Page:New Brunswick Magazine Issue 1.djvu/46

The English made several attacks on Acadia during the last decade of the seventeenth century, but the principal one was in 1696. An expedition was fitted out at Boston in the autumn of that year and placed under the command of Col. Benjamin Church who had been a commander in the Indian war of 1675, generally known as King Phillip's war. Church had about five hundred men with him and they were embarked in open sloops and boats. They ravaged the coast of Acadia from Passamaquoddy to the head of the Bay of Fundy, and were on their way back to Boston when they were met by a reinforcement of two hundred men in three vessels under Col. Hathorne, one of the Massachussetts Council. Hathorne, who now took the chief command, had orders to beseige and capture Fort Nashwaak, and the expedition returned to the St. John for that purpose, and ascended the river. Villebon was attacked in his fort on the 18th of October, but after cannonading it for two days the English retired. Villebon was ably assisted in the defence of his fort by two of the d'Amour's brothers, Mathieu and Rene, who arrived on the evening before the English appeared, with ten Frenchmen, their servants and retainers. Louis d'Amours was in France at this time and he had left his affairs in the care of his faithful English slave John Gyles, then a lad of sixteen. I doubt whether I can tell the story of what occurred to the family of Louis d'Amours during this English invasion better than in the words of Gyles himself, who in the narrative of his captivity^[1] describes the affair thus:—