The year 1710 opened with rumors from Albany about preparations in Canada for an onset along the frontier, and it was not till July (15) that flags and guns at the Castle and Sconce, with drum-beats throughout the streets, told the expectant Bostonians that General Nicholson, who was to head a new expedition, had arrived. It was candle-light before he landed, and the letters and despatches at once busied the government. A little later the council (July 24) entertained that commander, with Vetch and Hobby, at the Green Dragon Tavern; and four days afterwards Governor Saltonstall, from Connecticut, reached Boston, and the contingent of that colony, three hundred men, was on the spot in four weeks from the warning. In September the armament sailed,—twelve ships-of-war and twenty-four transports, of which fourteen carried Massachusetts troops, two New Hampshire, three Rhode Island, and five those of Connecticut. On the 26th of October (1710), Nicholson and his force were back in Boston, flushed with the triumph which the capitulation of Port Royal had given them.[203] The town had need of some such divertissement. There had been a scarcity of grain, and when Captain Belcher attempted to despatch a ship laden with it the mob cut her rudder, and the excitement had not passed without more or less inflaming of the passions. The circle of Matherites had also disturbed the equanimity of the liberals in theology by an anonymous document, _Question and Proposals_, which aimed at ecclesiasticising everybody and everything,—a stroke of a dying cause. There was an antagonist equal to the occasion in John Wise, of Ipswich, and the Mather dynasty had less chance of revival after Wise’s book _The Churches’ Quarrel Espoused_ was launched upon the town.[204]