uraged their animosity, exhorting them "to burn and to destroy."
This advice they followed to the letter for the Governor wrote in
his journal shortly afterwards, "the missionary, M. de Thury,
confirms the report I already had received of four small parties of
our Indians having killed fifteen or sixteen English and burnt one of
them alive on account of one of their chiefs being slain." The
vindictiveness of the Indians is further illustrated by an incident
that happened at the Medoctic village in the time of King William's
war, in which John Gyles and James Alexander, two English captives,
were cruelly abused. A party of Indians from Cape Sable, having
had some of their relatives killed by English fishermen, travelled
all the way to Medoctec in order to wreak their vengeance upon any
English captives they might find. They rushed upon their unfortunate
victims like bears bereaved of their whelps, saying, "Shall we, who
have lost our relations by the English, suffer an English voice to be
heard among us?" The two captives were brutally beaten and ill used
and made to go through a variety of performances for the amusement of
their tormenters. Gyles says: "They put a tomahawk into my hands
and ordered me to get up, sing and dance Indian, which I performed
with the greatest reluctance and while in the act seemed determined to
purchase my death by killing two or three of these monsters of
cruelty, thinking it impossible to survive the bloody treatment....
Not one of them showed the least compassion, but I saw the tears run
down plentifully on the cheeks of a Frenchman who sat behind." The
tortures were continued until the evening of what Gyles might well
call "a very tedious day." Finally a couple of Indians threw the
two wretched men out of the big wigwam, where they had been
tormented; they crawled away on their hands and knees and were
scarcely able to walk for several days.

The experience of Gyles was, however, nothing in comparison with that
of his brother and another captive taken by the Indians at the same
time as himself. This unfortunate pair attempted to desert, but failed
and were subjected to the most horrible tortures and finally burned
alive by the savages.

The people of the frontier settlements were now so on the alert that,
although the Indians roamed over the country like wolves, they were
usually prepared to meet them. Every little village had its block
house and sentinels, and every farmer worked in hi