t smashed her timbers to kindling
wood and sent twenty-four men to a watery grave; but General Nicholson
gave the raw provincials no time for panic fright. Day dawn, Monday,
drums rolling a martial tread, trumpets blowing, bugles setting the
echoes flying, flags blowing to the wind in the morning sun, he
commanded Colonel Vetch to lead the men ashore. Inside Port Royal's
palisades Subercase, the French commander, had less than three hundred
men, half that number absolutely naked of clothing, and all short of
powder. There were not provisions to last a month; but, game to his
soul's marrow, as all the warriors of {199} those early days, Subercase
put up a brave fight, sending his bombs singing over the heads of the
English troops in a vain attempt to baffle the landing. Nicholson
retaliated by moving his bomb ship, light of draught, close to the
French fort and pouring a shower of bombs through the roofs of the
French fort. Spite of the wreck the night before, by four o'clock
Monday afternoon all the English had landed in perfect order and high
spirits. Slowly the English forces swung in a circle completely round
the fort. Again and again, by daylight and dark, Subercase's naked
soldiers rushed, screeching the war whoop, to ambush and stampede the
English line; but Nicholson's regulars stood the fire like rocks, and
the desperate sortie of the French ended in fifty of Subercase's
soldiers deserting en masse to the English. By Friday Nicholson's guns
were all mounted in place to bombard the little wooden fort. Subercase
was desperate. Women and children from the settlement had crowded into
the fort for protection, and were now crazed with fear by the bursting
bombs, while the naked soldiers could be kept on the walls only at the
sword point of their commanding officers. {200} For two hundred French
to have held out longer against three thousand five hundred English
would have been madness. Subercase made the presence of the women in
Port Royal an excuse to send a messenger with flag of truce across to
Nicholson, asking the English to take the women under their protection.
Nicholson might well have asked what protection the French raiders had
accorded the women of the New England frontiers; but he sent back
polite answer that "as he was not warring on women and children" he
would receive them in the English camp, meanwhile holding Subercase's
messenger prisoner, as he had entered the English camp without warning,