Episode Details

In October 1690, a Boston man stood blindfolded before the governor of New France and gave him one hour to surrender Canada — to an army that belonged not to England, but to a single colony. This is the story of the first time the American colonies fought a war handed to them from across an ocean, and what it revealed about them. King William’s War and Queen Anne’s War fell on a sprawling, quarrelsome English America that outnumbered New France fifteen to one and could never once agree to act as one. It is a story of frontier towns burned in the snow, of Jacob Leisler hanged in New York, of a Maine shipwright named William Phips wrecking a colony’s fortunes against the cliffs of Quebec — and of the colonies leaning, year after year, on the one ally that did their fighting for them. The Iroquois. Until, worn down and answered only with corn, the most powerful nation on the continent made its own peace at Montreal in 1701 — and quietly walked out of the line that had shielded English America for fifty years.