[Footnote 451:  Winslow to Loudon, 16 Oct. 1756.]

[Footnote 452:  Report of a Scout to Ticonderoga, Oct. 1756, signed Israel Putnam.]

[Footnote 453:  Compare Massachusetts Archives, LXXVI. 81.]

After much persuasion, much feasting, and much consumption of tobacco and brandy, four hundred Indians, Christians from the Missions and heathen from the far west, were persuaded to go on a grand war-party with the Canadians.  Of these last there were a hundred,—­a wild crew, bedecked and bedaubed like their Indian companions.  Periere, an officer of colony regulars, had nominal command of the whole; and among the leaders of the Canadians was the famous bushfighter, Marin.  Bougainville was also of the party.  In the evening of the sixteenth they all embarked in canoes at the French advance-post commanded by Contrecoeur, near the present steamboat-landing, passed in the gloom under the bare steeps of Rogers Rock, paddled a few hours, landed on the west shore, and sent scouts to reconnoitre.  These came back with their reports on the next day, and an Indian crier called the chiefs to council.  Bougainville describes them as they stalked gravely to the place of meeting, wrapped in colored blankets, with lances in their hands.  The accomplished young aide-de-camp studied his strange companions with an interest not unmixed with disgust.  “Of all caprice,” he says, “Indian caprice is the most capricious.”  They were insolent to the French, made rules for them which they did not observe themselves, and compelled the whole party to move when and whither they pleased.  Hiding the canoes, and lying close in the forest by day, they all held their nocturnal course southward, by the lofty heights of Black Mountain, and among the islets of the Narrows, till the eighteenth.  That night the Indian scouts reported that they had seen the fires of an encampment on the west shore; on which the whole party advanced to the attack, an hour before dawn, filing silently under the dark arches of the forest, the Indians nearly naked, and streaked with their war-paint of vermilion and soot.  When they reached the spot they found only the smouldering fires of a deserted bivouac.  Then there was a consultation; ending, after much dispute, with the choice by the Indians of a hundred and ten of their most active warriors to attempt some stroke in the neighborhood of the English fort.  Marin joined them with thirty Canadians, and they set out on their errand; while the rest encamped to await the result.  At night the adventurers returned, raising the death-cry and firing their guns; somewhat depressed by losses they had suffered, but boasting that they had surprised fifty-three English, and killed or taken all but one.  It was a modest and perhaps an involuntary exaggeration.  “The very recital of the cruelties they committed on the battle-field is horrible,” writes Bougainville.  “The ferocity and insolence of these black-souled barbarians makes one shudder.  It is an abominable kind of war.  The air one breathes is contagious of insensibility and hardness."[454] This was but one of the many such parties sent out from Ticonderoga this year.