Battle of Fort Albany ( 1709 ) The Battle of Fort Albany ( about 26 June 1709 ) was an attack by French colonial volunteers and their native allies against the Hudson ' s Bay Company outpost of Fort Albany in the southern reaches of Hudson Bay . About 70 Frenchmen and 30 Indians attacked the fort , which was under the command of John Fullartine . Fullartine repulsed the attack , killing eighteen men including the leaders . He lost two men to ambush on their way back to the fort shortly after the attack . Background . Following the creation of the Hudson ' s Bay Company by English investors in 1670 , a lucrative fur trade was established on the shores of Hudson Bay by the company . By the early 1680s the company had established several trading posts near the mouths of rivers entering into the bay , and Indians living in those watersheds would deliver their furs to these trading posts in exchange for provisions and European goods , including weapons , ammunition , and other items . The success of this enterprise drew the attention of the authorities in New France , who objected to English encroachment on their claimed territories , and whose fur trade ( and concomitant economic benefits ) was hurt by the company ' s activities . Beginning with an expedition in 1686 , and running through the Nine Years ' War ( 1689 – 97 , known in the English colonies as King William ' s War ) , raiders from New France repeatedly attacked the company ' s outposts , capturing and holding the facilities , and sometimes making off with furs awaiting transport to Europe . By the end of the war , only one of the company ' s outposts , Fort Albany ( so named because it was located near the mouth of the Albany River in what is now far northern Ontario ) , remained in the company ' s hands . When the War of the Spanish Succession ( known to English colonists as Queen Anne ' s War ) began in 1702 , the idea of raiding this last vestige of English authority came up in New France . In 1709 , a group of French colonists decided to launch an overland raid against Fort Albany . New France ' s governor , Philippe de Rigaud Vaudreuil , gave his blessing to the raid , and also helped fund the expedition from his private purse . The investors in the expedition expected to recoup their costs from the furs that would be taken . Command of the expedition was given to Nicolas d ' Ailleboust de Manthet , an experienced frontier raider who appears , by the few surviving records concerning his life , to never have been to Hudson Bay before . Manthet recruited between 60 and 70 Frenchmen and 30 Caughnawaga Mohawk , and set out , went down the Moose River ( Ontario ) , skirted the James Bay coast in canoes and arrived near Fort Albany in late June 1709 . Battle . Fort Albany was inhabited by company employees under the direction of John Fullartine , a longtime company employee who had spent time as a prisoner of the French in the earlier raids . Fullartine was alerted to the French expedition by Cree traders , and thus had time to prepare a defense ; the number of defenders and the exact date of the event are not known from the fragmentary records of the event . All that is known of the French attack is that it was successfully repulsed , and that both Manthet and his second in command were killed . French casualties totalled 18 killed ( including the two leaders ) , while the company lost only two men . They had not been in the fort and were ambushed by the French as they made their way toward it . Aftermath . Because the company did not send a ship to Fort Albany in 1709 , officials in London learned of the event through an unexpected channel . Francis Nicholson , who had led an aborted expedition against New France from New York in 1709 , brought one Mahican and three Mohawk chiefs to London in a bid to gain support for a new expedition in 1710 . The Mohawks informed company officials that they learned of the attack because they were in Montreal at the time of the expedition ' s return . Fullartine filed a report on the event when he returned to England in 1711 , but it has apparently been lost . Governor Vaudreuil was criticized by government ministers in Paris for his role in supporting and funding the expedition . The Hudson ' s Bay Company recovered all of its outposts in the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht that ended the war , but France and Great Britain continued to dispute the extent of French and company territories in the following decades .