eck with the quiet stealth and quickness
of a cat. One sword-blow severed the sleeping sentinel's head from his
body. Then, with a stamp of his moccasined feet and a ramp of the butt
of his musket, d'Iberville awakened the sleeping crew below decks. By
way of putting the fear of God and of France into English hearts, he
sabred the first three sailors who came floundering up the hatches. Poor
old Bridgar came up in his nightshirt, hardly awake, both hands up in
surrender--his second surrender in four years. To wake up to bloody
decks, with the heads of dead men rolling to the scuppers, was enough to
excuse any man's surrender.

The noise on the ship had forewarned the fort, and the French had to
gain entrance thereto by ladders. With these they ascended to the roofs
of the houses and hurled down bombs--hand-grenades--through the
chimneys, 'with,' says the historian of the occasion, 'an effect most
admirable.' Most admirable, indeed! for an Englishwoman, hiding in a
room closet, fell screaming with a broken hip. The fort surrendered, and
the French were masters of Rupert with thirty prisoners and a ship to
the good. What all this had to do with the rescue of Jean Pere would
puzzle any one but a raiding fur trader.

With prisoners, ship, cannon, and ammunition, but with few provisions
for food, the French now set sail westward across the Bay for Albany, La
Chesnaye no doubt bearing in mind that a large quantity of beaver stored
there would compensate him for his losses at Nelson two years before
when the furs collected by Jean Chouart on behalf of the Company of the
North had been seized by the English. The wind proved perverse.
Icefloes, driving towards the south end of the Bay, delayed the sloops.
Again Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville could not constrain patience to await
the favour of wind and weather. With crews of voyageurs he pushed off
from the ship in two canoes. Fog fell. The ice proved brashy, soft to
each step, and the men slithered through the water up to the armpits as
they carried the canoes. D'Iberville could keep his men together only by
firing guns through the fog and holding hands in a chain as the two
crews portaged across the soft ice.

By August 1 the French voyageurs were in camp before Albany, and a few
days later de Troyes arrived with the prisoners and the big sloop.
Before Albany, Captain Outlaw's ship, the _Success_, stood anchored; but
the ship seemed deserted, and the fort was fast sealed, like a