[Footnote: _Frontenac au
Ministre_, 25 _Oct_., 1693.]
Thus far successful, the authorities of Boston undertook an enterprise
little to their credit. They employed the two deserters, joined with
two Acadian prisoners, to kidnap Saint-Castin, whom, next to the
priest Thury, they regarded as their most insidious enemy. The
Acadians revealed the plot, and the two soldiers were shot at Mount
Desert. Nelson was sent to France, imprisoned two years in a dungeon
of the Chateau of Angouleme, and then placed in the Bastile. Ten years
passed before he was allowed to return to his family at Boston. [4]
The French failure at Pemaquid completed the discontent of the
Abenakis; and despondency and terror seized them when, in the spring
of 1693, Convers, the defender of Wells, ranged the frontier with a
strong party of militia, and built another stone fort at the falls of
the Saco. In July, they opened a conference at Pemaquid; and, in
August, thirteen of their chiefs, representing, or pretending to
represent, all the tribes from the Merrimac to the St. Croix, came
again to the same place to conclude a final treaty of peace with the
commissioners of Massachusetts. They renounced the French alliance,
buried the hatchet, declared themselves British subjects, promised to
give up all prisoners, and left five of their chief men as hostages.
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