Such means alone would not attain the desired end. Nothing, the Governor knew, would avail except acknowledged mastery over the Five Nations. The most obvious confession of weakness on the French side in Denonville's disastrous time had been the evacuation of Fort Frontenac; and never had Denonville's successor slackened his determination to reoccupy the post, which, if he had arrived in Canada a day or two earlier, would not have been abandoned. The time came in the summer of 1695. A force, secretly and quickly gathered, was sent up from Montreal; the walls of the fort still standing were repaired; and the Iroquois were startled by the news that the post, which they most dreaded, and which most menaced their confederacy, was again manned by a French garrison. Frontenac was just in time. The day after the expedition started, orders came from France that the fort should not be reoccupied; but he refused to recall his troops, and set himself to justify, by further measures, his disobedience to the home Government. [Sidenote: _Frontenac's expedition against the Five Nations._] In July, 1696, he set out from Montreal at the head of {118} over 2,000 men. The military strength of Canada was well represented; there were French soldiers of the line, Canadian militia, and friendly Indians. With the old Governor went his best officers--Callières leading the van of the march, Vaudreuil bringing up the rear. The force reached Fort Frontenac, crossed Lake Ontario, and, landing at the mouth of the Oswego river, worked their way up, by stream and lake and portage, towards the goal of the expedition--Onondaga, the central town and meeting-place of the Five Nations. What had happened before happened again. The Indians retreated into the forest before superior numbers, leaving the French a barren conquest over the smouldering ashes of the native town and the standing corn. The Oneidas' village and maize fields were also laid waste, and then the invaders retraced their steps. [Sidenote: _Death of Frontenac._] Though the expedition was recorded by the French as a success, Frontenac had done no more than Denonville in his march against the Senecas, and a writer on the English side contemptuously refers to it as 'a kind of heroic dotage'.[14] The show of force, however, seems to have had the effect of inclining the Iroquois to peace, of proving once more that the French were more active than the English, and that the arm of _Onontio_ was longer than that of the Governor of New York. Early in 1698 came news of the Peace of Ryswick. The Five Nations were subjects neither of England nor of France, but both Canada and New York claimed them. Sturdily to the last, Frontenac repelled English pretensions and half-hearted Indian advances; but the hand of death was upon him, and on November 28, 1698, he died at Quebec, in the seventy-eighth year of his age. [Footnote 14: Colden, vol. i, chap. xii, p. 202.] [Sidenote: _His services to Canada._]