The ACADIANS of LOUISIANA: A History [far from complete]

The European Age of Exploitation

The usual place to begin the story of the founding of the European New World is with the commercial revolution that swept through Europe in the centuries that followed the great Crusades to the Holy Land.  In 1095, Pope Urban II stood before a council of bishops at Clermont in France and preached the First Crusade.  The pontiff had learned from the emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire that a new breed of infidel, the Seljuk Turks, had seized the Holy Land and refused to allow Christian pilgrims to visit the Holy Places.  He urged the warriors of Christendom to strap on their swords, take up the cross of their crucified Redeemer, and hurry to the Holy Land to drive these Muslim infidels from Jerusalem.  The knights of France and other Christian kingdoms took up the papal challenge, and four years later the Holy City fell to them in an orgy of blood and righteousness.

These Christian knights fought the Muslims of the Holy Land for material as well as spiritual gain.  As they conquered the great cities of the eastern Mediterranean, they created European feudal states to satisfy their lust for more territory.  For two centuries they clung tenaciously to their principalities in the Middle East, but the Muslims refused to let them be.  By the 1200s, as the Christians gradually lost their grip on the eastern Mediterranean, the Italian merchants who had provided them supplies and transportation for their Crusading expeditions had opened a lucrative trade between southwestern Europe and the eastern Mediterranean.  By the 1300s, despite the loss of the Holy Land to the tenacious Muslims, Europe was benefiting materially and intellectually from the Crusading effort.  The Italian city-states of Genoa, Pisa, and Venice exploited the Mediterranean trade routes that had not seen so much use since Roman times.  New ideas as well as new products flowed through the ports of Italy and southern France, igniting a Renaissance of art and ideas that transformed parochial Europe.  Put off by Turkish dominance of the eastern Mediterranean, the Italians, especially the Genoese, opened new trade routes via the Strait of Gibraltar with northwestern Europe. 

Meanwhile, the crusading spirit compelled two Christian kingdoms in a once obscure corner of Europe to move southward towards the gold fields of west Africa.  In the late 1300s, the Portuguese began the conquest of the Canary Islands off the coast of Africa.  The natives, called the Guanche, who had inhabited the island for thousands of years, fought valiantly to preserve their way of life, but island after island fell to the determined invaders, who used the Guanche as slaves on profitable sugar plantations.  In the mid-1400s, the Castilians drove the Portuguese from the islands and continued the conquest of the Guanche.  By the end of the century, most of the Canaries belonged to Castile. 

The Portuguese, encouraged by the king’s brother, Prince Henry the Navigator, turned their attention to other islands off the African coast--the Azores, Madeiras, and Cape Verdes--thrusting their economic and strategic interests deep into the Atlantic.  Sugar plantations, worked by slave labor, also appeared in the Madeiras.  Usually with the cooperation of local rulers, the Portuguese established fortified trading posts along the coast of northwest Africa, moving steadily southward towards the equatorial zone and the prosperous kingdom of Benin.  What they found in their exploitation of the African coast proved to be more compelling even than pagan souls—gold, ivory, jewels, pepper, fish ... and more slaves.  Their ultimate prize, however, was a spice trade with the fabled Orient via a route around Africa that would effectively outflank the Muslims.  In late 1487, the Portuguese navigator Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope at the southern end of Africa and noted that the coast beyond the cape stretched away to the northeast.  Ten years later, Vasco da Gama repeated Dias's voyage, used the winds and currents of the South Atlantic to propel him into the Indian Ocean, and, after a long and sometimes difficult voyage, returned to Portugal with a cargo of precious Indian spices.  The Portuguese now claimed an all-water route to unprecedented wealth and power. 

It was an obscure Italian with a bold idea who brought Iberian exploitation of the Atlantic world to an entirely new level.  Cristoforo Colombo was born in Genoa in 1451, the son of a weaver who lost his boy to the lure of the sea.  Young Columbus, as we know him, worked in the merchant fleet of his native city and then switched his allegiance to Portugal.  Sometime in the late 1480s, after carefully (mis)calculating the circumference of the earth, he conceived his plan—to sail due westward and reach the Indies by crossing the Atlantic Ocean.  He was confident that his skills at navigation and command could overcome all obstacles he would surely encounter in this dangerous voyage, which would give Portugal a much shorter route to the spices, as well as the unconverted souls, of Asia.  He presented his idea to his Portuguese masters, but a maritime commission rejected his calculations and refused to entrust a fleet to him.  Undaunted, he moved to France, England, and then to Spain but met similar rejection there.  He refused to give up and eventually sold his idea to Queen Isabella of Castile, who, with her husband, King Ferdinand of Aragon, had just conquered the Moors and established a degree of domestic tranquility within their kingdoms.  Christian Spain was ready, Isabella believed, to compete in the Eastern trade and to bring the Asians to Christianity.  So Columbus became the admiral of a fleet of three ships which set sail from the Canary Islands via Palos in the late summer of 1492.  Two months later, on the sandy beach of San Salvador, in the present-day Bahamas, the history of the world was profoundly changed when Columbus reached "the Indies."  Though Columbus himself never acknowledged the existence of the New World he had stumbled upon, others did.  Spanish conquistadors exploited Columbus’s great discovery, and by the mid 1500s, gold and silver from America, as the New World came to be called, transformed Spain into the most powerful kingdom in Europe.

Portugal came upon the New World in 1500 when Pedro Alvares Cabral, on his way to India with a huge fleet to duplicate da Gama’s voyage, landed on the coast of present-day Brazil.  The papal Treaty of Tordesillas six years before had awarded Portugal that part of the Atlantic east of a certain line of longitude down the middle of the ocean.  The place where Cabral landed and which he promptly claimed for Portugal stood east of the treaty line.  So even the Portuguese now had claims to exploit in what Europeans soon realized was an entirely New World.

Meanwhile, another Italian navigator, John Cabot, as he came to be called, also had seized upon the idea of a cross-Atlantic voyage to the Indies.  Like Columbus, he sought sponsors in several kingdoms, in this case Spain and Portugal, before finding one.  By the mid-1490s, he had moved to England, and in 1496 he and an Italian sponsor coaxed King Henry VII into authorizing a voyage to the East.  Sailing from Bristol, Cabot reached terra firma at present-day Newfoundland in 1497 and explored the coast extensively--probably the first European since the time of the Vikings to set foot in North America.  Now the English, too, possessed an early claim to "the Indies."  But the coast that Cabot had explored and that may have cost him his life on a subsequent voyage did not seem to possess the potential for exploitation as Columbus's and Cabral's discoveries to the south.  England thus failed to exploit its American claims for many decades, leaving Spain and Portugal the early winners in the imperial competition for the New World.

But if one were to award a trophy for the true "discoverers" of North America, of its size, its intricate configuration, and its economic importance, the prize must go to the thousands of fishermen and whalers who ventured there not long after Cabot's exploration.  Every coastal European people sent their sturdy sons across the cold, wide ocean.  Portuguese, French and Spanish Basques, Bretons, Normans, Englishmen from the West Country, Dutchmen, Danes, Norwegians--thousands of them ventured across  the dangerous North Atlantic to exploit the Grand Banks of Newfoundland.  "Together the whale and cod fisheries involved an annual trans-Atlantic migration of hundreds of ships and thousands of men.  Less spectacular than Spanish activities in the Caribbean, Mexico, and Peru, the fisheries in the northwestern Atlantic involved more ships and men."  By the 1550s, cod fishermen from northern France had perfected the wet or green fishery, which allowed them to fish the offshore banks early in the season, salt the cod in their holds and return to their northern European ports without having to make land fall.  But more extensively, and more importantly to our story, the cod fishermen developed the inshore or dry fishery for the southern European and West Indian markets.  This required them to build drying and salting stations along the North American coast.  Contact with the natives was inevitable, as was the exchange of goods and microorganisms.  The fishermen seldom used Indians in the labor-intensive drying operations, but they found a secondary market in trading with them, especially for furs.  This trade transformed Indian life permanently and profoundly, and someday it would rival fishing and whaling in economic importance to the Europeans.01

France in the New World

Except for its sturdy fishermen, France was a late comer to the competition for America’s riches.  Not until the 1520s did a French monarch, François I, authorize a voyage to America.  Yet another Italian navigator, Giovanni da Verrazano of Florence, explored the North American coast in 1524, seeking the elusive Northwest Passage to the Orient.  He claimed for France the entire coast of North America, which he called "Arcadia."   A decade later, in 1534, the Breton navigator Jacques Cartier of St.-Malo re-discovered the Gulf of St. Lawrence.  On subsequent voyages into the early 1540s, he explored the magnificent river that flowed into the gulf as far up as the falls above present-day Montréal, proving that it was not the Northwest Passage, and he and his men spent a hard, cold winter at the Iroquoian town of Stadacona, the site of present-day Québec.  Meanwhile, attempts at establishing a French colony in North America came to nothing, but Cartier's explorations in the St. Lawrence region gave France a firmer claim to that part of the continent.02

The Protestant revolt that had erupted in Europe a generation after Columbus’s discovery of the New World consumed France as much as it did Germany and England in a maelstrom of rancor and violence.  The French theologian Jean Calvin was as important a figure in the struggle against Catholic authority as was the founder of Protestantism, the German priest Martin Luther.  Run out of France in the year of Cartier’s first voyage to North America, Calvin took refuge in Geneva, but his ideas seeped back into this native country.  French Protestants, known as Huguenots, challenged the authority of the pope and preached what Catholics insisted were heretical doctrines.  As a result of these intractable theological differences and a bloody rivalry between noble families for control of the throne, a series of civil wars raged through France from 1562 to 1598.  "At times," a modern historian has written, "they brought the French monarchy very low; the nobility came near to mastering it.  Yet, in the end, aristocratic rivalries benefited a crown which could use one faction against another.  Meanwhile, the wretched population of France had to bear the brunt of disorder and devastation.  In 1589 a member of a junior branch of the royal family, Henry, ruler of the little Spanish kingdom of Navarre, became (after the murder of his predecessor) Henry IV of France and inaugurated the Bourbon line whose descendants still claim the French throne.  He had been a Protestant, but now accepted Catholicism as the condition of succession, recognizing the religion most Frenchmen would stand by.  The Protestants were given guarantees which left them a state within a state, the possessors of fortified towns where the king’s writ did not run."03

Despite domestic upheaval, the Huguenots, at least, tried to establish French colonies in the New World.  In 1555, Gaspard de Coligny, Admiral of France, a powerful Huguenot leader, sent an expedition to establish a colony of his fellow Protestants on an island in the harbor of present-day Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.  Coligny ignored the fact that Portugal had long claimed this area.  The next year, Coligny sent 300 reinforcements to the colony, "many picked personally by Jean Calvin himself."  The colony languished, and in 1558 the Portuguese attacked the settlement and hanged all of its survivors.  A few years later, Coligny tried again, this time in an area claimed by Spain.  In 1562, he sent a lieutenant, Jean Ribaut, to plant a Huguenot colony in Florida.  Ribaut built a fort near present-day Port Royal, South Carolina, which he named Charlesfort after King Charles IX, and then he returned to France.  Not long after he left, the unhappy tenants of the fort turned on one another, murdered the officer whom Ribaut had left in charge, built a ship of their own, and abandoned the fort to the elements.  In 1564, Coligny sent another lieutenant, René de Laudonnière, to try again.  Fort Caroline in northern Florida, also named after the French king, stood on a hill beside the St. Johns River and fared better, or at least a bit longer, than Ribaut's fort up the coast.  Eventually, however, Laudonnière and his colonists quarreled bitterly, ran short of food, found no gold, and alienated the local Indians.  Even worse for the hapless Huguenots, Spanish authorities learned of the French incursion into their territory and resolved to rid the New World of these troublesome heretics.  In September 1565, a powerful expedition led by Pedro Menéndez de Avilés attacked Fort Caroline and massacred most of the settlers, including the redoubtable Jean Ribaut.  Menéndez promptly erected a stronghold at nearby San Agústín, today's St. Augustine, 40 miles south of of Fort Caroline, to keep Protestants away from the Catholic realm.  Seven years later, in the Massacre of St. Bartholomew in France, Catholic militants murdered Coligny along with other prominent Huguenots, "thus bringing to an end the first phase of French transatlantic expansion" and precipitating a fourth war of religion in France.04

The Founding of Acadia

Not until well into the reign of Henry IV did the French attempt another lodgment in America.  It is then that the history of Acadia begins in earnest.05

In November 1603, at the king's residence at Fontainebleau just outside of Paris, Henry IV granted Pierre Dugua, sieur de Mons, a distinguished member of his court and a Calvinist, "extensive rights to settlement, trade, and fishery" for 10 years in the area the French called La Cadie.  That Henry IV rewarded the monopoly and the title of lieutenant governor to a Protestant gives some idea of how open-minded the French had become in religious matters, at least while Henry reigned.  To the French, La Cadie comprised not only the peninsula of present-day Nova Scotia but also what is now New England and New York, much of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, all of New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island (called Île St.-Jean by the French), Cape Breton Island (later Île Royale), Newfoundland, the Magdalen Islands in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and much of what is today the Province of Québec.06

