A Historical Geography of the British Colonies, Vol. V: Canada—Part I, HistoricalLucas, Charles Prestwood, Sir
History
A Historical Geography of the British Colonies, Vol. V: Canada—Part I, Historical
Lucas, Charles Prestwood, Sir
Canada -- History -- To 1763 (New France)
The French, to quote Colden's words,[10] had 'got nothing but dry
blows by this expedition.' Denonville had not done enough. He had
enraged the confederate Indians without crippling them. A few months
before, with odious treachery, he had ordered some friendly Iroquois
to be kidnapped and sent to France to serve in the galleys. The
tribesmen of the prisoners neither forgave nor forgot, and in less
than two {112} years' time they paid the debt. On the island of
Montreal, some eight miles above the town to the south-west, at the
head of rapids now cut by a canal, and at the lower end of the broad
reach of the St. Lawrence--which bears the name of Lake St.
Louis--was the settlement of Lachine. At the beginning of August,
1689, at dead of night and under cover of a storm, many hundred
Iroquois warriors broke in upon the settlers. Two hundred of the
French were butchered there and then. One hundred and twenty were
carried off, some to be tortured and burnt almost within sight of
their countrymen, others to be gradually done to death in the lodges
of the Five Nations. A detachment of eighty French soldiers was also
cut to pieces, and outside forts and palisades the country was a
scene of death and desolation.
[Footnote 10: _History of the Five Nations_ (3rd ed.), vol. i, chap.
v, p. 82.]
[Sidenote: _Abandonment of Fort Frontenac. Recall of Denonville and
return of Frontenac._]
The horrors of Lachine stand out in Canadian history as a kind of
Sicilian Vespers or Massacre of St. Bartholomew. The upper part of
the colony, Montreal and its neighbourhood, was paralysed with
terror, and once more, for a moment, the Iroquois seemed to threaten
the very existence of New France. It was not so in fact. Below Three
Rivers Canada was safe, and the savages did not, as in old days,
parade their triumph beneath the cliffs of Quebec. Meanwhile
Denonville had already been recalled, his last act being to order in
his panic the evacuation and destruction of Fort Frontenac; and the
old Frenchman, after whom that fort had been named, came back in his
seventieth year to save and to rule Canada.
[Sidenote: _Callières._]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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