78 LUNDY ISLAND. 



band of armed men rushed out, who took their aston- 

 ished and unresisting hosts prisoners. The whole 

 had been a ruse de guerre, a vile and complicated 

 falsehood, with which the inhabitants, by their very 

 kindness and courtesy, had been beguiled to their 

 ruin. Instead of Dutchmen, they found that they 

 had to do with their wily and bitter enemies the 

 French ; and learned, with unavailing regret, that 

 they had helped to carry upon their own shoulders, in 

 the coffin, those arms which were destined to make 

 them captives. 



The whole of the island was now ravaged without 

 mercy ; and, not content with robbing the poor people 

 of such portions of their property as could be carried 

 away, the invaders wantonly and wickedly destroyed 

 the remainder. The historians of the time state that 

 the island contained at this period fifty horses, nearly 

 the same number of neat cattle, three hundred goats, 

 and five hundred sheep. The greater part of the 

 horses and, cattle they hamstrung, so as to disable 

 them for us, and the goats and sheep they threw over 

 the cliffs. They took away even the clothes of the 

 wretched inhabitants ; and so bent were they on de- 

 struction, that a large quantity of meal happening to 

 be in certain lofts, under which was salt for curing 

 fish, they scuttled the floor, and so, by mixing the 

 meal and salt together, spoiled both. They then 

 went over to the fort on the eastern side, dismantled 

 it, threw the brass guns into the sea, as I have already 