Like his fellow Protestant Coligny, Dugua established a settlement in territory claimed by a rival nation--in this case, England.  Unlike Coligny, Dugua chose not to remain in France but to go himself to oversee the establishment of his new holdings.  Dugua had already spent a winter at Tadoussac, on the lower St. Lawrence River, and sought a milder climate to the south for his new settlement.  Also, having witnessed the annual frenzy by French traders in the St. Lawrence valley to acquire beaver pelts from the Indians, he chose to set up his fur-trading monopoly not on the St. Lawrence but further down the Atlantic coast, where the natives had not yet been exploited by his fellow countrymen.06a

Dugua crossed to Acadia from Le Havre in early March 1604 in two ships--the Bonne Renommée, 150 tons, and Le Don de Dieu, 120 tons--and a small unnamed barque or pinnace of 8 tons, with 120 men in the expedition.  No women and certainly no families accompanied this venture.  This was first and foremost a commercial enterprise bankrolled by an association of merchants, both Catholic and Protestant, back in France.  Large profits from trading for fur with the Indians was the main reason for the venture; everything else, including the local fishery, would be secondary to that trade.  With Dugua were Jean de Biencourt, sieur de Poutrincourt et de Saint-Just, an influential Catholic nobleman, who had come on the voyage "for his pleasure"; François Gravé, sieur du Pont, called Pontgravé, of Honfleur, Dugua's second in command, who knew North American waters well; and Samuel Champlain, an experienced navigator and geographer and friend of Dugua from their native region of Saintonge, who served as the expedition's cartographer.   Champlain also had spent some time in the St. Lawrence valley before 1604; he had explored as far up as present-day Montréal as well as several of the great river's tributaries.  It was his job to advise Dugua on the best place to set up the new trading center.06b

Dugua's little fleet reached Acadia in early May and landed in two places.  The larger ship, under Pontgravé, reached Canso, a fishing rendezvous on the Atlantic side of the Acadian peninsula, where it remained to intercept any contraband traffic, while the smaller ship and the pinnace, with Dugua and Champlain, landed at Cap de La Have, later called La Hève, farther down the coast.  Unfamiliar with these waters, Dugua moved the ship carefully down the coast and anchored at Port-au-Mouton, where he waited while Champlain, with 10 men, took the pinnace to explore the coast to the southwest.  Champlain inched his way around Cap-Nèigre and Cap-Sable and sailed north to the mouth of the Bay of Fundy, which the French called, appropriately, La Grand Baie Française.  Champlain hurried back to Port-au-Mouton, informed Dugua of what he had discovered, and Dugua sailed Le Don de Dieu to present-day St. Mary's Bay, near the southern entrance to the great French bay.  Dugua now joined Champlain in the pinnace to explore the big bay thoroughly.  Along the south shore they came upon today's Annapolis Basin with its narrow gut, commanding hills, and spacious harbor, which Dugua granted to Poutrincourt.  They explored what was later called the Bassin-des-Mines, the name of which evokes the hope of finding valuable minerals in the area along with a plentiful supply of furs.  They sailed along the narrow Baie de Chignecto at the far end of the great bay and found more inlets and marsh-lined estuaries along both shores.  Northeast of the great bay's entrance they came upon the mouth of a large river which they discovered on June 24, the feast day of St.-Jean-Baptiste, and so Champlain called it Rivière St.-Jean.07

But Dugua chose another place to establish his settlement.  For a number of reasons--its security, its beauty, its mild climate, the fertility of its soil, the profusion of fish, clams, and mussels in the surrounding water, its proximity to the mouth of the great bay and to nearby Indians villages, and the lateness of the season--Dugua picked as the site of his new trading venture a five-acre island in a wide river along the northern shore of Baie Française, west of the mouth of Rivière St.-Jean.  The French called the island Île Ste.-Croixe and the stream on which it lay Rivière Ste.-Croixe.  Dugua landed on the island on June 26, and the post there took shape over the summer.07a  [map]

Pontgravé and Poutrincourt returned to France in late August with the ships and a load of furs "to take care of their affairs and, to plan for a later return, with more men, provisions, tools, seedgrain and livestock," leaving Dugua and Champlain on the island.  From early September to early October, Champlain explored the coast south to the Kennebec River in present-day Maine while Dugua supervised the construction at Île Ste.-Croixe, which included additional gardens and a grist mill on the mainland east and west of the island.  When Champlain returned to Île St.-Croixe, he found most of the settlement completed.  But the island soon revealed its inadequacies as a settlement.  The sandy soil held no water, so they could not sink a well.  Rain, which fell too infrequently, failed to nourish the garden crops.  Only wheat sown on the mainland, farther upriver, produced a crop.  The fish and shellfish became the staple of their diet.  Winter came earlier than expected.  Snow fell in early October, and by early December ice floated past on the river.  No more rain fell, only snow.  Deep snow that lasted through April, thick ice on the river, heavy winds, biting cold, and the poor condition of their boats--all made leaving the island nearly impossible.  If anyone had thought that moving the trading venture south of the St. Lawrence valley would mean milder winters, the experience at Île Ste.-Croixe proved otherwise.  In March 1605, a band of local Passamaquoddy Indians appeared and exchanged meat for bread, but this did little to improve the Frenchmen's diet.  By spring, which finally came in May, nearly half of the 79 men with Dugua and Champlain had died from scurvy.  Dugua had expected Pontgravé to return from France by April.  In May, Dugua ordered the construction of two more pinnaces, of 7 and 15 tons each, to take the survivors to Gaspé, on the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where they were sure to find a ship to take them home.  Finally, in mid-June, Pontgravé appeared at Île Ste.-Croix with two ships full of supplies and reinforcements.08

The colony was saved.  

For good reason, Dugua was dissatisfied with the island and explored southward all the way to Cape Cod to find a more suitable place to settle.  From June 18 to August 2, he and Champlain sailed one of the new pinnaces along the coast of today's New England, but they saw nothing promising.  Dugua chose as the site of his new post a place that he and Champlain had seen on their exploration of the great French bay the summer before--the beautiful, wide basin beyond the gut on the south shore of the bay, in the seigneury he had granted to Poutrincourt.  There, in the summer of 1605, Dugua established Port-Royal, which became the oldest more or less continuously occupied French settlement in the New World and the heart of the French colony of Acadia.08a     

Dugua erected a small fort with several buildings on the north side of the basin, opposite present-day Goat Island, near the Mi'kmaq village of chief Membertou, using materials from the structures on Île Ste.-Croixe.  The following winter, 1605-06, Champlain remained again with the settlers, this time with Pontgravé.  Dugua returned to France, where he remained.  Poutrincourt, who had remained in France in 1605, left La Rochelle aboard the 150-ton Jonas in May 1606 with more supplies and men for his settlement at Port-Royal.  To his chagrin, Poutrincourt found Port-Royal virtually abandoned when he got there via Canso in late July.09

After another hard winter with many deaths from scurvy, most of the Port-Royal survivors, led by Pontgravé and Champlain, had sailed to Canso, the fishermen’s rendezvous, where they were certain to meet ships from the homeland.  The fishing trade at Canso and other harbors along the Acadian coast had been flourishing for decades.  "First in dozens, then in scores, and finally in hundreds," notes an historian of the period, fishermen from western Europe "came to the coast of Newfoundland and gradually to the offshore banks and the coasts of Greater Acadia in search of codfish" throughout the sixteenth century.  "Norman and Breton, West-country English and Basque, Spanish and Portuguese, they gradually added to the technique of packing the cod down in heavy salt on their vessels (the ‘green’ or ‘wet’ fishery) the practice of curing their catch on shore, in the open air soon after catching, with much less salt.  This (the ‘dry’ fishery) made a more valuable product and required landing on, and learning the nature of, the rocky Atlantic shoreline.  Disembarking only briefly in the summers at first, they began to find the shore phase of their work important enough to require leaving men to winter in the new land in order to protect structures and to prepare for the following season….  We have records of many who virtually lived their lives in such a fishery and whose knowledge of the coasts of today’s Atlantic Canada must often have been profound.  [Marc] Lescarbot described a meeting at Canso, in 1607, with a French fisherman who was on his forty-second annual voyage to the area."10

But Poutrincourt was not in Acadia to establish a fishery settlement.  The fur trade was still the major pursuit of the Acadian venture, and he was determined to start an agricultural settlement on his seigneury to support it.  He ordered the men back to Port-Royal to sow vegetables and grain to feed the trading post there.  "A lime kiln was built, a forge set up and charcoal made for it, and paths were cut from the settlement to the fields and the valley.  Tradesmen of many kinds spent a brief part of the day at their trades, the rest of it fishing, hunting, and gathering shellfish.  They had a good winter [1606-07], and toward the end of March [1607] started sowing seeds and building a water-powered gristmill to take care of the anticipated harvest."11

Then court politics threatened, not for the last time, the existence of the colony.  In the summer of 1607 news arrived in Port-Royal that the king had withdrawn Dugua’s concessions in Acadia.  The year before, "merchants and shipbuilders from Dieppe and La Rochelle succeeded in having [Dugua’s] 10 year trade and commerce rights in Acadia annulled just when the entire venture was beginning to look promising."  One of the charges brought against Dugua was that, during the three years since he received his monopoly, he had failed to convert a single savage to Catholicism.  Dugua gave up and stayed in France.  Without a concession from the crown to give him a monopoly on any profits to be made from the colony, he considered Acadia and the expense of its maintenance to be a liability, not an asset.  That summer, Port-Royal, "the longest and most elaborate post-Viking settlement of Europeans on the North American continent north of Florida[,] was abandoned—in the same year that Jamestown was established" by a company of English merchants 800 miles to the south.12

Champlain, however, remained in North America and directed his attention westward, to the interior of the continent.  The year after Dugua abandoned Acadia, Champlain founded a new trading post at Québec on the abandoned site of the old Iroquois town of Stadacona, where Cartier had wintered on the St. Lawrence River 70 years before.  Thus began the French colony of Canada or New France, which one day would thrive on the lucrative fur trade that Dugua had controlled so briefly.  Poutrincourt's little fort at Port-Royal lay abandoned for three years, watched over by Membertou and his Mi'kmaq ... until politics in France fashioned a new monopoly for Acadia and resurrection of the colony.12a

Early Struggles to Maintain the Colony

This time it was Poutrincourt who would risk his fortunes in Acadia.  In June 1610, he brought with him to his seigneury at Port-Royal two of his sons, 19-year-old Charles de Biencourt de Saint-Just and the even younger Jacques de Salazar.  Eager not to repeat Dugua's mistakes, one of the first things Poutrincourt did after he anchored at Port-Royal was to summon the local Indians.  Secular priest Jessé Fleché preached the Word to Membertou's band of Mi'kmaq and baptized 21 of them on June 24.  Only then could the French resume the business for which they had truly come.  Charles de Biencourt returned to France in 1611 with a cargo of furs and then hurried back to Port-Royal with reinforcements and two unwelcome Jesuit priests who had loaned him money to provision the colony and who now would share in half the profits.  It did not take long for Poutrincourt and the Jesuits to quarrel over religious as well as political matters.  Poutrincourt returned to France in 1612 on the annual voyage back to the homeland, leaving young Biencourt in charge at Port-Royal.  Biencourt also quarreled with the meddlesome priests, and again the colony was thrown into chaos.  Meanwhile, the ministers of Marie de Medici, widow of the recently-assassinated Henry IV and regent for her nine-year-old son, King Louis XIII, granted a concession in Acadia to the son of Pontgravé, who established himself on Rivière St.-Jean and promptly ran afoul of Biencourt's authority.  The queen mother also rewarded one of her favorites, Antoinette de Pons, marquise de Guercheville, who was a champion of the Jesuits, a generous grant in North America even larger than Poutrincourt's.  The marquise had provided invaluable support to the Port-Royal venture only because of the Jesuit mission there, but when Poutrincourt and Biencourt quarreled with the priests, she withdrew her support.  Poutrincourt ended up in debtor's prison, and for more than a year Port-Royal received no supplies from France.  In 1613, the marquise sent agents to Acadia to seize Jesuit assets from the Port-Royal habitation and to re-establish her priests on Mount Desert Island, off the coast of Maine.  Conflicting claims as well as politics in the mother country threatened once again the future of the Acadian venture.13

No sooner had these rival Acadian settlements put down roots than a greater menace came sailing up the coast, flying the flag of England.  Samuel Argall, a Welsh freebooter and the dangerous right arm of Jamestown’s new marshal, Sir Thomas Dale, sailed from Virginia in 1613 and destroyed the infant settlement on Mount Desert Island.  In November, guided by one of the captured Jesuits, Argall returned and fell upon Port-Royal, "looted and burned the … settlement, dispersed its people, and destroyed its livestock."  The incident would not be an isolated one.  It was, in fact, a foreshadowing of conflict over possession of Acadia that would haunt the colony for the next century and a half.  "This raid set the pattern for the future of the region," an historian of New France observes.  "Although blessed with rich natural resources[,] the Acadian marches, owing to their geographic position, were doomed to remain a buffer zone between the rival empires until one or the other prevailed."14

