forming him
that the promised forces had been sent to Portugal to meet an exigency
of the European war. They were to have reached Boston, as we have seen,
by the middle of May. Sunderland's notice of the change of destination
was not written till the twenty-seventh of July, and was eleven weeks on
its way, thus imposing on the colonists a heavy and needless tax in
time, money, temper, and, in the case of the expedition against
Montreal, health and life.[136] What was left of Nicholson's force had
fallen back before Sunderland's letter came, making a scapegoat of the
innocent Vetch, cursing him, and wishing him hanged.

In New England the disappointment and vexation were extreme; but, not to
lose all the fruits of their efforts, the governors of Massachusetts,
Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island met and resolved to attack
Port Royal if the captains of several British frigates then at New York
and Boston would take part in the enterprise. To the disgust of the
provincials, the captains, with one exception, refused, on the score of
the late season and the want of orders.

A tenacious energy has always been a characteristic of New England, and
the hopes of the colonists had been raised too high to be readily
abandoned. Port Royal was in their eyes a pestilent nest of privateers
and pirates that preyed on the New England fisheries; and on the refusal
of the naval commanders to join in an immediate attack, they offered to
the court to besiege the place themselves next year, if they could count
on the help of four frigates and five hundred soldiers, to be at Boston
by the end of March.[137] The Assembly of Massachusetts requested
Nicholson, who was on the point of sailing for Europe, to beg her
Majesty to help them in an enterprise which would be so advantageous to
the Crown, "and which, by the long and expensive war, we are so
impoverished and enfeebled as not to be in a capacity to effect."[138]

Nicholson sailed in December, and Peter Schuyler soon followed. New
York, having once entered on the path of war, saw that she must
continue in it; and to impress the Five Nations with the might and
majesty of the Queen, and so dispose them to hold fast to the British
cause, Schuyler took five Mohawk chiefs with him to England. One died on
the voyage; the rest arrived safe, and their appearance was the
sensation of the hour. They were clad, at the Queen's expense, in
strange and gay attire, invented by the costumer of one