Walley in his _Journal_, apparently an honest piece of work, sums up comprehensively the causes of the failure: "The land army's failing, the enemy's too timely intelligence, lying three weeks within three days' sail of the place, by reason whereof they had time to bring in the whole strength of their country, the shortness of our ammunition, our late setting out, our long passage, and many sick in the army--these," he says, "may be reckoned as some of the causes of our disappointment." Reasons enough surely. On both sides the hand of Providence was seen. "Well may you speak of this country," writes Laval to Denonville, "as the country of miracles." Had Phipps arrived but one week sooner he would certainly, in Laval's opinion, have captured the city, and that he did not arrive sooner was due to unfavourable winds. Similarly, Sister Anne Bourdon, archivist of the Ursuline Convent, writes that, when the first news of the approach of the English was received, nothing was spared in the way of religious practices "to appease divine justice." The happy result was that "Heaven, granting our prayers, sent winds so contrary that the enemy in nine days only made the distance they might otherwise have made in half a day." So Mere Juchereau of the Hotel Dieu: "God doubtless stopped them, to give the Montrealers time to arrive." Bishop Saint Vallier improved the occasion to stimulate the piety of his people. "Let us," he said, "raise our eyes, my dear children, and see God holding the thunder in His hand, which He is ready to let fall on us. He is causing it now to rumble in order to awaken you from the slumber of your sins." On the English side no less solemn a view was taken of the events of the time. Governor Bradstreet, of Massachusetts, writing to the agents of the colony in England, speaks of "the awful frown of God in the disappointment of that chargeable [costly] and hazardous enterprise." "Shall our Father," he exclaims, "spit in our face, and we not be ashamed? God grant that we may be deeply humbled and enquire into the cause, and reform those sins that have provoked so great anger to smoke against the prayers of his people, and to answer us by terrible things in righteousness." Cotton Mather in like manner speaks of "an evident hand of Heaven, sending one unavoidable disaster after another." He also reports a saying of Phipps, that, though he had been accustomed to diving in his time, he "would say that the things which had befallen him in this expedition were too deep to be dived into." The total loss of life on the part of the New England forces, taking shipwreck and disease into account, must have run far into the hundreds. Phipps estimated his loss in the engagements at Quebec at thirty, and possibly the number of those actually killed did not much exceed that figure. On the Canadian side the number of killed has been placed at nine, and of the wounded at fifty-two.[50]