tes an officer present. Ramesay lost himself in the woods, and could
not find his army. One Deruisseau, who had gone out as a scout, came
back with the report that nine hundred Englishmen were close at hand.
Seven English canoes did in fact appear, supported, as the French in
their excitement imagined, by a numerous though invisible army in the
forest; but being fired upon, and seeing that they were entering a
hornet's nest, the English sheered off. Ramesay having at last found his
army, and order being gradually restored, a council of war was held,
after which the whole force fell back to Chambly, having accomplished
nothing.[131]

Great was the alarm in Canada when it became known that the enemy aimed
at nothing less than the conquest of the colony. One La Plaine spread a
panic at Quebec by reporting that, forty-five leagues below, he had seen
eight or ten ships under sail and heard the sound of cannon. It was
afterwards surmised that the supposed ships were points of rocks seen
through the mist at low tide, and the cannon the floundering of whales
at play.[132] Quebec, however, was all excitement, in expectation of
attack. The people of the Lower Town took refuge on the rock above; the
men of the neighboring parishes were ordered within the walls; and the
women and children, with the cattle and horses, were sent to
hiding-places in the forest. There had been no less consternation at
Montreal, caused by exaggerated reports of Iroquois hostility and the
movements of Nicholson. It was even proposed to abandon Chambly and Fort
Frontenac, and concentrate all available force to defend the heart of
the colony. "A most bloody war is imminent," wrote Vaudreuil to the
minister, Ponchartrain.

Meanwhile, for weeks and months Nicholson's little army lay in the
sultry valley of Wood Creek, waiting those tidings of the arrival of
the British squadron at Boston which were to be its signal of advance.
At length a pestilence broke out. It is said to have been the work of
the Iroquois allies, who thought that the French were menaced with ruin,
and who, true to their policy of balancing one European power against
the other, poisoned the waters of the creek by throwing into it, above
the camp, the skins and offal of the animals they had killed in their
hunting. The story may have some foundation, though it rests only on the
authority of Charlevoix. No contemporary writer mentions it; and
Vaudreuil says that the malady was caused by the