France and England in North America, Part V: Count Frontenac, New France, Louis XIVParkman, Francis
History
France and England in North America, Part V: Count Frontenac, New France, Louis XIV
Parkman, Francis
Canada -- History -- To 1763 (New France); Frontenac, Louis de Buade, comte de, 1620-1698
A panic seized the settlers, many of whom were without arms as well as
without leaders. They imagined the Canadians to be savages, who scalped
and butchered like the Iroquois. Their resistance was feeble and
incoherent, and Iberville carried all before him. Every hamlet was
pillaged and burned; and, according to the incredible report of the
French writers, two hundred persons were killed and seven hundred
captured, though it is admitted that most of the prisoners escaped. When
spring opened, all the English settlements were destroyed, except the
post of Bonavista and the Island of Carbonnière, a natural fortress in
the sea. Iberville returned to Placentia, to prepare for completing his
conquest, when his plans were broken by the arrival of his brother
Serigny, with orders to proceed at once against the English at Hudson's
Bay. [2]
[2] On the Newfoundland expedition, the best authority is the long diary
of the chaplain Baudoin, Journal du Voyage que j'ai fait avec M.
d'Iberville; also, Mémoire sur l'Entreprise de Terreneuve, 1696. Compare
La Potherie, I. 24-52. A deposition of one Phillips, one Roberts, and
several others, preserved in the Public Record Office of London, and
quoted by Brown in his History of Cape Breton, makes the French force
much greater than the statements of the French writers. The deposition
also says that at the attack of St. John's "the French took one William
Brew, an inhabitant, a prisoner, and cut all round his scalp, and then,
by strength of hands, stript his skin from the forehead to the crown, and
so sent him into the fortifications, assuring the inhabitants that they
would serve them all in like manner if they did not surrender."
St. John's was soon after reoccupied by the English.
Baudoin was one of those Acadian priests who are praised for services "en
empeschant les sauvages de faire la paix avec les Anglois, ayant mesme
esté en guerre avec eux." Champigny au Ministre, 24 Oct., 1694.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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