After an original in the collection of _Proclamations_ in the library of the Mass. Hist. Society. Cf. _Mem. Hist. Boston_, iii. p. 181; Sparks's _Washington_, iii. 322; Niles's _Principles and Acts_ (1876), p. 127. Curwen records, when the proclamation reached London, that its prohibition of plunder "was a source of comfort."] Washington gradually moved his remaining army to New York, not without apprehension at one time that he would have to direct them to Rhode Island, for a fog had befooled some people in Newport into sending him a message that the British fleet was in the offing there. He left Cambridge himself April 4th, not for Virginia, as some good people imagined he would do, out of loyalty to his province,[474] but to defend as he could the line of the Hudson, of which signs were already accumulating that it was the game for each side to secure. A few of the enemy's ships still hung about Nantasket Roads, and some desultory fighting occurred in the harbor.[475] The British, however, failed to prevent some important captures of munition vessels being made. It was not till June that General Lincoln, with a militia force, brought guns to bear upon the still lingering enemy, when they sailed away, and Boston was at last free of a hostile force. It is now necessary to follow two other movements, which had been begun while the siege of Boston was in progress, the one to the north, and the other to the south. The exploits of Allen and Arnold at Ticonderoga, already related, had invited further conquests; but the Continental Congress hesitated to take any steps which might seem to carry war across the line till the Canadians had the opportunity of casting in their lot with their neighbors. On the 1st of June, 1775, Congress had distinctly avowed this purpose of restraint; and they well needed to be cautious, for the Canadian French had not forgotten the bitter aspersions on their religion which Congress had, with little compunction, launched upon its professors, under the irritation of the Quebec Act. Still their rulers were aliens, and the traditional hatred of centuries between races is not easily kept in abeyance. Ethan Allen was more eager to avail himself of this than Congress was to have him; but the march of events converted the legislators, and the opportunity which Allen grieved to see lost was not so easily regained when Congress at last authorized the northern invasion. Arnold and Allen had each aimed to secure the command of such an expedition, the one by appealing to the Continental Congress, the other by representations to that of New York. Allen had also gone in person to Philadelphia, and he and his Green Mountain Boys were not without influence upon Congress, in their quaint and somewhat rough ways, as their exuberant patriotism later made the New York authorities forget their riotous opposition to the policy which that province had been endeavoring to enforce in the New Hampshire Grants.