Nothing had been done meanwhile in the north. The first year of the war (1702) had seen Boston robbed of three hundred of her inhabitants by the scourge of small-pox, and New York stricken with a fatal fever brought out of the West Indies from which no man could rally. That dismal year lingered for many a day in the memory of the men of the middle colonies as “the time of the great sickness.” The northernmost border had been harried from Wells to Casco by the French Indians (1703); Deerfield, far away in the wilderness by the Connecticut, had been fearfully dealt with at dead of night, in the mid-winter of 1704, by a combined force of French and Indians; in 1705 the French in Acadia had brought temporary ruin upon the English trading posts in Newfoundland; and a French privateer had insolently come in open day into the Bay at New York, as if to show the English there how defenceless their great harbor was, with all the coast about it (1705). And yet there had been no counterstroke by the English,—except that Colonel Church, of Massachusetts, had spent the summer of 1704 in destroying as he could the smaller and less defended French and Indian villages upon the coasts which lay about the Penobscot and the Bay of Fundy. In 1707 a serious attempt was made to take Port Royal. Colonel March took a thousand men against the place, in twenty-three transports, convoyed by a man-of-war, and regularly laid siege to it; but lacked knowledge of the business he had undertaken and failed utterly. [Illustration: NEW YORK SLAVE MARKET ABOUT 1730]