Thus, through the beneficence of France, England, provided that she renounced all pretension to the rest of the continent, would become the rightful owner of an attenuated strip of land reaching southward 51 from the Kennebec along the Atlantic seaboard. The document containing this magnanimous proposal was preserved in the Château St. Louis at Quebec till the middle of the eighteenth century, when, the boundary dispute having reached a crisis, and commissioners of the two powers having been appointed to settle it, a certified copy of the paper was sent to France for their instruction.[46] Father Bobé had advised that France should not trust solely to the justice of her claims, but should back right with might, and build forts on the Niagara, the Ohio, the Tennessee, and the Alabama, as well as at other commanding points, to shut out the English from the West. Of these positions, Niagara was the most important, for the possession of it would close the access to the Upper Lakes, and stop the western tribes on their way to trade at Albany. The Five Nations and the governor of New York were jealous of the French designs, which, however, were likely enough to succeed, through the prevailing apathy and divisions in the British colonies. “If those not immediately concerned,” writes a member of the New York council, “only stand gazing on while the wolff is murthering other parts of the flock, it will come to every one’s turn at last.” The warning was well founded, but it was not heeded. Again: “It is the policy of the French to attack one colony at a time, and the others are so besotted as to sit still.”[47] For gaining the consent of the Five Nations to the building of a 52 French fort at Niagara, Vaudreuil trusted chiefly to his agent among the Senecas, the bold, skilful, and indefatigable Joncaire, who was naturalized among that tribe, the strongest of the confederacy. Governor Hunter of New York sent Peter Schuyler and Philip Livingston to counteract his influence. The Five Nations, who, conscious of declining power, seemed ready at this time to be all things to all men, declared that they would prevent the French from building at Niagara, which, as they said, would “shut them up as in a prison.”[48] Not long before, however, they had sent a deputation to Montreal to say that the English made objection to Joncaire’s presence among them, but that they were masters of their land, and hoped that the French agent would come as often as he pleased; and they begged that the new King of France would take them under his protection.[49] Accordingly, Vaudreuil sent them a present, with a message to the effect that they might plunder such English traders as should come among them.[50]