The arrival of Phipps in Boston with his shattered and diminished fleet, and shrunken and disheartened forces, produced a feeling almost of despair. The success of the expedition had been counted on with the greatest certainty. Cotton Mather declares that he "never understood that any of the faithful did in their prayers arise to any _assurance_ that the expedition should prosper in all respects; yet they sometimes in their devotions uttered their persuasion that Almighty God had heard them in this thing, that the English army should not fall by the hands of the French enemy." The higher criticism would probably detect in this declaration a large _ex post facto_ element. The English army did not exactly fall by the hands of the French enemy; but between the French enemy, cold, tempest and sickness, the expedition had been a most disastrous failure, which "the faithful" had certainly been far from thinking was, or could be, in the designs of Providence. There was no money in the treasury with which to pay the troops, who soon began to be clamorous and threatened mutiny. Finally, an issue of paper money was decided on, and the difficulty was thus tided over; but it was long before this questionable currency, which was only receivable in payment of public debts, and which for a time circulated at a discount of from twenty-five to thirty per cent., was fully redeemed. The period now opening was destined to be one of savage border warfare. The Iroquois--particularly the Mohawks--were still on the war-path, and were resuming all their ancient boldness in their attacks on the French settlements. In the spring of 1691 there were some informal and, as they turned out, futile negotiations for peace, brought on by the fact that a party of Mohawks who had captured ten mission Indians near Chambly, sent them back a few days later by three of their own people, who entered the fort at St. Louis unarmed, and began to talk of peace. Callieres, the governor of Montreal, did not quite know what to make of it, and meantime kept his troops scouring the neighbourhood. It seems probable that the Mohawks were really more anxious to draw away their kinsmen of the Laprairie mission from the French than to make peace with the latter. On more than one occasion the mission Indians had shown reluctance in making war on their own people, and something of the same feeling existed on the side of the heathen warriors, who always hoped that they might some day reclaim their separated brethren. Meantime the raiding went on, but took the form chiefly of killing the cattle and burning the houses of the settlers, though now and again one or two of the latter would be killed or carried off. It was in the early summer of 1691 that a somewhat memorable incident in this wild warfare occurred. A party of forty or fifty Oneidas had in one of their forays taken possession of an abandoned house at Repentigny, a point on the north shore of the river St.