The rude dwellings and storehouses which they enclosed,
together with a large wooden cross, were left standing. The commandant
De Troyes had died, and, Captain Desbergeres had been sent to succeed
him.]
He was forced to another and a deeper humiliation. At the imperious
demand of Dongan and the Iroquois, he begged the king to send back the
prisoners entrapped at Fort Frontenac, and he wrote to the minister:
"Be pleased, Monseigneur, to remember that I had the honor to tell you
that, in order to attain the peace necessary to the country, I was
obliged to promise that I would beg you to send back to us the
prisoners I sent you last year. I know you gave orders that they
should be well treated, but I am informed that, though they were well
enough treated at first, your orders were not afterwards executed with
the same fidelity. If ill treatment has caused them all to die,--for
they are people who easily fall into dejection, and who die of
it,--and if none of them come back, I do not know at all whether we
can persuade these barbarians not to attack us again." [Footnote:
Denonville, _Memoire de_ 10 _Aoust_, 1688.]
What had brought the marquis to this pass? Famine, destitution,
disease, and the Iroquois were making Canada their prey.
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