If, at the end of winter, Amherst had begun, as he
might have done, the building of armed vessels at the head of the
navigable waters of Lake Champlain, where Whitehall now stands, he would
have had a navy ready to his hand before August, and would have been
able to follow the retreating French without delay, and attack them at
Isle-aux-Noix before they had finished their fortifications. And if, at
the same time, he had directed Prideaux, instead of attacking Niagara,
to co-operate with him by descending the St. Lawrence towards Montreal,
the prospect was good that the two armies would have united at the
place, and ended the campaign by the reduction of all Canada. In this
case Niagara and all the western posts would have fallen without a blow.
Major Robert Rogers, sent in September to punish the Abenakis of St.
Francis, had addressed himself to the task with his usual vigor. These
Indians had been settled for about three quarters of a century on the
River St. Francis, a few miles above its junction with the St. Lawrence.
They were nominal Christians, and had been under the control of their
missionaries for three generations; but though zealous and sometimes
fanatical in their devotion to the forms of Romanism, they remained
thorough savages in dress, habits, and character. They were the scourge
of the New England borders, where they surprised and burned farmhouses
and small hamlets, killed men, women, and children without distinction,
carried others prisoners to their village, subjected them to the torture
of "running the gantlet," and compelled them to witness dances of
triumph around the scalps of parents, children, and friends.
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