Mike Grimmington is held and “tortured” to compel him to betray the secrets of navigation at the different harbors of Hudson Bay, but Mate Grimmington tells no tales; for he learns that rumors of raid are in the air at Quebec. Though England and France are at peace, the fur traders of Quebec are asking commission for one Chevalier de Troyes with the brothers of the family Le Moyne, to raid the bay, fire the forts, massacre the English. Smithsend by secret messenger sends a letter with warnings of the designs to the Hudson’s Bay Company in England, and Smithsend for his pains is sold with his comrades into slavery in Martinique, whence he escapes before spring. Grimmington is held prisoner for two years before a direct order from the French Court sets him free. Other things, Grimmington hears in Quebec of the French on the bay. All unsuspecting of plots at Quebec and pirate attacks on the Company’s ships, the governors of the different forts on the bay awaited the coming of the ships. From July, it was customary to keep harbor lights out on the sand-bars, and station sentinels day and night to watch for the incoming fleet. Secret codes of signals had been left the year before with the forts. If the incoming ships did not display these signals, the sentinels were ordered to cut the harbor buoys, put out the lights, and give the alarm. If the signals were correct, cannon roared a welcome, flags were run up, and pilots went out in small boats to guide the ships in through sand-bars and bowlder reefs. At Albany, Governor Sargeant, whose wife and family were now with him at the fort—had ordered a sort of lookout, or crow’s-nest, built of scaffolding, on a hill above the fort. As far as known, not a single Englishman had up to this time penetrated the wilds west of the bay. One Robert Sanford had been ordered this very year to “go up into the country,” but fear of French bush-rovers made him report that such a course was very unsafe. It would be wiser and safer for the Company to give handsome presents to the Indian chiefs. This would induce them to bring their tribes down to the bay. So the sentinel at Albany could hardly believe his senses one morning when from the eerie height of his lookout he espied three men—three white men, steering a canoe down the swift, tumultuous current of the rain-swollen river. They were coming _not_ from the sea, but from the Upcountry. This was a contingency the cutting of harbor buoys had not provided against. The astounded sentinel ran to Sargeant with the alarm. Cannon were manned and Governor Sargeant took his stand in the gate of the palisaded walls.