fleet led by Sir William Phips destroyed Port Royal.  It was decided, therefore, to send another fleet under Phips to take Quebec, while troops from New York and Connecticut marched against Montreal.  Both expeditions were failures, and for seven years the French and Indians ravaged the frontier.  In 1692 York, in Maine, was visited and a third of the inhabitants killed.  In 1694 Castine was taken and a hundred persons scalped and tomahawked.  At Durham, in New Hampshire, prisoners were burned alive.  Groton, in Massachusetts, was next visited; but the boldest of all was the massacre, in 1697, at Haverhill, a town not thirty-five miles from Boston.  In 1696, Frontenac, at the head of a great array of Canadians, coureurs de bois, and Indians, invaded the country of the Onondagas, and leveled their fortified town to the earth.

[Illustration:  MAP OF PART OF ACADIA]

%73.  The Struggle for Acadia and New France; “Queen Anne’s War."%—­In 1697 the war ended with the treaty of Ryswick, and “King William’s War” came to a close in America with nothing gained and much lost on each side.  The peace, however, did not last long, for in 1701 England and France were again fighting.  As William died in 1702, and was succeeded by his sister-in-law Anne, the struggle which followed in America was called “Queen Anne’s War.”  Again Port Royal was captured (1710); again an expedition went against Quebec and failed (1711); and again, year after year, the French and Indians swept along the frontier of New England, burning towns and slaughtering and torturing the inhabitants.  At last the treaty of Utrecht, in 1713, ended the strife, and the first signs of English conquest in America were visible, for the French gave up Acadia and acknowledged the claims of the English to Newfoundland and the country around Hudson Bay.  The name Acadia was changed by the conquerors to Nova Scotia.  Port Royal, never again to be parted with, they called Annapolis, in honor of the Queen.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Read Parkman’s A Half-century of Conflict, Vol.  I., pp. 1-149.]

%74.  The French take Possession of the Mississippi Valley; the Chain of Forts.%—­The peace made at Utrecht was unbroken for thirty years.  But this long period was, on the part of the French in America, at least, a time of careful preparation for the coming struggle for possession of the valleys of the Mississippi, the Ohio, and the Lakes.  In the Mississippi valley most elaborate preparations for defense were already under way.  No sooner did the treaty of Ryswick end the first French war than a young naval officer named Iberville applied to the King for leave to take out an expedition and found a colony at the mouth of the Mississippi, just as La Salle had attempted to do.  Permission was readily given, and in 1698 Iberville sailed with two ships from France, and in February, 1699, entered Mobile Bay.  Leaving his fleet at anchor, he set off with a party in small boats in search of the great river.  He coasted along the shore, entered the Mississippi through one of its three mouths, and went up the river till he came to an Indian village, where the chief gave him a letter which Tonty, thirteen years before, when in search of La Salle, had written and left in the crotch of a tree.