had been busied in ravaging the scattered
settlements was gathered around the place. It consisted of about five
hundred Indians of several tribes, and a few Frenchmen under an officer
named Beaubassin. Being elated with past successes, they laid siege to
the fort, sheltering themselves under a steep bank by the water-side and
burrowing their way towards the rampart. March could not dislodge them,
and they continued their approaches till the third day, when Captain
Southack, with the Massachusetts armed vessel known as the "Province
Galley," sailed into the harbor, recaptured three small vessels that the
Indians had taken along the coast, and destroyed a great number of their
canoes, on which they gave up their enterprise and disappeared.[47]

Such was the beginning of Queen Anne's War. These attacks were due less
to the Abenakis than to the French who set them on. "Monsieur de
Vaudreuil," writes the Jesuit historian Charlevoix, "formed a party of
these savages, to whom he joined some Frenchmen under the direction of
the Sieur de Beaubassin, when they effected some ravages of no great
consequence; they killed, however, about three hundred men." This last
statement is doubly incorrect. The whole number of persons killed and
carried off during the August attacks did not much exceed one hundred
and sixty;[48] and these were of both sexes and all ages, from
octogenarians to newborn infants. The able-bodied men among them were
few, as most of the attacks were made upon unprotected houses in the
absence of the head of the family; and the only fortified place captured
was the garrison-house at Winter Harbor, which surrendered on terms of
capitulation. The instruments of this ignoble warfare and the revolting
atrocities that accompanied it were all, or nearly all, converted
Indians of the missions. Charlevoix has no word of disapproval for it,
and seems to regard its partial success as a gratifying one so far as it
went.

One of the objects was, no doubt, to check the progress of the English
settlements; but, pursues Charlevoix, "the essential point was to commit
the Abenakis in such a manner that they could not draw back."[49] This
object was constantly kept in view. The French claimed at this time that
the territory of Acadia reached as far westward as the Kennebec, which
therefore formed, in their view, the boundary between the rival nations,
and they trusted in the Abenakis to defend this assumed line of
demarcation. But t