These privateersmen, it turned out, were more to be feared for the present than the fleets of France. The Count d’Estaing was, indeed, despatched to America with twelve ships of the line and six frigates, with four thousand troops aboard; and his fleet appeared off Sandy Hook in midsummer, 1778, while Sir Henry Clinton was still fresh from his fright at Monmouth. But the too cautious admiral came and went, and that was all. He would not attempt an attack upon the English fleet within the bay at New York, though it was of scarcely half his strength. His pilots told him his larger ships could not cross the bar. Newport was the only other harbor the English held; and there he allowed Lord Howe to draw him off. A storm separated the fleets before they could come to terms, and his cruise ended peaceably in Boston harbor. But it was a heavy thing for England to have French fleets to reckon with, and embarrassments thickened very ominously about her. She had absolutely no hold on America, it seemed, outside the lines actually occupied by her armies at Newport and New York; the very sea was beset, for her merchantmen; and France was now kindled into war against her. [Illustration: REDUCED FACSIMILE OF INSTRUCTIONS FROM CONGRESS TO PRIVATEERS] [Illustration: CONTINENTAL LOTTERY BOOK] And yet the Americans, too, were beset. They had not only their long coasts to watch and British armies to thwart and checkmate, but their western borders also to keep, against Tory and savage. The Iroquois country, in particular, and all the long valleys of the Mohawk, the Unadilla, and the Susquehanna, were filled with the terrors of raid and massacre throughout that disappointing and anxious summer of 1778. The stubborn loyalists of the forest country, with their temper still of the untamed highlands of old Scotland or of the intractable country-sides of old England, had been driven into exile by the uncompromising patriots, their neighbors, who outnumbered them. But they had not gone far. They had made their headquarters, the more dogged and determined of them, at Niagara, until this score should be settled. Sir John Johnson was still their leader, for all he had been so discomfited before Fort Stanwix; and John Butler and Walter Butler, father and son, men touched with the savagery of the redmen, their allies. Joseph Brant, that masterful spirit who was a sort of self-appointed king among the savage Mohawks, did not often willingly forget the precepts of that Christian creed to which good Mr. Wheelock had drawn him in his boyhood, and held the redmen back when he could from every wanton deed of blood; but the Butlers stopped at nothing, and white men and red made common cause against the border settlements. Their cruel strokes were dealt both far and near. Upon a day in July, 1778, never to be forgotten, twelve hundred men fell upon the far-away Wyoming Valley upon the Susquehanna and harried it from end to end until it was black and desolate.