When Poutrincourt sailed back to Port-Royal in early 1614, he found only ashes and ruin at the old fort beside his lovely basin.  A decade of effort had produced little for him and his associates; like Dugua, he had his fill of this Acadian business, gave up, and returned to France, taking his younger son and most of the settlers with him.  But Charles de Biencourt and a handful of other Frenchmen refused to abandon the venture.  They had seen the rich potential of the trade in furs and were determined to supply the wealthy merchants of La Rochelle with the precious commodity.  Back in France, Poutrincourt died in another bloody civil war, so Biencourt inherited his father’s title as well as his claims in Acadia.15

The next ten years of Acadian history were dominated by the efforts of Biencourt and others, including Claude de Saint-Étienne, sieur de La Tour and his son Charles-Amador, to profit from the fur trade.  The hardy young Biencourt "lived much like an Indian, roaming the woods with a few followers, and subsisting on fish, game, roots, and lichens."  Without the local Indians, the efforts of Biencourt and his associates to maintain a French presence in Acadia would not have been possible.  At first the French were no more impressed with the local Algonquian-speaking tribe than with any other natives they encountered.  The Mi’kmaq, called the Souriquois by the French, "were a small group thinly scattered over a large area when the seventeenth century opened.  Contacts throughout the previous century, chiefly through fishermen, had prepared them for trading relationships with the French," but they were little acculturated to French habits and attitudes when Dugua and his associates first encountered them.  They numbered then about 3,000 over an area of roughly 30,000 square miles.  The French put them to good use for their own purposes, and the Mi’kmaq responded in kind.  "The chief services of the Micmac to the French, consistent with the maintenance of their own basic culture patterns, were as guides, paddlers, hunters, and procurers of the furs and feathers for which a market existed in Europe, the St. Lawrence settlements, or the English colonies to the south."  This largely amicable relationship with the French was sealed by the efforts of Catholic missionaries.  "The slow, but ultimately universal, attachment of the Micmac to the Roman Catholic faith reinforced their ties to the French.  These ties were maintained assiduously by missionaries largely based on Quebec," who were not above sending their native charges on the warpath against English settlements.16

With the death of Biencourt at Port-Royal in 1623, only the La Tours remained to carry on trade with the Indians.  Charles La Tour claimed that Biencourt had bequeathed to him his rights to the colony.  But it almost did not matter anymore.  The English reappeared in greater force, and this time they came to stay.17  

The English Seize Acadia

Virginia, too, had endured its share of troubles after its founding in 1607.  From the beginning, the English colonists exhibited a remarkable ineptness in dealing with the Algonquian-speaking natives who lived in the vicinity of Jamestown.  In the first years of the settlement, mostly as a result of incompetent leadership and Indian depredations, the death toll among the settlers was astonishingly high.  The introduction of tobacco cultivation as a profitable venture and the conversion of Princess Pocahontas to Christianity after her kidnapping by the resourceful Argall were lucky strokes for the hard-pressed English during the administration of Thomas Dale.  In 1614, the princess married John Rolfe, the colony's secretary and the fellow who had introduced tobacco cultivation to the colony.  By 1619, the Englishmen at Jamestown managed to export the institution of representative government to Virginia and allowed a cargo of Africans who had arrived on a Dutch ship to become indentured servants.  But the peace that had followed the princess’s marriage to Rolfe was shattered in March of 1622 when the Indians under a formidable new leader massacred hundreds of the colonists in every settlement but Jamestown.  The king’s ministers soon took over administration of the colony from a defeated London Company.  By then, English Separatists had founded a colony of their own at Plymouth, near Cape Cod, in 1620, 15 years after Dugua and Champlain had explored the area.  Plymouth lay only 300 miles south of Port-Royal, closer to Acadia than to Virginia.  These "Pilgrims" were more adept at relations with the Indians than the Virginia pioneers had been.  And now two English colonies offered a potential threat to the tenuous French hold on Acadia.18

To make matters worse for the French in North America, in 1621 King James I of England (who also was King James VI of Scotland) rewarded one of his Scottish friends with a generous grant—Acadia and Canada!  Sir William Alexander was Earl of Sterling and a prominent member of the House of Lords.  In 1622 and 1623, he ventured to Acadia, which he called "Nova Scotia," explored along its coast and made landfall in Newfoundland but did not settle his grant … just yet.  Not until 1629, after his associate, David Kirke, had captured Port-Royal, did Sir William establish a Scottish settlement in Nova Scotia, across the basin from the old French habitation at Port-Royal.  That same year, the Kirkes struck again and forced Champlain to give up the crown jewel of French North America, the settlement at Québec.  A third British settlement was established in the region that year, on Cape Breton Island.  The story of French Acadia, and French Canada for that matter, could have ended in 1629, only a quarter of a century after it had begun.  But the French, despite years of bad luck and neglect, were unwilling to give up their holdings in North America.  French Captain Charles Daniel attacked the English fort on Cape Breton Island as it was being built and carried its inhabitants to France as prisoners of war.  The Treaty of St.-Germain-en-Laye in 1632 ended hostilities between the two kingdoms.  The treaty also provided that the English return Acadia and Canada to the French.19

In the meantime, life had become dangerously complicated for the hard-pressed La Tours.  Claude, the father, was captured in the Gulf of St. Lawrence by one of the Kirkes and taken to England.  Sir William rewarded him and his son titles of nobility in exchange for the outposts they controlled in Acadia.  This meant nothing to Charles, who seldom remained in one place.  "After the death of the … Sieur de Biencourt," wrote an enemy of Charles about his exploits during this time, "Charles Latour travelled the woods with 18 or 20 men, mingled with the savages and lived an infamous and libertine life, without any practice of religion, not even bothering to baptize the children they procreated and instead abandoned them to their poor, miserable mothers as the coureurs de bois still do today."  These half-breed children, called métis by the French in Canada, "became some of the staunchest allies of the first French families of Acadia."  Many of them were baptized by French missionaries and clung to the faith of their fathers.  They diligently pursued the trade in furs that sealed the relationship between the worlds of their fathers and mothers.20

Razilly and d'Aulnay Resurrect the Colony

After Canada and Acadia reverted to France, the powerful minister of King Louis XIII, Cardinal Richelieu, organized an expedition to reestablish French presence in North America under his cousin, Isaac de Razilly of Touraine.  The king named Razilly "Lieutenant-General of all of New France (Canada) and Governor of Acadia."  The Company of New France, or the Company of the Hundred Associates, a powerful trading organization founded by Richelieu in 1627 to organize the revenues in cod fishing and the fur trade in French North America, would direct the new governor's efforts.  Razilly’s expedition of three ships holding 300 men and supplies aplenty departed Auray in July and arrived at La Hève in early September 1632.  Razilly left the settlers at La Hève, his new headquarters, then hurried to Port-Royal to take possession of the old post from the surviving Scots, most of whom returned to Britain.  Soon afterwards, he seized the fort the English had built at Pentagouët at the mouth of the Penobscot River, today's Castine, Maine.  After 18 years of neglect and English interference, French suzerainty in Acadia finally was restored.21

Razilly next had to deal with the troublesome Charles La Tour, who considered himself master of all Acadia and had considerable influence with the Indians.  Razilly was forced to compromise with his clever compatriot.  Razilly would remain with his settlers at La Hève while La Tour and his men could retain their outposts at Cap-Sable at the southern end of the peninsula and at Pentagouët and Machias in Maine, from which they could pursue their lucrative fur trade.  Razilly also granted La Tour a large concession centered on Rivière St.-Jean.  La Tour had already built a fort near the mouth of the river to secure his rights to the area.  Fur-bearing animals were more plentiful in the western woods of the mainland than on the over-hunted peninsula.  Razilly was determined to establish an agriculture-based settlement as well as an entrepot for furs and codfish at La Hève.  La Tour was interested only in the fur trade, and the fort on the St.-Jean was a well-placed, well-protected headquarters from which to pursue his efforts.22

Razilly brought with him two associates who would play prominent roles in Acadian history.  Charles de Menou, sieur d’Aulnay de Charnisay, Razilly’s cousin and chief lieutenant, was 28 years old when he arrived at La Hève in 1632.  Nicolas Denys de la Ronde was age 29.  Razilly granted them concessions also, a continuation of what the French called the seigneurial system, whereby a land holder with sanction from the king could charge rent to the inhabitants of his seigneurie, as it had been done in France since the Middle Ages.  D’Aulnay took charge of the settlers and directed the agricultural efforts of the colony as well as the fur trade on the peninsula.  With him were two men who later would establish pioneering families in the colony:  the cooper Pierre Comeau, who was 34 years old and still a bachelor when he arrived in the colony; and trusted lieutenant Germain Doucet, sieur de La Verdure of Couperans or Conflans en Brie, who was married and the father of two or three children when he came to Acadia.  Denys, "an accomplished businessman and tireless trader," took charge of the Acadian fisheries and a new lumber trade and shared in the lucrative trade for fur.  His concessions extended along the Gulf of St. Lawrence from Canso all the way up to the Gaspé Peninsula.  He established his headquarters at Chedabouctou, now Guysborough, Nova Scotia, near Canso, and opened a fishing port at Port Rossignol, now Liverpool, Nova Scotia, just down the coast from La Hève.  In the 1640s, he built a post at Miscou, at the entrance of the Baie des Chaleurs in present-day northeastern New Brunswick.  His holdings eventually included Cape Breton Island, where he built Fort Saint-Pierre in the early 1640s.23

Under such vigorous leadership, the resurrected Acadian colony held every promise of success.  Only a single incident during Razilly’s short time at the helm of the Acadian venture threatened the colony.  By 1632, the year Razilly commenced his settlement at La Hève, the English had established yet another colony along the wide swath of the North American coast—Massachusetts Bay in 1629.  The founders of this colony were dour, exceedingly righteous, extraordinarily hardworking Puritan dissidents whom the new English king, Charles I, was glad to be rid of.  He granted them a charter to establish their "City upon a Hill."  Boston, up the coast from the Separatist settlement at Plymouth, had a flawless harbor and thus every chance of permanence.  Other English settlements had appeared in the area--Wessagusett, now Weymouth; Merry Mount, now Quincy; and Naumkeag, now Salem--and were subsumed into the Massachusetts Bay colony after Boston was established in 1630.  New England was there to stay.  It was only a matter of time before these good Puritans clashed with their papist enemies up the coast.  In 1633, a Massachusetts merchant named Isaac Allerton sailed to Machias, between Pentagouët and Rivière Ste.-Croixe, to rescue three English traders whom Charles La Tour was holding there and to assert his claim to the outpost.  La Tour and Razilly informed the rescuer that English rights extended up the coast of  Maine only as far as the Kennebec River.  This left Pentagouët, Machias, the Ste.-Croixe, and the St.-Jean squarely in French Acadia.  And there the matter ended … for now.24

Unfortunately for the colony, Razilly died suddenly at La Hève in July 1636, and, again, Acadia was thrown into confusion.  To the chagrin of La Tour and Denys, d’Aulnay quickly took over Razilly’s estate and assumed all of his rights in the colony.  La Tour insisted that d’Aulnay guarantee to him, as Razilly had done, rights to the Pentagouët outpost.  Denys continued his activities developing the flourishing fisheries and the fur and lumber trades on his concessions.25  

In 1636, d’Aulnay departed La Hève, though the settlement there had done well under his leadership, and moved his headquarters to Port-Royal, where he insisted there was more arable land and other advantages over La Hève.  Most of the hand full of settlers still at La Hève followed d'Aulnay to Port-Royal in the next few years, though none of them seems to have established a family of his own at Port-Royal.26  

 That same year, 1636, in May, the French vessel St.-Jehan arrived at La Hève from La Rochelle with a number of settlers and their families aboard--the first recorded French families in Acadia.  Aboard the vessel were 35-year-old farmer Pierre Martin of Saint-Germain de Bourgueil, in the Loire valley, his wife Catherine Vigneau, and sons Étienne age 5, Pierre age 4, and Urbain age 2; and Guillaume Trahan, also 35, an edge-tool maker from Montreuil-Bellay in Anjou but living in Bourgueil when he left France, his wife Françoise Corbineau, two daughters, Jeanne age 7, and a younger daughter whose name and age have been lost to history, as well as a valet.  According to Acadian historical tradition, also among the passengers aboard the St.-Jehan were 61-year-old widower Jean Gaudet from Martaizé, near Loudun, south of the Loire valley in northern Poitou, and three children, daughter Françoise, age 13, son Denis, age 11, and daughter Marie, age 3; Antoine Bourg, a farmer from Martaizé who was a bachelor in his late 20s; Vincent Brun from La Chaussée on the Loire near Blois, another bachelor in his 20s who was hired with other men from the area, probably including Antoine Bourg, "on a five-year contract as land clearers and laborers"; and 23-year-old François Gautrot from Martaizé and his wife, Marie.  These sturdy Frenchmen had been recruited by Razilly to settle in the colony.  All of them joined d'Aulnay at Port-Royal and established prominent families there.  Pierre Martin's sons Étienne and Urbain died at Port-Royal in c1636, soon after the family settled at d'Aulnay's new headquarters; they were among the first French children to die in the colony.  By all accounts, Pierre Martin's fourth and youngest son Mathieu, born at Port-Royal in c1639, was "the first Frenchman born in Acadia"; in the late 1680s Mathieu would pioneer the Acadian settlement at Cobeguit.  Also aboard the St.-Jehan was Jeanne or Jehanne Motin de Reux, 21-year-old daughter of Louis Motin de Courcelles, an associate of Isaac de Razilly.  She married the Sieur d'Aulnay at Port-Royal soon after her arrival.27

