Thus the promised advance of Amherst into Canada would be not without its difficulties, even when his navy, too tardily begun, should be ready to act its part.  But if he showed no haste in succoring Wolfe, he at least made some attempts to communicate with him.  Early in August he wrote him a letter, which Ensign Hutchins, of the rangers, carried to him in about a month by the long and circuitous route of the Kennebec, and which, after telling the news of the campaign, ended thus:  “You may depend on my doing all I can for effectually reducing Canada.  Now is the time!"[747] Amherst soon after tried another expedient, and sent Captains Kennedy and Hamilton with a flag of truce and a message of peace to the Abenakis of St. Francis, who, he thought, won over by these advances, might permit the two officers to pass unmolested to Quebec.  But the Abenakis seized them and carried them prisoners to Montreal; on which Amherst sent Major Robert Rogers and a band of rangers to destroy their town.[748]

[Footnote 747:  Amherst to Wolfe, 7 Aug. 1759.]

[Footnote 748:  Amherst to Pitt, 22 Oct. 1759. Rogers, Journals, 144.]

It was the eleventh of October before the miniature navy of Captain Loring—­the floating battery, the brig, and the sloop that had been begun three weeks too late—­was ready for service.  They sailed at once to look for the enemy.  The four French vessels made no resistance.  One of them succeeded in reaching Isle-aux-Noix; one was run aground; and two were sunk by their crews, who escaped to the shore.  Amherst, meanwhile, leaving the provincials to work at the fort, embarked with the regulars in bateaux, and proceeded on his northern way till, on the evening of the twelfth, a head-wind began to blow, and, rising to a storm, drove him for shelter into Ligonier Bay, on the west side of the lake.[749] On the thirteenth, it blew a gale.  The lake raged like an angry sea, and the frail bateaux, fit only for smooth water, could not have lived a moment.  Through all the next night the gale continued, with floods of driving rain.  “I hope it will soon change,” wrote Amherst on the fifteenth, “for I have no time to lose.”  He was right.  He had waited till the season of autumnal storms, when nature was more dangerous than man.  On the sixteenth there was frost, and the wind did not abate.  On the next morning it shifted to the south, but soon turned back with violence to the north, and the ruffled lake put on a look of winter, “which determined me,” says the General, “not to lose time by striving to get to the Isle-aux-Noix, where I should arrive too late to force the enemy from their post, but to return to Crown Point and complete the works there.”  This he did, and spent the remnant of the season in the congenial task of finishing the fort, of which the massive remains still bear witness to his industry.

[Footnote 749:  Orderly Book of Commissary Wilson.]

When Levis heard that the English army had fallen back, he wrote, well pleased, to Bourlamaque:  “I don’t know how General Amherst will excuse himself to his Court, but I am very glad he let us alone, because the Canadians are so backward that you could count on nobody but the regulars."[750]