care. To impress the council by the reality of his oneness with
the Indians, Frontenac now seized a tomahawk and brandished it in
the air shouting at the same time the Indian war-song. The whole
assembly, French and Indians, joined in a wild orgy of war
passion, and the old man of seventy, fresh from the court of
Louis XIV, led in the war-dance, yelled with the Indians their
savage war-whoops, danced round the circle of the council, and
showed himself in spirit a brother of the wildest of them. This
was good diplomacy. The savages swore to make war to the end
under his lead. Many a frontier outrage, many a village attacked
in the dead of night and burned, amidst bloody massacre of its
few toil-worn settlers, was to be the result of that strange
mingling of Europe with wild America.

Frontenac's task was to make war on the English and their
Iroquois allies. He had before him the King's instructions as to
the means for effecting this. The King aimed at nothing less than
the conquest of the English colonies in America. In 1664 the
English, by a sudden blow in time of peace, had captured New
Netherland, the Dutch colony on the Hudson, which then became New
York. Now, a quarter of a century later, France thought to strike
a similar blow against the English, and Louis XIV was resolved
that the conquest should be thoroughgoing. The Dutch power had
fallen before a meager naval force. The English now would have to
face one much more formidable. Two French ships were to cross the
sea and to lie in wait near New York. Meanwhile from Canada,
sixteen hundred armed men, a thousand of them French regular
troops, were to advance by land into the heart of the colony,
seize Albany and all the boats there available, and descend by
the Hudson to New York. The warships, hovering off the coast,