The move to Port-Royal put d’Aulnay’s headquarters perilously close to La Tour’s new seat on Rivière St.-Jean  across the bay.  In 1638, La Tour’s powerful friends in Paris acquired for him the title of Lieutenant-Governor of Acadia, which he was to share with d’Aulnay.  But the Sieur d’Aulnay would have none of that.  He and La Tour quarreled bitterly, and virtual civil war erupted in Acadia.28

La Tour made the first move by seizing a ship d’Aulnay had sent to Pentagouët to assist the settlers there against English threats.  In 1640, La Tour took two ships to Port-Royal to capture the place, but d’Aulnay arrived from Pentagouët in time to capture La Tour and his men instead.  In July, d'Aulnay ordered an inquiry at Port-Royal into the actions of La Tour; two of the witnesses who appeared to testify against La Tour were Germain Doucet and Guillaume Trahan.  The tables then turned on La Tour back in France.  In 1641, the French court, now dominated by Cardinal Mazarin, revoked La Tour’s concessions and summoned him to Paris to answer charges against his conduct, which he refused to do.  French authorities named d’Aulnay "Governor and Lieutenant-General of the entire coast of Acadia from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to Virginia."  This left not only La Tour but also Denys at the mercy of d’Aulnay, who soon declared that Denys’s holdings along the Gulf of St. Lawrence now were his.  In 1642, with La Tour’s refusal to appear before the royal court, authorities in France authorized d’Aulnay to seize La Tour and force him to return to France.  La Tour clung to his fort and sought assistance from the English in Boston.  Under cover of night, La Tour, his wife, and some of his men slipped past d'Aulnay's blockade of Rivière St.-Jean and sailed to Boston.  The ship La Tour used to make his escape to Boston, the St.-Clément, was manned by 140 Huguenots and had been sent to him by his merchant friends in La Rochelle.  The Boston magistrates at first were wary of the daring Frenchman despite his claim that he was now a Protestant, but soon La Tour charmed them into giving assistance in his struggle with d’Aulnay.  In July 1643, Bostonians manning four armed vessels joined La Tour and the crew of the St.-Clément in an assault on d'Aulnay's vessels at the mouth of the St.-Jean.  D'Aulnay and his men fled to a fortified mill at Port-Royal, but La Tour and the Bostonians drove them out.  The raiders "wounded several men, killed three others and took one captive.  They killed a quantity of livestock and took a ship loaded with furs, powder and food."  After burning the mill, "the Puritans returned home, having ... compromised their colony" by helping La Tour strike his enemy.  D’Aulnay, who managed to escape the raid, hurried to France to inform the authorities of La Tour’s treachery.  On 6 March 1644, the French court declared Charles La Tour an outlaw and a pirate.29

In April of 1645, d’Aulnay, with reinforcements from France, struck back.  The object of his wrath was not only La Tour but also the outlaw's wife.  She had gone to France to plead for her husband's cause, had failed, and had managed to return to Acadia via England and Boston despite orders from the king to remain in France.  Gathering up his forces, d'Aulnay assaulted La Tour’s stronghold on Rivière St.-Jean in late April.  La Tour was in Boston at the time, intriguing with his old friends, and it was knowledge of this that prompted d'Aulnay to launch the attack.  Madame La Tour and 45 of her husband’s men resisted valiantly.  After three days of fighting, d’Aulnay rushed the fort, losing 33 men in the struggle.  Incensed by the valiant resistance of La Tour's compatriots, d’Aulnay hanged many of them "as an example and as a lesson to posterity of such an obstinate rebellion," and forced Madame La Tour to witness the atrocity.  She died three months later.  La Tour "roved the Gulf of St. Lawrence as a privateer, before taking refuge in Quebec with Governor Montmagny."30

Having vanquished La Tour and made peace with the Puritans, d’Aulnay turned on his other former associate, Nicolas Denys.  He seized Miscou on the Baie des Chaleurs and threatened Denys’s holdings on Cape Breton Island.31

By 1650, d’Aulnay’s control of Acadia stood unchallenged.  In 1647, a decree of the new king, Louis XIV (for whom his mother, Anne of Austria, served as regent), had declared d'Aulnay Governor General and Seigneur of Acadia, his domains extending from the St. Lawrence all the way to Virginia.  The only glitch for d’Aulnay in this decree was that Denys retained his rights to what was left of his holdings.  Nevertheless, the assumption by d’Aulnay of La Tour’s lucrative empire brought him great wealth and undisputed power.  Keeping one eye on the fur trade and its promise of even greater wealth, d'Aulnay turned his attention to one of his original purposes in Acadia, improving the agriculture settlements around Port-Royal.32

A successful innovation that d’Aulnay encouraged amongst the earliest settlers of the Port-Royal valley was the dyking of the extensive salt marshes along the river above the basin using an innovative device the Acadians called aboiteau--"a sluice fitted with a clapet that was forced shut by the rising tide on the seaward side, then pushed open as the tide fell by water draining from the fields."  In a few years time, this marvel of engineering turned tidal marshes into hay fields and then into fields of golden grain.  The technique was exported to other Acadian settlements that arose near extensive salt marshes and had the potential to transform the colony into an agricultural paradise.33

Then disaster struck.  On 24 May 1650, a "dark and stormy day," d’Aulnay, accompanied only by his valet, paddled a birch bark canoe from Port-Royal, perhaps to visit one of the dyking operations.  Somehow his canoe foundered over a wide, deep mudflat, and he died of exposure trying to extricate himself from the mire.  A few hours later, Indians came upon d'Aulnay's body and the still-breathing valet, brought them to the north shore of the river, and sent word to the fort of what had happened.  Father Ignace, the superior of the Capuchin priests who had been so loyal to the governor, took the body to the fort and, after a solemn mass of the dead, buried it in the chapel "in the presence of his wife and all the soldiers and inhabitants."34

Suddenly the Acadians had lost their most important leader.  To be sure, his ambition, greed, and aggressiveness had caused chaos in the colony when he attacked first La Tour and then Denys.  But it was d’Aulnay more than anyone who had insured the survival of the struggling colony.  He had encouraged families to put down roots in the Port-Royal basin to create an agricultural foundation on which to build a colonial enterprise that would endure.  His sudden death left the colony in great confusion.  His leadership was gone.  His creditors were many.  It was anyone’s guess who would replace him.

The death of d’Aulnay resurrected his old antagonist, Charles La Tour.  When the outlaw heard that d’Aulnay was dead, he left his refuge in Québec, where he had been "lodged" at the Chateau Saint-Louis by the governor, and hurried to France.  In February 1651, he secured not only a pardon for his misdeeds but also the governorship of Acadia, such was the fickle nature of the young French king and his chief minister Mazarin.  La Tour chose as his lieutenant Philippe Mius d’Entremont of Cherbourg and hurried back to Acadia.  At Port-Royal, he found that the representatives of d’Aulnay’s powerful creditors already had visited the fort there.  Emmanuel Le Borgne de Bélisle, sieur du Coudray, a wealthy La Rochelle merchant and former agent of the dead governor, insisted that the d’Aulnay estate owed him 260,000 livres!  The Capuchin fathers at Port-Royal tried to protect the interests of Madame d’Aulnay, but Le Borgne’s men pillaged the settlement anyway.  La Tour compounded the widow’s problems by demanding the return of his old fort on Rivière St.-Jean.  She was powerless to stop him, so in September 1651 La Tour returned to Fort St.-Jean to recoup his Acadian fortunes.  He ordered d’Entremont to rebuild the trading post at Cap-Sable, leaving only Port-Royal and its immediate environs to the widow d’Aulnay.35

Dissatisfied even with this arrangement, in February 1653, the 60-year-old La Tour solved a personal problem of his own and attempted to solve the widow’s financial problems as well by marrying the good woman.  He brought her to the St.-Jean, farther from the reach of her dead husband’s creditors, and there she added to the number of La Tours who called Acadia home.  "His marriage to the widow of the man who had ruined him and banished him from the colony as a pirate made Latour sole master of all Acadia, with the exception of the fief controlled by Nicolas Denys," one historian observes.  But financial matters are seldom solved so easily.36

Meanwhile, Le Borgne and other creditors of the deceased d’Aulnay were determined to recoup what the estate still owed them, so they grabbed what they could of the colony.  In 1652, they seized Chedabouctou, which actually belonged to Denys, burned La Hève, and swooped down on Fort St.-Pierre on Cape Breton Island.  Denys was at the fort.  Le Borgne arrested the poor fellow, slapped him in irons, then, taking Denys with him, sailed to Port-Royal and seized the fort there, too.37

But all of this effort by Le Borgne came to naught.  In 1654, the English appeared and seized Acadia again.

The English Seize the Colony Again

Much had transpired on the isle of Great Britain since the English last had held Acadia in 1632.  In the 1640s, civil war erupted in England, pitting King Charles I against his recalcitrant Parliament, whose forces eventually were led by the dour Puritan, Oliver Cromwell.  By 1646, after much bloody fighting, Cromwell’s New Model Army decisively defeated the forces of the king.  Charles, however, was a stubborn Scotsman and refused to follow the reforms that Parliament had exacted from him.  He was arrested, tried, and convicted as an enemy of the state!  On 30 January 1649, he became the only monarch in England’s history to be executed by his own people.  His heirs, sons Charles and James, fled to France to escape a similar fate.  England became a Commonwealth, the monarchy was abolished, and by 1653, Cromwell had become England's Lord Protector.  Meanwhile, war had broken out between the English and the Dutch, which Cromwell ended successfully in 1654.

During that struggle, in 1654, an English sea borne expedition under Robert Sedgwick of Boston, a former lieutenant of Cromwell, was ordered to attack the Dutch colony at New Amsterdam, south of New England.  But before he could attack New Amsterdam, Sedgwick learned that the war against the Dutch had ended.  He sailed north, instead, to Acadia, where he seized Fort St.-Jean from La Tour, and La Hève and Port-Royal from Le Borgne.  The garrison at Port-Royal was commanded by two Acadian pioneers, Germain Doucet and his lieutenant, surgeon Jacques Bourgeois, who also was Doucet's brother-in-law.  Doucet designated Bourgeois as a hostage to insure that he fulfilled the articles of surrender.  Sedgwick released Nicolas Denys from imprisonment and left Port-Royal in charge of a council of inhabitants headed by syndic Guillaume Trahan.  La Tour and Denys made deals with their new English overlords and continued their operations unmolested.  His stronghold on the St.-Jean no longer his, La Tour returned to Cap-Sable, where his fortunes had begun, and died in 1666 at age 73.  Denys operated from Fort Saint-Pierre and from Nepisiguit on the Baie des Chaleurs and remained in possession of his lucrative concessions until 1669, when, again, Fort Saint-Pierre was destroyed by fire.  He settled at Nepisiguit, his remaining post, and died in 1688 in his late 80s, almost penniless.38

Meanwhile, Emmanuel Le Borgne used two of his sons first to placate and then to harass the English conquerors.  In late 1654, after the surrender of Port-Royal, Le Borgne left his oldest son, Emmanuel Le Borgne du Coudray, then 18, as a hostage in Port-Royal and returned to France.  Four years later, in May 1658, after the English had consolidated their holdings in Acadia under Governor Sir Thomas Temple of Massachusetts, Le Borgne's younger son, Alexandre Le Borgne de Bélisle, only 22 years old, "at the head of a force of fifty men, took possession of the fort at La Heve."   Temple counterattacked, wounded the young Bélisle, captured him, and sent him to London as a prisoner of war.  The colony then fell quiet.  In 1668, Alexandre was named governor of Acadia "in place of his father," no doubt in absentia.38a

