Through the long months of the summer of 1711 there had been prayer and fasting to avert the danger.Apparently trading ships had deserted the lower St.Lawrence in alarm, for no word had arrived at Quebec of the approach of Walker's fleet.Nor had the great disaster been witnessed by any onlookers.The island where it occurred was then and still remains desert.Up to the middle of October, nearly two months after the disaster, the watchers at Quebec feared that they might see any day a British fleet rounding the head of the Island of Orleans.On the 19th of October the first news of the disaster arrived and then it was easy for Quebec to believe that God had struck the English wretches with a terrible vengeance.Three thousand men, it was said, had reached land and then perished miserably.Many bodies had been found naked and in attitudes of despair.Other thousands had perished in the water.Vessel-loads of spoil had been gathered, rich plate, beautiful swords, magnificent clothing, gold, silver, jewels.The truth seems to be that some weeks after the disaster the evidences of the wrecks were discovered.Even to this day ships are battered to pieces in those rock-strewn waters and no one survives to tell the story.Some fishermen landing on the island had found human bodies, dead horses and other animals, and the hulls of seven ships.They had gathered some wreckage--and that was the whole story.Quebec sang Te Deum.From attacks by sea there had now been two escapes which showed God's love for Canada.In the little church of Notre Dame des Victoires, consecrated at that time to the memory of the deliverance from Phips and Walker, daily prayers are still poured out for the well-being of Canada.God had been a present help on land as well as on the sea.Nicholson, with more than two thousand men, had been waiting at his camp near Lake Champlain to descend on Montreal as soon as Walker reached Quebec.When he received the news of the disaster he broke up his force and retired.For the moment Canada was safe from the threatened invasion.
In spite of this apparent deliverance, the long war, now near its end, brought a destructive blow to French power in America.
Though France still possessed vigor and resources which her enemies were apt to underrate, the war had gone against her in Europe.Her finest armies had been destroyed by Marlborough, her taxation was crushing, her credit was ruined, her people were suffering for lack of food.The allies had begun to think that there was no humiliation which they might not put upon France.
Louis XIV, they said, must give up Alsace, which, with Lorraine, he had taken some years earlier, and he must help to drive his own grandson from the Spanish throne.This exorbitant demand stirred the pride not only of Louis but of the French nation, and the allies found that they could not trample France under their feet.The Treaty of Utrecht, concluded in 1718, shows that each side was too strong as yet to be crushed.In dismissing Marlborough, Great Britain had lost one of her chief assets.His name had become a terror to France.To this day, both in France and in French Canada, is sung the popular ditty "Monsieur Malbrouck est mort," a song of delight at a report that Marlborough was dead.When in place of Marlborough leaders of the type of General Hill were appointed to high command, France could not be finally beaten.The Treaty of Utrecht was the outcome of war-weariness.It marks, however, a double check to Louis XIV.He could not master Europe and he could not master America.France now ceded to Britain her claim to Acadia, Newfoundland, and Hudson Bay.She regarded this, however, as only a temporary setback and was soon planning and plotting great designs far surpassing the narrower vision of the English colonies.
It was with a wry face, however, that France yielded Acadia.To retain it she offered to give up all rights in the Newfoundland fisheries, the nursery of her marine.Britain would not yield Acadia, dreading chiefly perhaps the wrath of New England which had conquered Port Royal.Britain, however, compromised on the question of boundaries in a way so dangerous that the long war settled finally no great issues in America.She took Acadia "according to its ancient limits,"--but no one knew these limits.
They were to be defined by a joint commission of the two nations which, after forty years, reached no agreement.The Island of Cape Breton and the adjoining Ile St.Jean, now Prince Edward Island, remained to France.Though Britain secured sovereignty over Newfoundland, France retained extensive rights in the Newfoundland fisheries.The treaty left unsettled the boundary between Canada and the English colonies.While it yielded Hudson Bay to Britain, it settled nothing as to frontiers in the wilderness which stretched beyond the Great Lakes into the Far West and which had vast wealth in furs.
