Count Frontignac, who, in his sixty-eighth year, possessed the activity of youth, after remaining a few days on shore, re-embarked in a canoe for Montreal. In the hope of conciliating the Five nations, he held a great council with them at Onondago, where the Indians showed some disposition towards a peace without concluding one. To influence their deliberations, and raise the depressed spirits of the Canadians, he sent out several parties against the English colonies. That against New York, consisting of about two hundred French, and some Indians; after marching twenty-two days with their provisions on their backs, through a wilderness covered deep with snow, arrived, on 8th of February 1690, about eleven at night, at Schenectady, a village a few miles north-west of Albany. Finding the gates open and unguarded, they immediately entered the town, the inhabitants of which were asleep; and, dividing themselves into small parties, invested every house at the same time. No alarm was given until the doors were broken open; and then was commenced the perpetration of those barbarities which add so much to the ordinary horrors of war. The whole village was instantly in flames; pregnant women were ripped open and their infants cast into the flames, or dashed against the posts of the doors. Sixty persons were massacred, twenty-seven carried into captivity, and those who escaped fled naked, through a deep snow and storm to Albany. In the flight, twenty-five lost their limbs from the intensity of the cold. The town was pillaged until about noon the next day, when the enemy marched off with their plunder. Being pursued by a party of young men from Albany, about twenty-five of them were killed and captured.[117]
[Sidenote: Expedition against Port Royal.]
In the spring and summer of 1689, several settlements and forts in New Hampshire and Maine, were successfully attacked by the Indians; who, wherever they were victorious, perpetrated their usual cruelties. Knowing that these depredations originated in Canada and Acadié, the general court of Massachusetts planned an expedition against both Port Royal and Quebec. Early in the spring, eight small vessels, carrying seven or eight hundred men, sailed under the command of sir William Phipps; and, almost without opposition, took possession of Port Royal, and of the whole coast between that place and New England. The fleet returned in May, having taken nearly plunder enough to discharge the expense of the equipment. But two detachments made about the same time by count Frontignac, attacked the Salmon falls, and fort Casco, where they killed and took about one hundred and eighty persons.