CHAPTER of Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard.

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Many perished

by enlisting in the military expeditions undertaken in 1677. future years against Acadie and the West Indies. The Indians intermarried with the blacks, and thus confirmed. their degradation by associating themselves with another oppressed and unfortunate race. Gradually they dwindled away. A few hundred sailors and petty farmers, of mixed blood, as much African as Indian, are now the sole surviving representatives of the aboriginal possessors of southern New England.

On the side of the colonists the contest had also been very disastrous. Twelve or thirteen towns had been entirely ruined, and many others partially destroyed. Six hundred houses had been burned, near a tenth part of all in New England Twelve captains, and more than six hundred men in the prime of life, had fallen in battle. There was hardly a family not in mourning. The pecuniary losses and expenses of the war were estimated at near a million of dollars. Massachusetts was burdened with a heavy debt. No aid nor relief seems to have come from abroad, except a contribution from Ireland of £500 for the benefit of the sufferers by the war, chiefly collected by the efforts of Nathaniel Mather, lately suc cessor to his brother Samuel as minister of the noncon formist congregation at Dublin. These Dublin minis. ters, both graduates of Harvard College, were elder brothers of Increase Mather, minister of Boston North Church, already becoming a distinguished person in the colony. The New England colonists even accused their neighbors of Albany of furnishing powder and shot to the Indians; but this charge was indignantly denied by Andros, whom the Duke of York, on recovering his province, had appointed as its governor. Yet his attempt, just at the breaking out of the war, to surprise the fort at Saybrook,

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ander pretense that the charter of New York extended CHAPTER to the Connecticut, and his shuffling and captious correspondence on the subject of obtaining assistance from the 1677 Mohawks, gave reason enough for the Connecticut authorities to regard him with some doubt.

The war at the eastward still continuing, the project cf a Mohawk alliance was revived. Even the Connecticut July. valley was not secure. Some fugitives, who had taken refuge in Canada, descended along that river, fell upon a party assembled at Hatfield, at a house raising, and car- Sept 15. ried off twenty prisoners. The husbands of two of the captives proceeded to Canada, guided by a Mohawk Indian, by way of Albany and Lake Champlain-the first recorded journey made in that direction; and, by the friendly intervention of the French governor, succeeded in redeeming the captives.

In the midst of these domestic disasters, new troubles were preparing in the mother country. A petition from the English merchants had been presented to the Privy 1675 Council, complaining of the total disregard of the acts of trade in New England. The Committee for Plantations had suggested, by way of remedy, to establish a royal custom-house at Boston, with officers to look after breaches of the acts of trade. The difficulty was to provide salaries for them. Should Massachusetts decline to receive these officers, it was proposed to refuse Mediterranean passes to her ships, thus exposing them to capture by the Barbary pirates; also to cut cff her trade with the southern colonies, and to authorize such of the king's frigates as might visit the American coast to seize offenders and send them to England for trial-expedients indicative enough of the weakness and poverty of the king's government.

Association of breaches of the acts of trade, with resistance to prerogative, tended to strengthen the hands

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CHAPTER of the king, who might now expect, in the controversy with Massachusetts, support from the English mercantile 1676. interest. The Massachusetts theocracy gained also new hold on the affections of the colonists as advocates of colonial free trade, and new support from pecuniary as well as spiritual considerations.

Mason and Gorges had continued to urge in England their respective claims to New Hampshire and Maine; June. and, in the midst of the Indian war, Randolph, a kins man of Mason, and henceforward, by his zeal and perti nacity, the terror and abhorrence of Massachusetts, arrived at Boston with notice from the Privy Council that unless, within six months, agents were sent to defend the right of Massachusetts to those provinces, judgment by default would be given for the claimants. Thus pushed, the General Court, after consulting the elders, commisSept sioned Bulkley and Stoughton as agents; but their powers were very carefully circumscribed. Bulkley, son of the first minister of Concord, was speaker of the House, and subsequently a magistrate. The father of Stoughton, commander of the Massachusetts troops in the Pequod war, had afterward been a lieutenant colonel in the Parliamentary army. Stoughton himself, after gradua ting at Harvard College, studied divinity, and obtained, by his father's interest, an Oxford fellowship, from which he had been ejected at the Restoration. He inherited, however, a handsome estate, and, returning to New England, was presently chosen a magistrate, and now agent.

lö77.

After hearing the parties, the Privy Council decided, in accordance with the opinion of the two chief justices, that the Massachusetts patent did not include any territory more than three miles distant from the left, or north. ern bank of the Merrimac. This construction, which set aside the pretensions of Massachusetts to the province of

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Maine, as well as to that part of New Hampshire east CHAPTER of the Merrimac, appeared so plain to the English lawyers that the agents hardly attempted a defense.

1677

The king had intended to purchase Maine as an appanage for the Duke of Monmouth, his illegitimate son. But Massachusetts was beforehand with him; and, through the agency of Usher, a wealthy Boston merchant, Gorges was induced, for the sum of £1200, to sell out all his rights as proprietary, thus confirming the May 6. jurisdiction of Massachusetts, and giving her a title to the ungranted soil.

It is worthy of notice, as throwing some light on the habits of the colonists, at least a part of them, that this Usher, the richest merchant in Boston, had acquired his fortune in the bookselling business. A London stationer, who presently visited Boston with a venture of books, "most of them practical," and so "well suited to the genius of New England," found no less than four booksellers established in that town.

The province of Maine, as purchased by Massachusetts, was bounded by the Kennebec. Sagadahoc, the territory, that is, from the Kennebec to the Penobscot, was claimed as forming a part of New York. Jurisdiction over its few scattered hamlets had lately been assumed on behalf of the duke by Andros, governor of that province, who built a fort at Pemaquid, and terminated the Indian war in that quarter by agreeing to pay the Indians a tribute, or quit-rent, of a peck of corn for each English family. A treaty with these tribes, concluded about the same time by the Massachusetts authorities at Casco, gave peace to the eastern coasts; not, however, till the set- 1678. tlements of Maine had lost at least half of their inhabit- April 12 ants a bitter foretaste of wars to come.

The country east of the Penobscot, though included

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CHAPTER as far as the St. Croix in the Duke of York's charter, was claimed by the French as a part of Acadie.

Baron 1677. St. Castin, a man of intrigue and enterprise, who had borne a commission as captain in the regiment of Carignan, sent to Canada, established himself on the west shore of the Penobscot, on the spot which still bears his name. He succeeded to that Indian trade formerly carried on from the same spot by D'Aulney; and, having taken several Indian wives, daughters of the chiefs, he acquired a great influence among the Indians of the vicinity. St. Castin and other French traders furnished the Eastern Indians with arms and ammunition. The French missionaries converted them to the Catholic faith. Both were believed to exercise an influence unfavorable to the English.

The jealousy of the English merchants once excited, they soon renewed their complaints of the disregard by Massachusetts of the acts of trade. The Committee for Plantations, to whom these complaints were referred, suggested, as the only effectual remedy, "a governor wholly to be supported by his majesty." Randolph, who had carried back to England very exaggerated accounts of the wealth and population of Massachusetts, soon returned to Boston, authorized to administer to the New England governors an oath to enforce the acts of trade. Leverett, on the ground that no such oath was required by the charter, refused to take it. The General ct. Court, however, enacted a law of their own for enforcing

the navigation acts. They re-enacted, also, the original oath of fidelity, by which allegiance was sworn to the king as well as the colony. They voted a present to the king of cranberries, "special good samp" and codfish, and sent an humble petition, with another also from the New Hampshire towns, that they might be allowed to retain jurisdiction as far as the Piscataqua.