Sep 24, 2020 - Sale 2546

Sale 2546 - Lot 78

Price Realized: $ 625
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 500 - $ 750
(COLONIAL WARS.) Issue of the London Chronicle with coverage of the tragic surrender of Fort William Henry. Pages [361]-368 (issue 124 complete). 4to, disbound; minimal wear. London, 15 October 1757

Additional Details

This issue contains news on the French and Indian War which straggled in from the northern New York frontier in July and early August. It includes vivid accounts of small-scale actions at Fort Edward and Fort Johnson, followed by more dramatic news from besieged Fort William Henry. It gives the Marquis de Montcalm's 3 August letter requesting a British surrender and the 9 August Articles of Capitulation "done in the trenches before Fort William-Henry." After the surrender, the British surrendered all of their ammunition and left the fort peacefully, where they were set upon by American Indian allies of the French, who killed dozens and took many more captive, later dramatized in The Last of the Mohicans. This newspaper includes a short paragraph on this event, in a 17 August report from Albany that was likely the first hint of the news in England: "This morning arrived here several Officers which had been missing and thought to be killed. . . . They do not think we had above ten or twelve killed after the Place was taken; but that the Indians had carried off several Prisoners, whom Montcalm engaged, upon his Honour, to return safe."