Their fleet was composed of over a hundred vessels of various grades. On the first day of May, 1745, the fleet reached Louisburg. Every French effort, to drive them back was unsuccessful. The siege continued for six weeks; when a French war vessel of came to the rescue of the fort, it was captured by the English fleet. The fort could hold out no longer and on the 17th of June, the fort surrendered. The French King, in response, sent fleets to seize the fort but they were all captured by the English. However, the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, made in 1748, restored to each power what it had possessed before the war. The French and Indian War, the last of four major colonial wars between the British, the French, and their Native American allies, began in North America and then spread to Europe. Both the British and the French claimed the vast territory between the Appalachians and the Mississippi River, from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, known as the Ohio Country. The first major event was in 1754. Major George Washington killed a French officer when he went to negotiate the Ohio Country with the French, who refused to give up their forts. He set up Fort Necessity but was forced to surrender it in 1754. In 1756, William Pitt, Great Britain¡¯s Secretary of State, drove the French from many frontier posts, and Fort Louisburg fell to the British in 1758. In 1759, the Battle of the Plains of Abraham gave Quebec City to the British. On February 10, 1763,