The inhabitants of Port-Royal, meanwhile, continued to live as they had done since the first of them had arrived in the basin with d’Aulnay in 1636.  A change in masters had not ended the trade that was essential to the colony's survival, it had only redirected it; commerce that had once linked them to France and Québec now centered on Boston.  As their numbers grew by natural increase, the settlers at Port-Royal moved farther up the basin and into the valley above it, creating new farm land from the marshes along the river with their clever aboiteaux.  While being held as a prisoner at Port-Royal in 1653, Nicolas Denys observed the remarkable growth of the settlement:  "There are numbers of meadows on both shores, and two islands which possess meadows, and which are 3 or 4 leagues from the fort in ascending," he wrote in a description of the colony that he published years later.  "There is a great extent of meadows which the sea used to cover, and which the Sieur d'Aulnay had drained.  It bears now fine and good wheat."  He described how the settlers moved steadily upstream to get away from the prying eyes of the authorities at the fort and to create more farmland from the marshes.  "There they have again drained other lands which bear wheat in much greater abundance than those which they cultivated round the fort, good though those were.  All the inhabitants there are the ones whome Monsieur le Commandeur de Razilly had brought from France to La Have; since that time they have multiplied much at Port Royal, where they have a great number of cattle and swine."  Denys observed all of this about the time that the English seized the colony.  "Although we may accept Denys’s belief that [the inhabitants at Port-Royal] gave up their homes near the fort to move away from immediate English surveillance," one historian of the colony comments on Denys's observations, "the direction of the move was a natural one if they were seeking more marshlands and there is no evidence that the English paid much attention to them.  Certainly their new masters, whether from New or old England, had not the slightest interest in settling or actively developing the part of Acadia they controlled:  their interest was solely in furs and in the control of Indian attacks on New England, and the Acadians at least were protected from attacks from that area."  Back in France, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the powerful financial minister of King Louis XIV, ordered the inhabitants at Port-Royal not to abandon their settlements in the face of English occupation; he was confident the colony soon would be restored to France.  Some families defied Colbert’s order and returned to France or moved on to French-held Canada.  But most of them refused to abandon their farms in the Port-Royal valley.39  

This was their home now.  They had begun the unconscious process of becoming Acadians, not just Frenchmen.  Their sons and daughters grew up and found suitable mates among their neighbors.  Married sons moved even farther upriver and, with the help of family and friends, wrested from nature new plots of ground on which to raise families of their own.  The older folks looked forward to the birth of grandchildren and the blessings of an extended family.  A spirit of independence and self-sufficiency had taken hold of these sturdy French farmers.  France, in spite of herself, had laid powerful roots in the troubled soil of Acadia.39a

Resurrection of French Control, the First Acadian Census, and the First Families of Acadia

Despite Colbert’s optimism, the English clung to Acadia until 1667, when the Treaty of Breda finally restored ownership of the colony to France.  However, the English governor at that time, still Sir Thomas Temple, delayed turning over the administration of the colony to France until 1670, when the new French governor of Acadia, Hector d’Andigne de Grandfontaine, accepted the surrender of the English garrisons at Pentagouët, on the St.-Jean, at Port-Royal, and at Cap-Sable.  Following orders from France, Grandfontaine established his headquarters at Pentagouët, near the disputed border with New England.  Sixteen years of English occupation was over.  The colony was finally back in French hands, this time under royal governance; the often chaotic rule of the proprietors and concessionaires was over.40

The years of English occupation, ironically, had been beneficial ones for the Acadians.  During the time of English control, a lucrative trade had sprung up between Acadia and New England, and there had been a notable growth of settlement in the Port-Royal basin.  One historian records that "there was a substantially larger number of settlers up the Port Royal River above the fort than there had been sixteen years earlier; in Acadians terms almost a generation had grown up."  He adds:  "Documentation on the conditions of settlement and agriculture is almost completely lacking.  It has been inferred that after 1654 many of the French settlers moved on to Quebec or returned to France.  For those who remained (and they were, we think, the majority), we have to assume the gradual but inexorable increase of numbers and expansion of agriculture, the planting and reaping of grain, peas, flax, and vegetable crops, and the tending of sheep, swine and cattle.  If the period is largely a tabula rasa in the historical record, it was nevertheless one of consolidation and expansion of this nucleus of the Acadian population."41

With the full resumption of French control in Acadia under Governor Grandfontaine, immigration into the colony resumed in earnest, and the Acadians' trade with New England merchants continued unabated.  Members of the Carignan-Salières Regiment arrived with Grandfontaine and his lieutenants, and some of them married Acadian women.  In the spring of 1671, Colbert sent 60 new settlers to Acadia aboard L’Oranger, which sailed from La Rochelle.  Other settlers arrived from Canada.42

That same spring, just before the L'Oranger reached Port-Royal, Grandfontaine ordered Father Laurent Molin to take a census of the colony’s inhabitants—the first Acadian census on record.  The good priest counted a total of 68 families and over 300 inhabitants at Port-Royal and at Cap-Nèigre, Pobomcoup, and Rivière aux Rochelois near Cap-Sable.  Here was created a list of the First Families of Acadia, including families that had lived in the colony for over three decades.43 

In the census could be found the names of two settlers or their descendants who had come to the colony with Razilly in the early 1630s:  Germain Doucet, who had come to Acadia in his middle age, died before 1671, but not before he had taken a second wife, who gave him no more children.  In the census were Germain's two sons, Pierre and Germain, fils, from his first wife; Pierre had become a bricklayer and married a daughter of Simon Pelletret; Germain, fils had married a daughter of René Landry l'aîné.  Pierre Comeau the cooper was still alive and age 75 in 1671; he had married Rose Bayol or Bayon when he was 51 and had started a family of his own at Port-Royal. 

Two of the passengers who had come to Acadia in 1636 aboard St.-Jehan were still alive and well at Port-Royal:  Pierre Martin was 70 years old and his wife Catherine Vigneau was 68 when they appeared in the first census; two of their sons, Pierre, fils and Mathieu, were still alive, but only Pierre, fils, who married twice, created a family of his own; all of Pierre, fils's children were from his first wife, an Indian named Anne Ouestnorouest dit Petitous.  Guillaume Trahan also was 70 years old in 1671; he, too, had remarried in the colony, to a daughter of Vincent Brun (Guillaume was 65 years old and his bride only 21 at the time of the wedding); she gave him seven more children, including all of his three sons.

Several putative passengers from the St.-Jehan, who had either brought families to Acadia or had married after they got there, were still alive in 1671:  Antoine Bourg had married a sister of René Landry l'aîné.  Like most of the bachelors who had come to the colony during the Razilly years, Vincent Brun had returned to France, where he married twice to Breau sisters and then returned to Acadia; his only son Sébastien, by his second wife, born at Port-Royal, married a daughter of Antoine Bourg.  Jean Gaudet, when he was 77, had remarried to Nicole Colleson, who gave him another son; amazingly, Jean also was still alive in 1671; the census taker, Father Molin, noted that Jean was "the oldest inhabitant of Port-Royal ..., the venerable doyen of the colony ... then aged ninety-six years"; Jean died at Port-Royal a few years later, age 103.   François Gautrot had remarried to Edmée, one of the Lejeune sisters; she gave him more children, including three more sons. 

Grandfontaine's census revealed that in the 35 years since the arrival of the St.-Jehan dozens of new settlers had come to Port-Royal and set down roots in Acadia.  Some historians claim that three of the new arrivals were from the village of Martaizé in northern Poitou, where d'Aulnay and his mother had controlled "vast seigneuries" and where some of the passengers on the St.-Jehan may have been recruited:  Jean Thériot came to Port-Royal in c1637 with wife Pérrine Rau.  François Savoie arrived in c1643 and married Catherine, the other Lejeune sister.  Daniel LeBlanc came to the colony in c1645 and married a daughter of Jean Gaudet; they created what would become the largest family in all of Acadia.  François Guérin, who also may have been from the Martaizé area, came to Port-Royal by c1659, when he married a daughter of Jean Blanchard. 

According to some historians, early settlers counted in the first census may have come also from La Chaussée, another town in the Loire valley, near Blois, upriver from Bourgeuil and Martaizé:  In c1640, François Girouard dit La Varanne came to the colony with wife Jeanne Aucoin, who was from La Rochelle.  In the same year, René Landry, later called l'aîné, came to the colony; he married Pérrine, sister of Antoine Bourg and widow of Simon Pelletret.  Clément Bertrand came to Acadia in c1642; he married Huguette Lambelot, but they had no children.  Antoine Belliveau arrived in c1645 and married Andrée Guyon.  Vincent Breau dit Vincelotte, whose sisters had married Vincent Brun back at La Chaussée in the early and mid-1640s, came to Port-Royal in c1652; Vincelotte married a daughter of Antoine Bourg.  In c1659, René Landry le jeune, a cousin of René Landry l'aîné, reached the colony with wife Marie Bernard and created an even larger branch of the Landry family.  Antoine Babin arrived by c1662, when he married Marie Mercier, a granddaughter of Jean Gaudet.  Michel Dupeux dit Dupuis came to Port-Royal by c1664, when he married a daughter of François Gautrot. 

New settlers from other parts of France who were counted in the first census had come to Acadia during the years of struggle between Latour and d'Aulnay:  Abraham Dugas of Chouppes, Poitiers, a gunsmith, came to the colony in c1640 and married a daughter of Germain Doucet.  Two brothers, Antoine and Étienne Hébert, perhaps of La-Haye-Descartes, Touraine, came to Port-Royal in c1640; Antoine was a cooper and married Geneviève Lefranc; Étienne married a daughter of Vincent Brun and died before the census of 1671; both created large families.  Jacques dit Jacob Bourgeois of Couperans-en-Brie, Germain Doucet's home village, came to Acadia aboard the St.-François in 1641 with his father Jacques, père, an army officer who had been recruited by Claude Razilly; Jacques dit Jacob became a surgeon and married a daughter of Guillaume Trahan, which made him a brother-in-law of Germain Doucet.  Jean Poirier, a fisherman, also came to the colony aboard the St.-François in 1641; with him was wife Jeanne Chebrat of La Chaussée; Jean died 17 years before the census of 1671, but not before fathering a son, Michel, who married a daughter of Michel Boudrot.  Michel Boudrot of Cougnes, near Le Rochelle, came to Port-Royal in the early 1640s with wife Michelle Aucoin, a sister of François Girouard's wife.  Jean Blanchard came to the colony by c1642, when he married Radegonde Lambert at Port-Royal.  René Rimbault came to the colony in the early 1640s; he married Anne-Marie, surname unknown, widow of a settler named Pinet; Anne-Marie may have been a métisse, or half-breed; her son Philippe Pinet, born at Port-Royal in c1654 and raised by her second husband, René Rimbault, married a daughter of Étienne Hébert.  Robert Cormier, a master ship's carpenter from La Rochelle, signed an indenture for three years with an associate of Nicolas Denys in early 1644; that spring, he, his wife Marie Péraud, and their two young sons sailed to Fort St.-Pierre on Cape Breton Island aboard Le Petit St.-Pierre; after Robert fulfilled his contract, he took his family to Port-Royal but probably returned to La Rochelle with his wife and younger son in the 1650s; his older son Thomas, however, who was a teenager in the early 1650s, remained in the colony and married a daughter of François Girouard in 1668; Thomas was in his early 30s at the time of the wedding, and his bride was in her mid-teens.  Claude Petitpas, sieur de La Fleur, a clerk who became a notary, came to Acadia in c1645 and married Catherine Bugaret.  Pierre Lejeune dit Briard of Brie came to Port-Royal by c1650, when he married a daughter of Germain Doucet. 

Two young soldiers who came to the colony in the early 1650s with Emmanuel Le Borgne de Bélisle remained in Acadia, married, and became prominent settlers.  They, too, were counted in the first census:  Pierre Thibodeau, probably of Poitou, married a daughter of Jean Thériot.  Michel Richard dit Sansoucy of Saintonge married a daughter of Jean Blanchard. 

