerable area stood a fort which was called Castle Dangerous because of the excessive peril in which its inhabitants existed. This was Fort Verchères, which was on the south bank of the river, about twenty miles below Montreal. It was therefore only a short distance from the Richelieu River, the route taken by Iroquois war parties. The mouth of the Richelieu was always under watch and guard, and the wily redskins had fallen into the habit of leaving the water before reaching the junction point with the St. Lawrence and striking inland. After a few miles they would find themselves in sight of the fort and blockhouse (connected by a covered passage) of Verchères. It had suffered so many attacks and alarms that the inhabitants thereabouts lived in constant dread.

Castle Dangerous belonged to the Sieur de Verchères, who had been an officer in the Carignan regiment. He had settled down with more good will and determination than most of his fellow officers and had been reasonably successful over the years.

A curious spell of overconfidence seems to have invested the Verchères domain on this morning of October 22. The seigneur was on duty at Quebec and Madame de Verchères was in Montreal. It had been a good season in spite of the constant alarms which had kept men as well as women indoors. The fields were high with waving
corn, the pumpkins were ripe and yellow, the last of the melons remained to be gathered, and the trees were laden with fruit. The sun had been so bright and cheerful this fine October morning that the settlers had decided to risk gathering this bountiful harvest. They were out in the fields, and the cheerful sound of their voices could be heard from all parts of the cultivated area as they labored with sickle and hoe.

The fourteen-year-old daughter of the family, Madeleine, was at the wharf on the riverbank, which was close to the main entrance of the fort. The settlers had a name of their own for wharves, calling them
mouille-pieds
, which meant “wet feet”; but this did not concern small Madeleine (from the descriptions available she seems to have been petite and rather pretty) because she was probably expecting her mother from Montreal and so would not have dared put on her best kid-topped shoes with tasseled drawstrings. A hired man whose name was Laviolette was with her.

A sound of musket fire reached them from the direction of the fields where the settlers were at work. Laviolette, with his greater height, could see more of what was happening than the girl. In a voice of great panic he cried: “Run, mademoiselle, run! The Iroquois!” She saw then that the fields had filled almost in the winking of an eye with naked top-knotted warriors screeching their triumphant battlecries and killing the unarmed workers as fast as they could run them down.

She turned and made for the fort, followed by the man Laviolette. Her mind was filled with supplications to God and the Holy Virgin but at the same time busy with thoughts of what might be done. There were only two soldiers in the fort, she knew, in addition to her two brothers, aged twelve and ten, a very old man of eighty or thereabouts, and a number of women with infant children. They reached the fort uninjured in the face of a heavy spatter of Iroquois bullets.

“To arms! To arms!” cried the girl.

Outside the gate were two weeping women who had seen their husbands cut down and killed by the fierce marauders, and it required a firm hand and a display of confidence, both of which the child managed to achieve, to get them inside. Madeleine closed the gate herself and drove the crossbeams into place.

She found the two soldiers in the blockhouse, which was safer
than the somewhat dilapidated fort. One had hidden himself and the other was standing over a budge barrel of powder with a lighted fuse in his hand.

“What are you going to do?” she cried.

The man answered in a quavering voice, “Light the powder and blow us all up.”

“You are a miserable coward!” said the girl, driving him away from the ammunition supply.

She proceeded then to instill courage into the huddled group about her. They must fight as though they were all soldiers and numerous enough to hold the Indians off, she said, and perhaps God, Who was watching them as she spoke, would send them help in time. The rest were encouraged by her words. First her two young brothers and then the soldiers in a shamefaced silence took guns to the loopholes and began to fire on the Indians in the fields. By running from one loophole to another, while the women loaded the guns for them, they were able to create the impression that a sizable garrison held the fort.

Neither time nor space is available to tell in full detail the story of what followed. For a week the little band of defenders kept up their brave pretense. The four men, counting the octogenarian, the two boys, and the petticoated commander slept at intervals only and never at night. They stood guard in the bastion of the fort and at the loopholes in the blockhouse in the daytime, firing briskly when the bronze skin of a hostile warrior showed in the fields or in the cover of the trees. At night they paced the platforms to keep awake and kept up encouraging cries of “All’s well!” at regular intervals. The gallant little band was so successful in its pretense of being an adequate and alert garrison that the Iroquois, still lurking in the woods, did not risk an attack. It became known later that the redskins held a council of war and decided that the chance of carrying a fort so well defended was slight.

During this week of effort and strain the meager garrison took their orders without question and drew their inspiration from the girl of fourteen. In the desperate moment of time when she had first seen the war party issuing from the trees she had ceased to be a child. An adult resolution had taken possession of her. Knowing the full weakness of her tiny band—the soldiers had displayed their clay feet in the first moments of the attack, her brothers were still
children, the old man could do no more than dodder about the loopholes—she drove them with a fierce energy and never allowed them a moment’s ease. She slept little herself and consumed the cold scraps of food which the women prepared with an eye on the fields and the line of trees. She preached at them and prayed with them when their will to go on wavered. She sometimes swayed unsteadily with the weight of the musket which she always carried (and used also to good effect), her face became pale and wan, her eyes were shadowed and deep-sunken. But never for a moment did she give way to her fears.