The war made little progress. The expedition against Port Royal in 1707 was a failure, and the frontier towns were still harassed. The news of Marlborough’s victories was inspiriting, and Boston could name a part of its main thoroughfare after the great soldier; but while she planted guns on her out-wharves and hoisted a tar-barrel to her beacon’s top, and while Colonel Vetch marshalled her troops,[201] she waited in vain for the English army to arrive, in concert with which the New England forces were to make a renewed attack on Port Royal in 1709. Rhode Island sent her war-vessels and two hundred men, and they too lay listlessly in Nantasket roads. Schuyler, of Albany, meanwhile started to conduct four Mohawks or Maqua chiefs to England, where he hoped to play upon the imagination of the queen; and in August, while the weary New Englanders were waiting for the signal to embark, Schuyler brought the savages to Boston, and Colonel Hobby’s regiment was mustered for their diversion.[202] Very likely they were taken to see the “celebrated Cotton Mather,” as the man who had not long before “brought in another tongue to confess the great Saviour of the world,” as he himself said of a tract in the language of the Iroquois, which he had printed in Boston (1707) and supplied to the Dutch and English traders among that people. Distractions and waiting wore away the time; but the English forces never came, and another Port Royal attempt proved wretchedly futile. That autumn (October, 1709) the New England governors met at Rehoboth, and prepared an address to the queen urging another attempt. In the face of these events the Massachusetts colony had to change its London agent. Sir Henry Ashurst died, and the House would have chosen Sir William Ashurst against Dudley’s protest, if Sir William would have accepted. They now selected their own Jeremiah Dummer, but against his desires.