Many of the Acadians who were counted in 1671 came to the colony during the English occupation of 1654-70, when immigration to Acadia from France and Canada was supposed to have been curtailed.  At least two of them were Englishmen, one was a Dutchman in English service, one an Irishman, and another was from Flanders.  The others came from France:  Pierre Melanson dit La Verdure, a French Huguenot in English service, came to the colony in the spring of 1657 with his English wife and three sons, who had been born in England; when the English abandoned the colony in 1670, Pierre dit La Verdure, his wife, and their youngest son retreated to Boston, but the two older sons remained at Port-Royal, where they had converted to Catholicism and taken Acadian brides; older son Pierre dit La Verdure, fils had married a daughter of Philippe Mius d'Entremont, seigneur of Pobomcoup, and younger son Charles dit La Ramée had married a daughter of Abraham Dugas.  Laurent Granger of Plymouth, England or New England, also in English service, came to Acadia during the late 1650s; he converted to Catholicism and married a daughter of René Landry l'aîné.  Geyret de Forest from Leyden, Holland, came to Acadia in c1659 as a soldier in English service; he, too, converted to Catholicism, changed his name to Michel, and married a daughter of Étienne Hébert; in the late 1680s, he remarried to a daughter of Martin Benoit.  Pierre Pitre, an edge tool maker probably from Flanders, came to the colony in the late 1650s and married a daughter of Isaac Pesseley, former major of Port-Royal who had been killed during the civil war between Latour and d'Aulnay.  Étienne Robichaud came to Port-Royal by c1663, when he married a daughter of Michel Boudrot.  François Pellerin came to Acadia from Québec by c1665, when he married a daughter of Pierre Martin, père.  Roger dit Jean Quessy or Caissie, an Irishman, came to the colony in the mid-1650s probably as a soldier in English service; after his enlistment ended, he married a daughter of Jean Poirier.  Pierre Vincent came to Acadia by c1663, when he married a daughter of Denis Gaudet.  Guyon Chiasson dit La Vallée of La Rochelle came to the colony by c1666, when he married Jeanne Bernard at Port-Royal; Guyon remarried to a Canadienne at Québec in 1683 and returned to Acadia.  Olivier Daigre came to the colony by c1666, when he married another daughter of Denis Gaudet.  Barnabé Martin, probably no kin to Pierre Martin of St.-Germain de Bourgeuil, came to Acadia in c1666, when he married a daughter of Simon Pelletret; they created an even larger branch of the Martin family.  After converting to Catholicism, Pierre Lanoue, a "young scion of a noble Huguenot family in France," came to Acadia in c1667 as a cooper and married a daughter of François Gautrot.  Jean Corporon came to the colony in the late 1660s and married a daughter of François Savoie.  Pierre Guilbeau came to Acadia by c1668, when he married a daughter of Jean Thériot.  Pierre Cyr, an armurier or gunsmith, came to the colony by c1670, when he married a daughter of Jacques Bourgeois.  Jacques, also called Jean-Jacques, Le Prince, came to Port-Royal before 1671 and married a daughter of Étienne Hébert the year of the census. 

At least four of the settlers who came to Acadia aboard L'Oranger, only months after the first census was taken, also established significant families in the colony:  Pierre Arseneau of Rochefort married a daughter of Abraham Dugas and remarried to a daughter of François Guérin.  Nicolas Barrieau married a daughter of Étienne Hébert.  Martin Benoit or Benoist dit Labriere, probably of Rochefort, married Marie Chaussegros.  Jean Doiron came with wife Marie-Anne Canol.  

Other settlers who created lasting families came to Acadia from France and Canada during the 1670s:  Martin Aucoin of Cougnes, near La Rochelle, half-brother of the Aucoin sisters who had come to the colony decades before, married a daughter of Denis Gaudet.  François Brossard, later Broussard, may have been born in Acadia in the early 1650s to parents yet identified; he married a daughter of Michel Richard and created one of the most famous families in Acadian history.  Pierre Godin dit Châtillon of Châtillon-sur-Seine came to Acadia from Montréal with his Canadian wife, Jeanne Rousseliere.  Claude Guédry dit Gravois dit La Verdure married first to Kesk8a, an Indian, and then to Marguerite, daughter of Claude Petitpas and widow of Martin Dugas; they lived at Mirliguèche, on the Atlantic side of the peninsula, as well as at Port-Royal.  Michel Haché dit Gallant, a Canadian, came to Acadia with the seigneur of Chignecto and married a daughter of Thomas Cormier.  Robert Henry of Rouen, raised a Huguenot but a convert to Catholicism, also came to Acadia from Canada and married a daughter of Pierre Godin dit Châtillon.  Louis-Noël, called Noël, Labauve married a daughter of René Rimbault.  René Lambert, an indentured servant to a rich widow, lived on the lower Rivière St.-Jean after his term of service ended, moved to Port-Royal, and married a woman whose name has been lost to history; she gave him two sons.  François Levron dit Nantois, probably of Nantes, married a daughter of François Savoie.  Jean Préjean dit Le Breton, probably from Brittany, married another daughter of François Savoie.  Étienne Rivet or Rivest married a daughter of Pierre Comeau.  Jean Roy dit LaLiberté of St.-Malo married Marie-Christine Aubois, a métisse. 

More settlers came to Acadia from France and Canada during the 1680s:  Louis Allain, a blacksmith, married a daughter of Antoine Bourg and built a sawmill on the river below Port-Royal.  Pierre Allain de La Motte of Mamers, Maine, in France, probably no kin to Louis, married a woman whose name has been lost to history and served as the King's clerk in the colony.  Nicolas Babineau dit Deslauriers, probably a soldier, married a daughter of Laurent Granger.  Nicolas's younger brother, Jean, married a daughter of Michel Boudrot, but they had no sons.  Jean Bastarache dit Le Basque of the Basque region of southern France married a daughter of Pierre Vincent.  René Bernard married a daughter of Pierre Doucet.  Claude Bertrand, no kin to the childless Clément, married a daughter of Jean Pitre and fathered a large family.  Pierre Brassaud married a daughter of Michel Forest.  Pierre-Alain Bugeaud, a surgeon and later a notary, married a daughter of Pierre Melanson.  Mathieu de Goutin served as a high colonial official under six governors and, despite the disapproval of one of the governors, married a daughter of Pierre Thibodeau.  Joseph Gravois married Marie Mignier dit La Gassé.  Louis D'Amours, de Chauffours et de Jemseg, sieur des Louvieres, a Canadian nobleman, married Marguerite Guyon at Québec and remarried to a daughter of Jean Comeau l'aîné in Acadia; Louis held the seigneury of Jemseg on Rivière St.-Jean.  François Michel dit La Ruine married Madeleine Germon and remarried to Marguerite Meunier; he and his first wife lived at La Hève on the Atlantic coast, and he lived with his second wife briefly on Rivière-Ste.-Croixe.  François Moyse dit Latreille, perhaps of Arcasson, married another daughter of Pierre Vincent.  Jean Naquin dit L'Étoille, a master tailor, married a daughter of Jean Bourg.  Joseph Prétieux, later Précieux, of Charente married a daughter of François Gautrot.  Louis Saulnier, a sailor, married Louise Bastineau dit Peltier.  François Savary, a mason and stone cutter, married Geneviève Foret.

Most of these settlers were not fur traders or fishermen but artisans, laborers, and farmers, the sort of men who put down roots, literally and figuratively, in the rich soil of Acadia--soil that they themselves were literally creating with their dykes and aboiteaux.44

The Founding of New Settlements and the Growth of Old Ones:  Chignecto, Minas, Pigiguit, Cobeguit, Chepoudy, Petitcoudiac, Memramcook, Rivière St.-Jean, Pobomcoup, and Port-Royal

Soon after the counting of heads by the new Acadian governor and the arrival of the L'Oranger in 1671, some of the inhabitants of the crowded Port-Royal basin became pioneers again.  A hand full of them established the first permanent agricultural settlement outside of the Port-Royal valley, "the first swarming of the Acadians to establish their hive," as one historian describes it.   "Not long after 1671," writes another historian of the colony,  "Jacques Bourgeois, the former surgeon of d’Aulnay and a well-to-do farmer of Port Royal, decided to move...."  His new settlement stood nearly a hundred miles northeast of Port-Royal, along the Missaguash River just north of what is now the Cumberland Basin, an arm of the Baie de Chignecto that, in turn, is an extension of the Bay of Fundy.  Bourgeois "had known the area in younger days in the course of extensive fur-trading activities and his move was undoubtedly aimed at the freer activity of Indian trading as well as of farming.  But he persuaded five other families to go with him and the prospects of farming were certainly bright enough with a situation on the edge of the largest continuous expanse of dykable marshland in eastern North America [the Tantramar].  Even without dyking, the resources of salt-marsh hay, and of grazing, must have seemed limitless.  Within five years the group was well established, other settlers followed, more and more land was reclaimed, and the flocks and herds increased."  The location of a new settlement so far from the prying eyes of French officials in Port-Royal doubtlessly was another incentive to settle the place.  The small ships of New England merchants could slip quietly past Port-Royal into Chignecto Bay and then up into the Cumberland Basin, where they could anchor near the settlements and engage in the trade that was so important to the Acadians.  Also, as one historian points out, "the Shediac portage was an important relay station in the sea communications between Acadia and Canada and a strategic position commanding the isthmus and Baie Française."89

The other men who followed Jacques Bourgeois to this distant new settlement were his older sons Charles and Germain; his son-in-law Pierre Cyr and future sons-in-law Jean Boudrot and Germain Girouard; Germain Girouard's brothers-in-law Thomas Cormier and Jacques Belou; and Pierre Arseneau, a bachelor who had recently arrived at Port-Royal aboard L'Oranger.  In the late 1670s, Michel Le Neuf, sieur de La Vallière, a native of Trois-Rivières in Canada and son-in-law of Nicolas Denys, secured the seigniorial rights to the area around the new settlement and named it Beaubassin.  It also was known by the Indian name Chignecto, after the narrow, 15-mile-wide isthmus that it dominated.  According to Acadian tradition, the grant to La Vallière specified that "he leave undisturbed any settlers there, together with the lands they used or had planned to use for themselves; the Bourgeois group was thus protected."  La Vallière for a time was the governor of Acadia, so Beaubassin served as the colony's capital until it was returned to Port-Royal in 1684.90

With La Vallière came new settlers to the Chignecto area in the late 1670s, among them Guyon Chiasson dit Lavallée, then in his middle age and married to his second wife, and Michel Haché or Larché dit Gallant, a young servant of the seigneur who married Anne, daughter of Thomas Cormier.  From Port-Royal in the late 1670s and early 1680s came Michel, son of Jean Poirier; and Irishman Roger dit Jean Caissie, brother-in-law of Michel Poirier.  In the years that followed, other settlers in the Chignecto area bore the names Belliveau, Bernard, Boucher, Bourg, Brun, Carret, Clémençeau, Daigre, Doiron, Doucet, Dugas, Forest, Gaudet, Gravois, Guénard, Hébert, Hugon, Labauve, Lambert, Landry, Lanoue, Livois, Martin, Melanson, Mouton, Olivier, Orillon, Pothier, Quimine, Richard, and Thériot.91

Within a decade after the founding of the Chignecto settlements, the Acadians swarmed again, this time to a fertile basin half way between Port-Royal and Beaubassin.  The Bassin des Mines, or Minas Basin, 60 miles northeast of Port-Royal and 50 miles south of Beaubassin, took its name from a shiny metal substance found in the area that early explorers of the peninsula believed was copper.  In 1680, Pierre Melanson, the older son of a French Huguenot who had come to Acadia with the English, sold his property in the Port-Royal basin and moved his large family to Grand-Pré near Rivière Gaspereau, which flows into the Minas Basin.  Two years later, Pierre, the 26-year-old son of Jean Thériot, started another settlement at Minas on Rivière St.-Antoine, now the Cornwallis, not far from Pierre Melanson's homestead.  "Being a popular and generous man," one historian attests, Thériot "supplied wheat without interest and housed many while their homes were being built."  Thériot had married Cécile, daughter of René Landry le jeune, in 1678.  They were not blessed with children, but Pierre's nephews, Germain, Jean, Claude, and Joseph, sons of his older brother Claude, followed their uncle to Minas and spawned a huge extended family.  Soon the Melansons and Thériots were joined by other pioneers and their families from Port-Royal who settled along the many streams that flowed into the basin:  Antoine, Claude, and René, sons of René Landry l'aîné and kinsmen of Pierre Thériot; Jacques, René, André, and Antoine, sons of Daniel LeBlanc; Étienne and Michel, sons of Étienne Hébert; their cousin Jean, son of Antoine Hébert; and Claude, son of Michel Boudrot, filled the basin with their progeny in the decades that followed; as did other colonists from Port-Royal and even immigrants directly from France.  Other settlers at Minas bore the names Allain, Aucoin, Babin, Bellemère, Bélisle, Benoit, Bergeron, Bertrand, Blanchard, Boucher, Bourg, Brasseur, Breau, Brun, Bugeaud, Clouâtre, Comeau, Daigre, Darois, David, Doucet, Dugas, Dumont, Duon, Dupuis, Flan, Gautrot, Girouard, Granger, Labauve, Lalande, Lebert, Longuépée, Mazerolle, Mouton, Part, Pinet, Pitre, Précieux, Renaud, Richard, Robichaud, Saulnier, Semer, Surette, Thibodeau, and Trahan.92

As the number of new settlers at Minas attests, the place was an agricultural marvel.  "This area, which was to assume demographic and economic leadership among the three Acadian farming regions in the eighteenth century, was the last of the three major Acadian centers to get started," one historian of the settlement reminds us.  "But its fine marshlands, the weakness of its nominal seigneurial control, and, perhaps above all, its relative freedom from the attention of both New England raiders and French officials, allowed it to expand rapidly.  From only 37 people in the Grand Pré area in 1686 the population soared to more than 580 in 1707."  He goes on:  "There is no doubt that agriculture flourished in Minas beyond any experience at Port Royal or Beaubassin.  It was the better balanced than the latter; not neglecting livestock, in which Beaubassin rather specialized, it developed the best and most extensive arable farming in Acadia."  Another plus for the settlements at Minas was the fact that access to the basin from the Bay of Fundy was easy enough for the Acadians to continue their important trade with the merchants of New England.93

