FRENCH SHIPS DESTROYED, &c.

The French ministry had attempted to succour Montreal by equipping a considerable number of store ships, and sending them out in the spring under convoy of a frigate; but as their officers understood that the British squadron had sailed up the river St. Laurence before their arrival, they took shelter in the bay of Chaleurs, on the coast of Acadia, where they did not long remain unmolested. Captain Byron, who commanded the ships of war that were left at Louisbourg, having received intelligence of them from brigadier-general Whitmore, sailed thither with his squadron, and found them at anchor. The whole fleet consisted of one frigate, two large store-ships, and nineteen sail of smaller vessels; the greater part of which had been taken from the merchants of Great Britain; all these were destroyed, together with two batteries which had been raised for their protection. The French town, consisting of two hundred houses, was demolished, and the settlement totally ruined. All the French subjects inhabiting the territories from the bay of Funda to the banks of the river St. Laurence, and all the Indians through that tract of country, were now subdued, and subjected to the English government. In the month of December of the preceding year, the French colonists at Miramachi, Rickebuctou, and other places lying along the gulf of St. Laurence, made their submission by deputies to colonel Frye, who commanded in Fort Cumberland at Chignecto. They afterwards renewed this submission in the most formal manner, by subscribing articles, by which they obliged themselves, and the people they represented, to repair in the spring to Bay Verte, with all their effects and shipping, to be disposed of according to the direction of colonel Laurence, governor of Halifax, in Nova-Scotia. They were accompanied by two Indian chiefs of the nation of the Mickmacks, a powerful and numerous people, now become entirely dependent upon his Britannic majesty. In a word, by the conquest of Canada, the Indian fur trade, in its full extent, fell into the hands of the English. The French interest among the savage tribes, inhabiting an immense tract of country, was totally extinguished; and their American possessions shrunk within the limits of Louisiana, an infant colony on the south of the Mississippi, which the British arms may at any time easily subdue.