In these wars five expeditions had been fitted out by the colonies to attack the enemy on the east, under Colonel Benjamin Church, and in his command were found the Cape Cod men. Thomas Dimmock, of Barnstable, fell, fighting gallantly, at the battle of Canso. He would not shelter himself, as did the other officers, but stood boldly out in the open cheering on his men—a conspicuous mark for sharpshooters. Major Walley, son of the old minister, was another officer—a gallant figure, handsome and debonair, as a portrait of him, in fine surtout, ruffles and periwig, testifies; and there was Caleb Williamson in command of the Plymouth forces, and Captain Gorham, later lieutenant-colonel, son of the old Indian fighter of Philip’s War. And Gorham, especially, did unique and valuable service in command of the “whaleboat fleet.” These light-draft boats, manned by whalemen and Indians, could transport men and supplies up the shallow bays and rivers to the spot where they were most needed; and without such a device, the enemy, stationed for the most part where the transports could not land troops, would have been hard come at by marches overland through the wilderness. At night, or in bad weather, the boats were taken ashore and turned over to serve as shelter. In 1704 Church called for fifty of these boats, and that winter visited every town on the Cape to recruit men. “For years after,” writes Amos Otis, “these old sailors and soldiers, seated in their roundabout chairs, within their capacious chimney-corners, would relate to the young their adventures in ‘the Old French Wars.’” In 1739 there was an abortive war with Spain when Cape men enlisted for an expedition to the Spanish Main where many died of disease, and there was no result beyond a further impoverishment of the country. And by 1745 England and France, drawn as they were into the War of the Austrian Succession, were fighting out in America “King George’s War.” In April of that year thirty-five hundred troops, chiefly “substantial persons and men of beneficial occupations,” sailed from Boston under another fighting Governor, Sir William Pepperell, to attack Louisburg, the “Gibraltar of America.” In this force the Seventh Massachusetts was known as the “Gorham Rangers” under the command of a Gorham of the third generation. With him, as it chanced, was a descendant of Richard Bourne, William by name, whom an Indian medicine-man had cured in childhood when white doctors had given him up as dying. William came scathless through the wars to die in old age, rich and respected, at Marblehead.