From Southold, where Andros landed, he sent a few soldiers to protect his master's islands of Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard. He returned through Long Island to Manhattan, and exacted fresh assurances of good behaviour from all the Algonquin sachems in the neighbourhood. After a few weeks the rumour of Jesuit intrigues in the Mohawk valley led him to visit the Long House in person, to counteract this dangerous influence. French invasion of the Mohawk country. The Iroquois league was now at the height of its power. These barbarians had never forgotten Champlain's attack upon them at Ticonderoga,1 and seldom let slip any opportunity for harassing the French. They became so vexatious that early in 1666 Courcelle, the governor of Canada, set out with a party on snow-shoes to invade the Mohawk country. Courcelle with much difficulty reached Schenectady, the most advanced outpost of New Netherland, where he first learned of the capture of the province by Colonel Nicolls. He was obliged to retrace his steps without chastising the barbarians, for, hard as the advance had been through a frozen wilderness, he feared that sudden thaws and vernal mud might make retreat impossible. In the autumn of the same year Courcelle returned with the Marquis de Tracy, lieutenant-general of New France, and a powerful force of 1300 men, and they succeeded in burning five of the Mohawk "castles," or palisaded villages, and destroying an immense quantity of food that had been stored for the winter. The French beheld with astonishment how 1 See above, vol. i. p. 97. much these keen-witted barbarians had learned from the Dutch. Not only had they grown expert in the use of firearms and many carpenters' tools, but their forts were stout quadrangles twenty feet high, with formidable bastions at the corners. The destruction of these elaborate strongholds made a deep impression upon the dusky brethren of the Long House, for it showed them that their eastern door, at least, might be beaten in by Onontio2 and his pale-faced children. Governor Nicolls held that this French invasion of the Mohawk country was a trespass on the territory of New York, since he recognized a kind of Dutch overlordship over the Long House, and held that their rights of suzerainty had now passed over to the English. For a moment Nicolls dreamed of a general attack upon Canada, in which the New England colonies should take part, but such a scheme found little favour. A war against New France meant a war against Algonquins and in aid of Iroquois, and was likely to infuriate the Algonquins of New England, whose love for their brethren of Canada may not have been strong, but whose hate for the Iroquois sur 1 Parkman, Old Régime, i. 257. 2 Onontio (occasionally written Yonnondio) means Big Mountain, and is the Iroquois translation of the name of Charles de Montmagny, who was governor of Canada from 1636 to 1648. All the French governors of Canada were thereafter called Onontio by the Iroquois, among whom it was customary for the hereditary chief to inherit the name as well as the office of his predecessor. In like manner all the governors of Pennsylvania were called Onas, which means Quill, and is a translation of the name Penn. See Parkman's Jesuits, ii. 102. passed the hatreds of hell. Nicolls encouraged the Mohawks to resist the French, but neither under his administration nor that of Lovelace were adequate measures taken for securing a permanent Anglo-Iroquois alliance. French in the Long House. Meanwhile the sagacious and indefatigable rulers of New France were as ready to try persuasion as violence, and they found consummate instruments in the Jesuits. These devoted missionaries addressed themselves to the task of converting the Iroquois to Christianity and turning their hearts to an alliance with Onontio. With the trigues with Mohawks, who had suffered the chief damage from the French, the case was hopeless; but the other tribes - Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas — were more ready to listen. Some headway was made, and a few tawny warriors were baptized, while Courcelle began building a fortress at Cataraqui, where the river St. Lawrence flows out of Lake Ontario. This stronghold, which was finished in 1673 by Frontenac, and bore his name for more than eighty years, stood on the site of the present city of Kingston. Its immediate purpose was to serve as a base for expeditions across Lake Ontario against the central and western tribes of the Long House, and to cut off the lucrative fur trade in which these barbarians were the purveyors for the Dutch and English in New York. The moment when Andros was governor of New York was therefore a critical moment. If the Jesuit missionaries had won over the Long House, it is not improbable that New York would have become, and might perhaps have remained, a French province. Possibly the formation A critical of the American Union might have been moment. prevented. Certainly the history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would have been modified in many important particulars. The duke's .policy. There was imminent danger that the shortsighted policy of the Duke of York would play directly into the hands of the French. For a while James did what he could to favour the Jesuit missionaries, wishing to see the heathen of the New World brought into the fold mistaken of Rome, and failing to realize that every point gained by those good Jesuits was a nail in the coffin of his own American interests. At times, however, he seemed to wake up to the gravity of the situation, which Andros, being on the spot, understood much better than he. In the terrible summer of 1675, when the Wampanoags were working such havoc in the Plymouth colony and the Nipmucks in the central highlands of Massachusetts, while on the other hand the frontier settlements in Virginia and Maryland were being goaded into a war set afoot by wandering Susquehannocks,1 it was clearly a time for preserving friendly relations with the formidable Long House. Scarcely had Andros returned from his Connecticut expedition when he made up his mind to go in person to the Mohawks and secure their favour and that of their confederates. His journey took him far into the Indian country. It was a pleasant voyage, of course, to Albany, 1 See Old Virginia and Her Neighbours, ii. 58–63. Journey of the wilderness. making a brief stop at Esopus. After landing at Albany his party struck into the great Andros into Indian trail, the course of which has been closely followed in later days by the Erie Canal and the New York Central Railroad. After a march of about sixteen miles they came upon the Mohawk River, at a fording-place, where there was a tiny Dutch hamlet founded fourteen years before by Arendt van Corlear, a man of noble and generous nature. As a commissioner of Rensselaerwyck he had long been well known to the Indians, in whose minds his name stood as a synonym for truth and integrity. In 1667 this good Corlear came to a melancholy end. As Arendt van he was sailing on Lake Champlain he passed a rock whereon the waves were wont to dash and fly up wildly, and Indian folklore told of an ancestral Indian who haunted the spot and controlled the weather, so that passing canoes always threw a pipe or other small gift to this genius of the lake and prayed for a favourable wind. But Corlear not only neglected this wise precaution, but in his contempt for such heathen fancies made an unseemly gesture as he passed the rock; whereat the offended spirit blew a sudden gust which capsized his boat and drowned him.1 The Indian name of the village founded by Corlear was Onoaligone, but the village itself was Fate of Corlear. Corlear's village, Schenec tady. known to Indians and French simply as "Corlear's." The Dutch inhabitants, however, transferred to it the Iroquois name Schenectady, which was originally applied to 1 Colden's History of the Five Nations, London, 1755, i. 32. |