r, they reduced
the army to the pitiable number of seven thousand men. Louis XIV grew
ever more confident. In 1700 he was able to put his own grandson on the
throne of Spain and to dominate Europe from the Straits of Gibraltar
to the Netherlands. Another event showing his resolve soon startled the
world. In 1701 died James II, the dethroned King of England, and Louis
went out of his way to insult the English people. William III was King
by the will of Parliament. Louis had recognized him as such. Yet, on the
death of James, Louis declared that James's son was now the true King of
England. This impudent defiance meant, and Louis intended that it should
mean, renewed war. England had invited it by making her forces weak.
William III died in 1702 and the war went on under his successor, Queen
Anne.

Thus it happened that once more war-parties began to prowl on the
Canadian frontier, and women and children in remote clearings in the
forest shivered at the prospect of the savage scourge. The English
colonies suffered terribly. Everywhere France was aggressive. The
warlike Iroquois were now so alarmed by the French menace that, to
secure protection, they ceded their territory to Queen Anne and became
British subjects, a humiliating step indeed for a people who had once
thought themselves the most important in all the world. By 1703 the
butchery on the frontier was in full operation. The Jesuit historian
Charlevoix, with complacent exaggeration, says that in that year alone
three hundred men were killed on the New England frontier by the Abenaki
Indians incited by the French. The numbers slain were in fact fewer and
the slain were not always men but sometimes old women and young babies.
The policy of France was to make the war so ruthless that a gulf of
hatred should keep their Indian allies from ever making friends and
resuming trade with the English, whose hatchets, blankets, and other
supplies were, as the French well knew, better and cheaper than their
own. The French hoped to seize Boston, to destroy its industries and
sink its ships, then to advance beyond Boston and deal out to other
places the same fate. The rivalry of New England was to be ended by
making that region a desert.

The first fury of the war raged on the frontier of Maine, which was an
outpost of Massachusetts. On an August day in 1703 the people of the
rugged little settlement of Wells were at their usual tasks when they
heard gunshots and war-whoops. I