“I thought,” writes Bougainville, “that the Governor would have told them they should have neither provisions nor presents till all the English were given up; that he himself would have gone to their huts and taken the prisoners from them; and that the inhabitants would be forbidden, under the severest penalties, from selling or giving them brandy.  I saw the contrary; and my soul shuddered at the sights my eyes beheld.  On the fifteenth, at two o’clock, in the presence of the whole town, they killed one of the prisoners, put him into the kettle, and forced his wretched countrymen to eat of him.”  The Intendant Bigot, the friend of the Governor, confirms this story; and another French writer says that they “compelled mothers to eat the flesh of their children."[531] Bigot declares that guns, canoes, and other presents were given to the Western tribes before they left Montreal; and he adds, “they must be sent home satisfied at any cost.”  Such were the pains taken to preserve allies who were useful chiefly through the terror inspired by their diabolical cruelties.  This time their ferocity cost them dear.  They had dug up and scalped the corpses in the graveyard of Fort William Henry, many of which were remains of victims of the small-pox; and the savages caught the disease, which is said to have made great havoc among them.[532]

[Footnote 531:  “En chemin faisant et meme en entrant a Montreal ils les ont manges et fait manger aux autres prisonniers.” Bigot au Ministre, 24 Aout, 1757.

“Des sauvages out fait manger aux meres la chair de leurs enfants.” Jugement impartial sur les Operations militaires en Canada.  A French diary kept in Canada at this time, and captured at sea, is cited by Hutchinson as containing similar statements.]

[Footnote 532:  One of these corpses was that of Richard Rogers, brother of the noted partisan Robert Rogers.  He had died of small-pox some time before.  Rogers, Journals, 55, note.]

Vaudreuil, in reporting what he calls “my capture of Fort William Henry,” takes great credit to himself for his “generous procedures” towards the English prisoners; alluding, it seems, to his having bought some of them from the Indians with the brandy which was sure to cause the murder of others.[533] His obsequiousness to his red allies did not cease with permitting them to kill and devour before his eyes those whom he was bound in honor and duty to protect.  “He let them do what they pleased,” says a French contemporary; “they were seen roaming about Montreal, knife in hand, threatening everybody, and often insulting those they met.  When complaint was made, he said nothing.  Far from it; instead of reproaching them, he loaded them with gifts, in the belief that their cruelty would then relent."[534]

[Footnote 533:  Vaudreuil au Ministre, 15 Sept. 1757.]

[Footnote 534:  Memoires sur le Canada, 1749-1760.]

Nevertheless, in about a fortnight all, or nearly all, the surviving prisoners were bought out of their clutches; and then, after a final distribution of presents and a grand debauch at La Chine, the whole savage rout paddled for their villages.