Their labors were suddenly interrupted. On
the seventeenth of April a swarm of bateaux and canoes came down the
Alleghany, bringing, according to Ward, more than a thousand Frenchmen,
though in reality not much above five hundred, who landed, planted
cannon against the incipient stockade, and summoned the ensign to
surrender, on pain of what might ensue.[145] He complied, and was
allowed to depart with his men. Retracing his steps over the mountains,
he reported his mishap to Washington; while the French demolished his
unfinished fort, began a much larger and better one, and named it Fort
Duquesne.
[Footnote 145: See the summons in _Precis des Faits_, 101.]
They had acted with their usual promptness. Their Governor, a practised
soldier, knew the value of celerity, and had set his troops in motion
with the first opening of spring. He had no refractory assembly to
hamper him; no lack of money, for the King supplied it; and all Canada
must march at his bidding. Thus, while Dinwiddie was still toiling to
muster his raw recruits, Duquesne's lieutenant, Contrecoeur, successor
of Saint-Pierre, had landed at Presquisle with a much greater force, in
part regulars, and in part Canadians.
Dinwiddie was deeply vexed when a message from Washington told him how
his plans were blighted; and he spoke his mind to his friend Hanbury:
"If our Assembly had voted the money in November which they did in
February, it's more than probable the fort would have been built and
garrisoned before the French had approached; but these things cannot be
done without money.
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