In spite of the massacre at Schenectady, New York suffered less than New England from border war. In 1691, in a second attack on the French settlement of La Prairie over against Montreal, the English and Dutch colonists achieved some success, carrying out the raid which they had planned, and cutting their way back hand to hand through a party of French troops who tried to bar their retreat. The Iroquois were the salvation of New York. Their raids into Canada safeguarded the rival colony, and when the Five Nations were not on the warpath, the French hesitated to attack their English allies, for fear of provoking a fresh incursion of savages. It has been seen that the Iroquois tended more and more to a policy of neutrality, worn by constant fighting, tired of English inaction, and discerning that their true interest lay in siding with neither French nor English. Still, with the exception of their converted countrymen settled in Canada, they were not likely to band with the French against the English. To do so would have been to break with old ties and traditions, to close their best market, to combine with their deadliest foes against friends of long standing, whose faults had been after all but faults of omission. This the French knew well: they were content to leave New York alone, provided they themselves were left alone by the Iroquois, and so long as {135} the traders of New York did not seriously threaten their command of the West. [Sidenote: _The Abenakis on the borders of New England._] It was otherwise in the case of New England. The Abenaki Indians on the borders of the New England colonies had always been in the French interest. Jesuit influence was strong among them: they had been taught that Christianity could go hand in hand with ferocity, and that murder of white heretics might be not only a pleasure but a duty. Here the object of the French was not to keep the Indians quiet, but to spur them on. As they dreaded lest their Indian allies on the upper lakes should come to terms with the Iroquois,[5] and enforced barbarities to make peace impossible, so in the closing years of the seventeenth century and the early years of the eighteenth, they incited the Abenaki warriors against the border settlements of Maine and New Hampshire, butchering, looting, carrying into captivity, their one object being to keep alive the taste of blood, lest, lured by the prospect of peaceful and profitable trade with the neighbouring English, the Abenakis should drift apart from New France. [Footnote 5: See above, p. 117.] [Sidenote: _Port Royal reoccupied by the French._] [Sidenote: _French and Indian raids on York, Wells, and Oyster River._]