a volley, and called on them to surrender; but the crews put off in boats and made for the opposite shore.  They followed and seized them.  Out of twelve men their fire had killed three and wounded two, one of whom, says Rogers in his report, “could not march, therefore we put an end to him, to prevent discovery."[460] They sank the vessels, which were laden with wine, brandy, and flour, hid their boats on the west shore, and returned on foot with their prisoners.[461]

[Footnote 460:  Report of Rogers to Sir William Johnson, July, 1756. This incident is suppressed in the printed Journals, which merely say that the man “soon died.”]

[Footnote 461:  Rogers, Journals, 20.  Shirley to Fox, 26 July, 1756. “This afternoon Capt.  Rogers came down with 4 scalps and 8 prisoners which he took on Lake Champlain, between 20 and 30 miles beyond Crown Point.” Surgeon Williams to his Wife, 16 July, 1756.]

Some weeks after, Rogers returned to the place where he had left the boats, embarked in them, reconnoitred the lake nearly to St. John, hid them again eight miles north of Crown Point, took three prisoners near that post, and carried them to Fort William Henry.  In the next month the French found several English boats in a small cove north of Crown Point.  Bougainville propounds five different hypotheses to account for their being there; and exploring parties were sent out in the vain attempt to find some water passage by which they could have reached the spot without passing under the guns of two French forts.[462]

[Footnote 462:  Bougainville, Journal.]

The French, on their side, still kept their war-parties in motion, and Vaudreuil faithfully chronicled in his despatches every English scalp they brought in.  He believed in Indians, and sent them to Ticonderoga in numbers that were sometimes embarrassing.  Even Pottawattamies from Lake Michigan were prowling about Winslow’s camp and silently killing his sentinels with arrows, while their “medicine men” remained at Ticonderoga practising sorcery and divination to aid the warriors or learn how it fared with them.  Bougainville writes in his Journal on the fifteenth of October:  “Yesterday the old Pottawattamies who have stayed here ‘made medicine’ to get news of their brethren.  The lodge trembled, the sorcerer sweated drops of blood, and the devil came at last and told him that the warriors would come back with scalps and prisoners.  A sorcerer in the medicine lodge is exactly like the Pythoness on the tripod or the witch Canidia invoking the shades.”  The diviner was not wholly at fault.  Three days after, the warriors came back with a prisoner.[463]

[Footnote 463:  This kind of divination was practised by Algonkin tribes from the earliest times.]