Beginning around c1685, settlers from Minas and Port-Royal moved a few miles southeast of Grand-Pré into the upper stretches of what is now the Avon River just above its confluence with the St. Croix.  They settled on both sides of the Avon around present-day Falmouth and Windsor, Nova Scotia.  The Acadians called the settlement Pigiguit, Mi'kmaq for "junction of the waters."  Settlers there bore the names Arsement, Babin, Barillot, Benoit, Boudrot, Boutin, Brasseur, Breau, Broussard, Bugeaud, Comeau, Corporon, Daigre, Doiron, Forest, Gaudet, Gautrot, Girouard, Guédry, Hébert, Landry, LeBlanc, Lejeune, Martin, Michel, Mire, Prince, Richard, Rivet, Roy, Savary, Thibodeau, Trahan, and Vincent.94 

In 1689, Mathieu Martin, "the first born Frenchman in Acadia," secured a seigneury along Rivière Wecobequitk at the site of present-day Truro, 45 miles east of Minas and 50 miles southeast of Beaubassin.  There he founded the Acadian settlement of Cobeguit.  Martin was followed by the families of Jean and Martin, sons of Antoine Bourg of Port-Royal; Jerome Guérin; and Martin, son of Jean Blanchard, also of Port-Royal.  In the following years, Cobeguit settlers also bore the names Aucoin, Benoit, Breau, Carret, Doiron, Dugas, Gautrot, Guédry, Guillot, Hébert, Henry, Lejeune, Longuépée, Naquin, Pitre, Robichaud, and Thériot.95

In the late 1690s, another cluster of Acadian settlements sprang up in the region, this time only a dozen miles west of Beaubassin, in an area still claimed by the seigneur of Chignecto, Michel LeNeuf de la Vallière.  Chepoudy settlement, now present-day Hopewell Hill, New Brunswick, joined the constellation of Acadian communities when Pierre Thibodeau, who had come to Acadia with Emmanuel Le Borgne de Bélisle in the early 1650s and married into the Thériot clan, secured a seigneury from the governor and brought his huge family of 16 children and some of his Port-Royal neighbors to a stretch of marsh along the Baie de Chignecto.  There he built a church and a flour mill, and soon other settlers joined him.  Guillaume Blanchard of Port-Royal, son of Jean, also secured a seigneury and chose the Petitcoudiac River near present-day Hillsborough, New Brunswick, as the location of a new settlement about the same time that Pierre Thibodeau settled at Chepoudy.  Pierre "Pitre" Gaudet and René Blanchard were the first settlers in the valley of the Memramcook east of the Petitcoudiac.  In the years that followed, the settlers at Chepoudy, Petitcoudiac, and Memramcook also bore the names Allain, Babineau, Bertrand, Breau, Broussard, Brun, Comeau, Daigre, Darois, Doucet, Dubois, Hébert, Labauve, Lalande, Landry, LeBlanc, Léger, Martin, Pitre, Préjean, Saulnier, Savoie, Surette, and Trahan.96

While Acadians on the peninsula were establishing settlements at the head of the Bay of Fundy and in the Minas Basin, another, much smaller Acadian community, along the middle Rivière St.-Jean, also began or, rather, came into its own, in the late 1600s.  This was the area once controlled by Charles La Tour and his lieutenants and for a time was the center of the fur trade in greater Acadia.  Agricultural settlements grew up along the river above the old fort at Jemseg, at Ste.-Anne-du-Pays-Bas, now Fredericton; Ekoupag or Meductic, now Maugerville; and at Nashwaak.  The La Tours were still there, in the third generation, as were the descendants of Jean-Vincent d'Abbadie de Saint-Castin and his half-breed son Bernard-Anselme, who once held sway at Pentagouët in Maine.  Joining the La Tours and the Saint-Castins, some with seigneuries of their own, were families that bore the names Bélisle, Bergeron dit d'Amboise, D'Amour or D'Amours de Louviere, Dugas, Godin dit Beauséjour, dit Bellefeuille, dit Bellefontaine, dit Boisjoli, dit Châtillon dit Préville, dit Lincour, and dit Valcour, Henry, Part, and Roy.97 

Another Acadian community that had sprung up in the early 1600s also came into its own late in the century.  Cap-Sable, at the southwestern tip of the peninsula, was once controlled by the La Tours.  The most populated settlement near the cape was Pobomcoup, now Pubnico, north of the cape.  Philippe Mius, sieur d'Entremont of Cherbourg, a lieutenant of Charles La Tour, had been awarded the seigneury of Pobomcoup in the early 1650s.   Half a century later, his family was still there, in the third generation, and still in possession of their ancestor's seigneurial rights.  The largest family at Pobomcoup were the Amireaus.  Families there also included the Landrys and the Moulaisons.99

Meanwhile, the Acadians who stayed in the Port-Royal area built more dykes on both sides of the river above and below the fort, claiming more arable land from the basin.  Settlers moved as far upriver as the terrain and the salt marshes allowed, and others fanned out along the many tributaries that flowed from the uplands into the basin.  New settlers arrived, took up new land, and married into the families already there.  Despite living under the noses of the French officials who ran the colony, Port-Royal Acadians went about their business much as their cousins and compatriots were doing in more distant settlements.  At least one high-ranking official, Mathieu De Goutin, the colony's head clerk or recorder and conseiller du roi, married into an Acadian family, the Thibodeaus.  Some settlers built houses near the fort and engaged in legitimate commerce, among them Abraham Boudrot.  Other families at Port-Royal, old and new, also bore the names Babineau, Bastarache, Bélisle, Belliveau, Blanchard, Bonnevie, Bourg, Bourgeois, Breau, Broussard, Brun, Comeau, Doucet, Dugas, Duon, Dupuis, Forest, Gaudet, Gautrot, Girouard, Gousman, Granger, Guédry, Guilbeau, Hébert, Jeanson, Landry, Lanoue, Lavergne, LeBlanc, Léger, Levron, Martin, Martin dit Barnabé, Melanson, Michel, Moyse, Orillon, Part, Pellerin, Préjean, Prince, Richard, Robichaud, Roy, Savary, Savoie, and Thériot.98

The Acadians and Their Seigneurs

The Acadians and the Indians

An interesting and seemingly unique aspect of life for these Acadian pioneers was the relationship they had with the local Indians, the Mi'kmaq.  Unlike the English and Dutch colonists down the coast, whose burgeoning settlements rose up suddenly where the Indians also dwelled, the Acadian settlements never became populous enough to threaten the Indians' way of life.  The Mi'kmaq were hunters, gatherers, and fishermen, not agricultural Indians.  Although they spent most of their time along the seacoast and the shores of the Bay of Fundy "taking advantage of the wealth of food available there throughout all but about six weeks of the year," the Acadian homesteads along the dyked marshlands did not intrude on their nomadic way of life.  Thus, in Acadia, red man and white man did not compete for precious land, nor did they compete for other valuable resources.  To be sure, there was potential competition in the acquisition of furs, and the Acadians were just as eager to acquire this precious commodity as were the English and the Dutch who settled in the region or their fellow Frenchmen in the St. Lawrence Valley.  But, as has been explained, from the beginning the French and the Indians in peninsula Acadia chose cooperation, not competition, in the mutually beneficial fur trade.  The Indians trapped and skinned the animals and traded the pelts for goods that only Europeans could provide them.  This was much easier for the Acadians than trapping the fur-bearing animals themselves, and it guaranteed an eager market for their trade goods.  So, while colonists in Virginia, New York, and New England died by the score in Indian uprisings during the seventeenth century, the Acadians, for most of their history, knew only peace with the Mi'kmaq bands who lived all around them.139  

The Mi'kmaq were part of a group of Algonquian-speaking Indians that included the Maliseet of present-day New Brunswick and the eastern Abenakis of Maine.  These tribes, in turn, were related by language and culture to other Algonquian-speaking tribes in the region, such as the Ottawa of the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River valley.  These Algonquian tribes also had in common an ancient rivalry with the Iroquois tribes of upper New York.  Champlain had interjected the French into this ancient rivalry by accompanying  the Ottawa on the warpath against the Iroquois in 1609 and forever earning the enmity of that powerful nation.  In historical times, at least, the Iroquois did not raid as far east as the Acadian peninsula, but they enthusiastically fought their fellow Iroquois-speaking Hurons and the Abenakis and other Algonquian-speaking tribes that threatened their hegemony in the region.  And in these wars along the Indian frontier, the French Canadians played their part as allies of the Algonquian people.  The founders of Acadia--Dugua, Poutrincourt, Biencourt, and La Tour--emulated Champlain in Canada.  They, too, used the Indians not only to gather precious furs but also to provide a buffer of protection against the enemies of the colony, be they Indian or European.  The Indians were an essential weapon especially in the struggle against the English, whose colonies always far outnumbered the French settlements to the north.  French traders threatened to withhold their wares if the Indians refused to help them fight the English.  Missionary priests, especially the Jesuits, were keen to the realities of trade and security and took advantage of Indian vulnerabilities when they went among the natives to convert them to Roman Catholicism.  It was not unusual for Algonquian bands to take to the warpath with one or two "black robes" padding along to give spiritual sustenance to the painted warriors.  "Their methods were often cruel and ruthless, being based chiefly on political necessities, and the higher principles of the Christian faith were subordinated for the time being to these considerations," an historian has described these warrior-priests.  One doubts if these sturdy Jesuits were troubled by their consciences.  In their eyes, the English and the Dutch were unrepentant heretics who were worse than savages.140  

The traders and the Jesuits were not the only ones who held power over the Indians.  Some of the so-called seigneurs of Acadia, especially on the continent, were nothing more than capitaines de sauvages, or captains of the Indians, "who," according to one historian, "trained Indians for the defence[sic] of territories put in their charge.  The most famous of the captaines de sauvages was Jean-Vincent d'Abbadie, third Baron de Saint-Castin, who came to Acadia as an ensign in the Carignan Regiment in 1665.  After his marriage to Mathilde, the daughter of Abenaki chief Madokawondo, in 1670, Saint-Castin founded a kind of feudal principality that was half Indian at Pentagouët on the Penobscot River.  He soon became the supreme chief of the entire Abenaki tribe, subjecting them to dictatorial rule."  The French governors of Acadia, like those of Canada, used these French-led Indians to protect their colony especially from the English.  "It was an ingenious defence system for the Acadian territory:  integration of the Indians into the organization helped the comparatively small Acadian colony against the more populous English colonies in New England, especially Massachusetts, bordering Acadia.  When war broke out, these captains ordered out the Indians who repelled attacks or carried out bloody raids directly into the heart of the English colonies."  But there was always a price to pay for such a scheme.  "Expeditions carried out by some of these captains and their Indian infantry into enemy territory often were for reasons other than mere defence; consequently, the peaceful Acadian colonists often suffered painful counterattacks as as result.  Furthermore, the raids built up animosity and hate for the Acadians among the Massachusetts settlers in particular."  This became manifest in the almost continuous warfare that erupted in North America towards the end of the first century of Acadia's existence.141  

The Acadians and Their Sun King

The settlers of Acadia had known only turmoil from the arrival of their first families in 1636 to when the English seized the colony in 1654.  Ironically, English control, which lasted 16 years, brought peace at last to the hard pressed Acadians, and peace continued for 19 more years after the return of Acadia to France.  It ended suddenly, however, in 1689 with the coming of full-scale war with England.  For nearly a quarter of a century, until 1713, the peace-loving Acadians once again would live in a world gone mad all around them.

The end of the long peace had much to do with the man to whom the Acadians tried to be loyal subjects.  Louis XIV, who would fashion himself the Sun King, had declared upon the death of his regent, Cardinal Mazarin, in 1661 that "henceforth he would rule France without a chief minister, something no French king had done in living memory."  Through the application of will and calculated ruthlessness, Louis created for France a divine-right monarchy the likes of which Europe had not seen since the time of the Roman emperors.  During his long reign, he never once called into session the ancient legislature of France, the Estates-General.  He did not feel constrained to answer to his people.  His rule was absolute.  His famous words, if they were ever uttered, L'état, c'est moi ("I am the state"), would not have been an idle boast of the Sun King.  He created his magnificent palace at Versailles not only to control his unruly nobles and provide a center for the arts, but also to erect a personal monument of glory and splendor worthy of an absolute monarch.  The heady atmosphere of Versailles, however, did not blind the king to the realities of the French character.  He "understood that he must rule within the constraints of the laws and customs of his kingdom.  Louis consulted widely with his nobles and ministers, and he met weekly with members of his high council.  He created an informal cabinet, which was eventually led by Jean-Baptiste Colbert, chief minister of finance."142

One of the goals of Louis's reign was to establish borders for France that he could defend against attack from his enemies.  The English with their superb navy were not the worst of these enemies.  He was especially vexed by the powerful Habsburg kingdoms of Spain and Austria, whose far-flung possessions included much of the Low Countries (today's Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands), and most of Germany and Italy, thus hemming France in on three sides.  The dangerous northern frontier in what was then called the Spanish Netherlands, which stood so close to Paris and Versailles, worried Louis most, and it was there that most of his wars were fought.  Coupled with his determination to secure defensible borders for France was Louis's ambition to place on the throne of Spain one of his Bourbon heirs.  Louis had married Marie-Thérèse, the eldest daughter of King Philip IV of Spain, in 1660.  "The marriage was arranged via a treaty that explicitly excluded Marie's heirs from inheriting the Spanish crown once Philip had paid her dowry.  However, the full dowry was never paid.  Consequently, Louis refused to relinquish his family's claim to the Spanish inheritance...."143

The result was almost constant warfare during the last three decades of Louis's long reign of 72 years.  

