In that Council they even looked on our persons as precious hostages,

either for the exchange of some of their tribe who were in prison, or obtainment of whatever pleased

them when within view of our French settlements they should make us feel the effects of their cruelty doubting not that these horrible spectacles and the lamentations of forty and fifty innocent French would touch with compassion and distress the Governor and inhabitants of what place so ;

ever.

We were only privately acquainted with these disastrous designs of the Iroquois, but we openly saw their spirits prepared for war ; and in the month of February divers bands took the field for that purpose, 200 Mohawks on the one side, 40 Oneidas on the other ; some Onnontague warriors had already gone forward whilst the main body of the army was assembling. We could not expect, speaking humanly, to extricate from these dangers, by which we were surrounded on all sides, some fifty Frenchmen who had entrusted to us their lives and for whom we should feel ourselves responsible before God and men. What distressed us the most was, not so much the flames into which a part of our Frenchmen would be cast, as the unfortunate captivity to

which the most of them were destined by the Iroquois, in which the salvation of their souls was more to be dreaded than the loss of their bodies. This is what the greater number most especially apprehended, who already seeing themselves prisoners, coveted rather the stroke of the hatchet or