Nicholson dallied in Boston for a week or two, eating good dinners, and then started for New York, to take the conduct of the land expedition, Saltonstall accompanying the Connecticut troops as far as Albany. Much farther no one of the land forces went, for word reached them of the sad disaster on the St. Lawrence and of the withdrawal of Walker’s fleet. The New England part of it came straggling back to Boston in October to find the town suffering under the loss of a great fire, which had happened on the night of October 2-3; most unmistakably the result, as Increase Mather told them in a sermon,—and perhaps believed,—of the way in which, during the fitting of the fleet, they had carried bundles on the Lord’s Day, and done other servile work! The cause of the expedition’s failure can be more reasonably indicated: delay in starting, an ill-organized method of supplies, bad pilotage, and incompetent leaders. Walker and Hill sailed direct for England, and in October, while the deputies of the province were bolstering their courage in asking the monarch for another attempt, the English mind was being filled with charges of want of proper coöperation on the part of the New Englanders as the all-sufficient cause of the disaster. Dummer, in London, vindicated his people as well as he could in a _Letter to a Noble Lord concerning the late expedition to Canada_.[209] In August of the following year (1712) Bolingbroke made a truce with France, the news of which reached Boston from Newfoundland in October (24th). It resulted in the following spring (March 31, 1713) in the Treaty of Utrecht, by which England acquired Acadia with its “ancient limits,” whatever they might be, for we shall see it was a question. The news arrived amid another corn panic. Two hundred angry and perhaps hungry men broke open Arthur Mason’s storehouse and seized the stock of grain. Capt. Belcher sent off another shipload, despite the remonstrance of the selectmen; but the mob stopped short of pulling down Belcher’s house about his ears. “Hardest fend off,” was his word. Peace secured, Dudley despatched from Boston, November 6, 1713, John Stoddard and John Williams to proceed to Albany, thence by Lake Champlain to Quebec, to negotiate with Vaudreuil for the restoration of prisoners.[210] * * * * *