The quantity of salmon caught annually was estimated at eleven hundred thousand pounds' weight, [134] The people of Londonderry shared in the alarm which, towards the close of the year 1688, was general among the Protestants settled in Ireland.
It was known that the aboriginal peasantry of the neighbourhood were laying in pikes and knives.

Priests had been haranguing in a style of which, it must be owned, the Puritan part of the Anglosaxon colony had little right to complain, about the slaughter of the Amalekites, and the judgments which Saul had brought on himself by sparing one of the proscribed race.

Rumours from various quarters and anonymous letters in various hands agreed in naming the ninth of December as the day fixed for the extirpation of the strangers.

While the minds of the citizens were agitated by these reports, news came that a regiment of twelve hundred Papists, commanded by a Papist, Alexander Macdonnell, Earl of Antrim, had received orders from the Lord Deputy to occupy Londonderry, and was already on the march from Coleraine.

The consternation was extreme.