hich was
most important in his eyes, was the defense of New England against the
French. The contest between the two nations for control of the New World
had already begun. The territory between Hudson Bay and the St. Lawrence
and that between the Penobscot and the St. Croix were already in
dispute, and New Englanders had taken their part in the conflict. When
Governor of New York, Andros had become aware of the French danger, and
his successor Dongan had proved himself capable of holding the Iroquois
Indians to their allegiance to the English and of extending the beaver
trade in the Mohawk Valley. But at this juncture reports kept coming in
of renewed incursions of the French, led by the Canadian nobility, into
the regions south of Lakes Erie and Ontario, and of new forts on
territory that the English claimed as their own. There was increasing
danger that the French would embroil the Indians of the Five Nations
and, by drawing them into a French alliance, threaten not only the fur
trade but the colonies themselves. The French Governor, Denonville,
declared that the design of the King his master was the conversion of
the infidels and the uniting of "all these barbarous people in the bosom
of the Church"; but Dongan, though himself a Roman Catholic, saw no
truth in this explanation and demanded that the French demolish their
forts and retire to Canada, whence they had come. Just as this quarrel
with the French threatened to arouse the Indians in northwestern New
York, so it threatened to arouse, as eventually it did arouse, the
Indians along the northern frontier of New England. To the authorities
in England and to Andros in America, this menace of French aggression
was one of the dangers which the Dominion of New England was intended to
meet, and the substitution of a single civil and military head for the
slow-moving and ineffective popular assemblies was designed to make
possible an energetic military campaign.

Andros had no sooner organized his council and got his government into
running order than he began to prosecute measures for improving the
defenses of the colony. He sent soldiers to Pemaquid to occupy and
strengthen the fort there, and himself began the reconstruction of the
fortifications of Boston. He turned his attention to Fort Hill at the
lower end of the town, erected a palisaded embankment with four
bastions, a house for the garrison, and a place for a battery; later he
leveled the hill on Castle Island