Thus it happened that once more war-parties began to prowl on the
Canadian frontier, and women and children in remote clearings in
the forest shivered at the prospect of the savage scourge. The
English colonies suffered terribly. Everywhere France was
aggressive. The warlike Iroquois were now so alarmed by the
French menace that, to secure protection, they ceded their
territory to Queen Anne and became British subjects, a
humiliating step indeed for a people who had once thought
themselves the most important in all the world. By 1703 the
butchery on the frontier was in full operation. The Jesuit
historian Charlevoix, with complacent exaggeration, says that in
that year alone three hundred men were killed on the New England
frontier by the Abenaki Indians incited by the French. The
numbers slain were in fact fewer and the slain were not always
men but sometimes old women and young babies. The policy of
France was to make the war so ruthless that a gulf of hatred
should keep their Indian allies from ever making friends and
resuming trade with the English, whose hatchets, blankets, and
other supplies were, as the French well knew, better and cheaper
than their own. The French hoped to seize Boston, to destroy its
industries and sink its ships, then to advance beyond Boston and
deal out to other places the same fate. The rivalry of New
England was to be ended by making that region a desert.

The first fury of the war raged on the frontier of Maine, which
was an outpost of Massachusetts. On an August day in 1703 the
people of the rugged little settlement of Wells were at their
usual tasks when they heard gunshots and war-whoops. Indians had
crept up to attack the place. They set the village on fire and
killed or carried off some twoscore prisoners, chiefly women and