Rivals for America (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: I CHAPTER III THE ATTACK ON DEEBKIELD (1704) war which in the British colonies was called Queen Anne's War, and in England the War of the Spanish Succession, was the second of a series of four conflicts which ended in giving to Great Britain a maritime and colonial preponderance over France and Spain. So far as concerns the colonies and the sea, these several wars may be regarded as a single protracted one, broken by intervals of truce. The three earlier of them, it is true, were European contests, begun and waged on European disputes. Their American part was incidental and apparently subordinate, yet it involved questions of prime importance in the history of the world. The War of the Spanish Succession sprang from the ambition of Louis XIV. Louis placed his grandson on the throne of Spain, and insulted England by acknowledging as her rightful King the son of James II, whom she-had deposed. Then (in 1702) England declared war. In America, the whole burden of this war fell upon New England, or rather upon Massachusetts, with its outlying district of Maine and its small and weak neighbor, New Hampshire. For untold ages Maine had been one unbroken forest, and it was so still. It has and still has its beasts of prey, wolves, bears, wolverines, lynx, and cougar; but the human denizens of this wilderness were no less fierce and far more dangerous. These were the various tribes and sub-tribes of the Abe- nakis,1 whose villages were on the Saco, the Kennebec, the Penobscot, and the other great watercourses. Most of them had been converted by the Jesuits, and some had been persuaded to remove to Canada, like the converted Iroquois of Caughnawaga.2 The rest remained in their native haunts, where,under the direction of their missionaries, they could be used to keep the Engli...