Boston was now a vigorous town, and held probably for the next forty years a larger space in the view which Europe took of the New World than has belonged to her since. Forty topsail vessels were at this time building in her ship-yards. She was despatching to sea twice as many sail as New York, and Newport was far behind her. Fortunes were relatively large, and that of John Erving, the father of Shirley’s son-in-law, was perhaps the largest of its day. He earned a few dollars in ferrying passengers across to Cambridge on a Commencement Day; put them into fish for Lisbon, there into fruit for London, and the receipts into other commodities for the return voyages, until the round of barter, abundantly repeated, made him the rich man that he became, and one who could give tea to his guests. The privateers of the merchants brought royal interest on their outlay, as they captured goods from the French and Spanish traders. Yankee wit turned sometimes unpromising plunder to a gain. One vessel brought in “a bale of papal indulgencies,” taken from a Spanish prize. Fleet, the printer, bought them, and printed his ballads on their backs. Another Boston merchant, of Huguenot stock, had given the town a public hall. This benevolent but keen gentleman, of a limping gait, did not live long to add to the fortune which he inherited. The first use that Faneuil Hall was put to was when James Lovell, the schoolmaster and a writer in the local magazines, delivered a eulogy there on this same Peter Faneuil,[288] while the loyal Bostonians glanced from the speaker to the likeness of George II., which had already been hung on its walls. Shirley with the rest saw that war with France could not be far off. There was preparation for it in the treaty with the Six Nations, which was made at Philadelphia in July, 1742. In August Shirley himself had treated with the eastern Indians at Fort St. George’s. The next year (1743) the line of western settlements in Massachusetts was strengthened by the occupation, under William Williams, of Poontoosuck, now Pittsfield, and Williams was later instructed to establish Fort Shirley (at Heath), Fort Pelham (at Rowe), and Fort Massachusetts (in Adams, near the Williamstown line).