During the War of the Devolution (1667-68) that followed the death of Philip IV of Spain, Louis invaded the Spanish Netherlands to secure the vulnerable northern border and to assert his family's claim to the Spanish throne.  The Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle ended the fighting soon after it began.  Louis returned some of the fortified towns he had captured in Belgium and secured rights to the Spanish throne if Philip's Hapsburg successor, Charles II, should die without an heir.  This sudden French aggression along their southern frontier alarmed the Dutch, who had fought long against Spanish rule to secure their independence and refused to be threatened by the French as well.  War erupted between Holland and France in 1672 and lasted for six long years.  "In a sweeping campaign, Louis almost succeeded in conquering Holland.  To protect themselves, the Dutch opened their dikes, flooded the countryside, and turned Amsterdam into a virtual island."  During the struggle, in August 1673, the Dutch were joined by Spain, Austria, and Lorraine, but not England.  Louis had signed a treaty with London in June 1670 "to keep the English navy neutral."  It was this agreement with the English that had restored French control of Acadia in 1670.  But Acadia did not escape the war unscathed.  In the summer of 1674, a Dutch privateer captain, Jurriaen Aernouts, out of Curaçao in the Dutch West Indies, attacked the Acadian outpost at Pentagouët in Maine, which at the time was the military headquarters of the colony, and captured it after only a few hours of fighting.  The Dutchman took the wounded Acadian governor, Jacques de Chambly, prisoner, captured Jemseg on Rivière St.-Jean, and plundered the area around it before going on his way.144

The war with Holland ended with the Peace of Nijmegen in 1678.  "Louis had achieved a defensible perimeter around the core of his inheritance," but he also had alienated his northern neighbors, those Protestant stalwarts, the Dutch.  And he was not done with Spain.  In October 1683, Louis invaded the Spanish Netherlands ... again ... and France was at war with Spain until the following August.145  

But it was religion that led to the most important decision of Louis's long reign, one that would plunge France deeper into conflict with her Protestant neighbors, with far reaching consequences for her colonial possessions.  Cardinal Mazarin had taught Louis the intricacies of statecraft, but his mother, Anne of Austria, a devout Catholic like all of her Habsburg kin, had given her son his spiritual education.  "Throughout his life Louis remained devoutly religious and attempted to eliminate Protestantism in France."  His grandfather, Henry IV, had been a Huguenot before he declared that Paris was well worth a mass.  Henry had granted the Protestants freedom of worship and protection from persecution with his Edict of Nantes in April 1598.  Louis's father had honored his own father's edict, and, despite continued pressures from the Catholic majority to conform to Roman orthodoxy, the Huguenots thrived in the fortified cities that Henry had granted to them for their protection.  "Within these cities dwelled highly skilled Huguenot craftsmen, who were an integral part of Colbert's economic program," a program that kept France happy and prosperous throughout much of the first half of Louis's reign.146  

But the Sun King was determined to rule absolutely in the spiritual as well as the temporal realm.  In 1685, two years after Colbert's death, while the Acadians thrived in the Port-Royal valley, at Chignecto, and in the infant communities of the Minas Basin, their king, without the wise council of his great minister, "by an extravagant act of piety and sovereignty," suddenly revoked the Edict of Nantes and plunged their mother country into economic turmoil.  Between 1685 and 1710, hundreds of  thousands of Huguenots fled France rather than convert to the Roman Catholic faith.  Most of them went to Holland and Britain, "where they were greeted as martyrs.  The loss of many highly productive citizens depressed the French economy."  By this time, "France was recognized as the dominant continental power, and its strength threatened other European nations.  The Catholic powers, especially Austria, were fearful of Louis's designs upon Spain's possessions.  Meanwhile, the Protestant states, especially England and Holland, worried about the revival of religious warfare."  The English were so worried about French designs on their North American colonies that they negotiated with the Sun King a treaty at Whitehall in November 1686 that guaranteed "a True and Firm Peace and Neutrality" between the North American colonies if war should break out in Europe.  Nevertheless, by the late 1680s, as a result of Louis's aggressions and the heated nature of religious intolerance, only a spark was needed to ignite the powder keg of frustrations that lay between France and her enemies.147

The Glorious Revolution and King William's War

The spark came with Louis's attack across the Rhine in September 1688 to intervene in German politics and England's so-called Glorious Revolution of the same year.  Three years before, in 1685, the year that Louis XIV had revoked the Edict of Nantes, King Charles II of England, who had been restored to the throne 25 years earlier, died without a legitimate child to succeed him.  His younger brother, James, Duke of York, became King James II of England and James VII of Scotland.  James had grown up a Protestant, had married a Protestant wife, Anne Hyde, daughter of an English earl, and raised his two daughters, Mary and Anne, as Protestants.  He converted to Catholicism, however, in 1668, when he was 35 years old and still married to Anne.  She died in 1671, and two years later James remarried to Mary of Modena, a devout Roman Catholic from Italy.  In 1677, he consented to the marriage of his daughter Mary to William, the Protestant prince of Orange, stadtholder, captain general, and admiral of the United Provinces of the Netherlands and the implacable enemy of Louis XIV of France.  Parliament declared Mary and William as next in line to the throne behind James, and the English Protestant majority breathed a sigh of relief that James would not be able to create a Catholic dynasty for England.  James's succession to the throne in 1685 was peaceful.  However, his attempts to rule autocratically like his father, coupled with his policy to place Catholics in influential positions, fueled his opposition and ruined what little popularity he had with the people.  The birth of a son to him in 1688, insuring that his heir would be Catholic, precipitated the so-called Glorious Revolution.  Staunch Protestant nobles, with the consent of Parliament, invited William of Orange and an army of 15,000 Dutchmen to land in northern England, march to London, and seize the throne from the hapless James, who could muster virtually no support.  James fled, was captured, and allowed to escape to France, and in 1689 William and Mary ruled jointly as William III and Mary II.  Louis XIV, ever the staunch Catholic, refused to recognize the legitimacy of William and Mary and clung to the fiction that James and not William was the legitimate king of England, Scotland, and Wales.

It was William who had opened the dykes in Holland back in 1672 to save Amsterdam from the invading French.  After the conclusion of the six-year struggle with the Sun King, William had strived to build a European coalition against Louis to block further French aggression on the continent.  This effort came to fruition in 1689, the year William succeeded to the English throne, when he created a Grand Alliance with Austria, Holland, Spain, and Savoy to halt the French offensive in western Germany.  For the next eight years, war raged between William's alliance and the forces of Louis XIV.  But the conflict was not confined to Europe and the high seas.  It erupted also in America despite the Treaty of Whitehall... and war came to Acadia again.148

The English made the first aggressive move that brought war to French Acadia.  Soon after ascending to the throne, James II had revealed his autocratic tendencies by abolishing self-government in the New England colonies.  He appointed a fellow autocrat, Sir Edmund Andros, as governor of a new colonial entity that would be ruled by decree, not assembly--the Dominion of New England.  This new dominion subsumed the colonies of Plymouth, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Haven, Connecticut, and New Hampshire--that is, New England--and eventually New York and East and West Jersey.  The people of these colonies were very unhappy, not only with the loss of self-rule but also with the despotic personality of Sir Edmund.  Political chaos ensued, and Andros became even more tyrannical in his treatment of the colonists.  He also alienated the Indians of the region and looked for any excuse to antagonize the French, violating the spirit of the treaty that guaranteed neutrality for the colonies in America if war should break out in Europe.149

In the spring of 1688, while James II still occupied the English throne, Andros descended on Pentagouët on the coast of Maine.  During the governorships of Grandfontaine and de Chambly (1670-78), Pentagouët had been the capital of French Acadia.  Though subsequent governors moved the capital to Beaubassin and then back to Port-Royal, the French considered Pentagouët an important part of the colony.  Jean-Vincent de Saint-Castin was still the seigneur there, and his hold on the Abenakis in the area was still absolute.  Andros insisted that the Penobscot River region belonged to his dominion, and he used this boundary dispute as an excuse to commence hostilities with the French and their Indian allies.  After seeing the ramshackle condition of Saint-Castin's fort, however, Andros changed his mind about holding Pentagouët.  But before he returned to New England, he plundered Saint-Castin's house and thereby antagonized the old Frenchman and his fierce Abenaki relatives.  Further depredations by English officials against the Indians in Maine and the establishment by Andros of new English garrisons along the coast of that province stirred the Abenakis against the English, and in 1689 the war exploded in earnest.150  

The first English town to suffer at  the hands of the Abenakis was Dover, New Hampshire, on the border with Maine.  In late June 1689, warriors from two bands sneaked up on the village during the night and massacred many of the settlers.  After subduing the men, the Indians burned the garrison-houses and forced many of the women and children into captivity, where they were kept or sold as slaves, as the English had done to their people years before.151

Saint-Castin, meanwhile, planned his revenge against the English.  In early August 1689, he fell on Pemiquid, now Woolwich, Maine, at the mouth of the Kennebec River, the farthest English outpost along the Maine coast.  With him were two bands of Abenakis with their war paint on.  They completely surprised the settlers, killing many of them in the open fields, and the next day forced the surrender of the survivors who, fleet of foot, had managed to make it into their stockade, Fort Charles.  Again, the victorious Indians took women and children into captivity and treated them as slaves.  The English were appalled by such barbarity, though they, too, in previous wars with the Indians had acted just as barbarously.  That same August, in fact, their allies, the fierce Iroquois, 1,500 strong, descended on the Canadian town of Lachine, near Montréal, and butchered or captured nearly everyone in the place, prompting the French authorities to abandon some of their fortifications on the upper St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes.152  

In the weeks that followed, the Maine frontier erupted in almost continuous warfare.  So far, the fight there had been between the Indian allies of the French--the Abenaki bands of Maine--and the hapless New Englanders, first under the despised Andros, then, after his ouster when the New Englanders learned of the Glorious Revolution, under the new governors of the restored, independent colonies.  In the summer of 1689, however, word arrived in Boston that, in the spring, war had officially been declared between England and France--the War of the Grand Alliance, called King Williams's War in the colonies.  Word of the war came to Québec in July, and in October the newly-arrived governor-general of Canada, 69-year-old Louis de Buade, comte de Palluau et de Frontenac, stood poised to jump into the fight against the English colonies alongside his Indian allies.153

Frontenac, an old soldier of formidable talents, chose late winter as the moment in which to surprise the English colonies from his base on the St. Lawrence.  From Montréal, using the relatively swift route via the Richelieu River, Lake Champlain, and Lake George, 300 Canadian militia, coureur de bois, and "Christianized" Iroquois, led by French officers, hit Schenectady, then called Corlear, New York, on a frigid night in February 1690.  The result can be described as nothing less than a massacre.  The New Yorkers suffered so keenly from the raid that it essentially took them out of the war, leaving New England to fight it out alone.  Another, smaller column of Frontenac's fighters, this one from Trois-Rivières, struck Salmon Falls, New Hampshire, near the burned-out village of Dover, in late March and destroyed that settlement, too.  The third of Frontenac's expeditions, out of Quebec, hit in late May the Maine village of Casco, at present-day Portland, which was defended by ramshackle Fort Loyal.  Despite the neglected condition of the palisade fort, the survivors of the initial ambush defended Fort Loyal gallantly for three days before surrendering to the French officers in charge of the expedition.  The English commander asked for terms, but the French refused to hold back their Indian allies.  More Maine settlers, men, women, and children, became Indian slaves, and for the next several months, the Abenaki pillaged as many Maine and New Hampshire settlements as they could reach.154

After over a year of fighting in earnest in New York and on the New Hampshire-Maine frontier, King William's War was proving to be a disaster for the English.  It was time for them to devise a new strategy that would take the war to the enemy.  "Up to this time," notes a principal historian of the conflict, "the people of New England seem to have had no thought of invading Canada themselves, or felt much fear of being invaded from there.  Thus far the war, on their part, had been a purely defensive one.  But it was now clear to everyone that the real struggle was not so much between the English and Indians, as between the English and French, who kept the Indians constantly supplied with the means of carrying on hostilities, while enjoying entire immunity from its ravages themselves.  The relation was as close as that between the hand and the weapon.  Two flourishing provinces lay at the mercy of hostile incursions, which no power could foresee or prevent.  The entire depopulation of both was imminent.  All this continuous harrying of defenceless[sic] villages, with its ever-recurring and revolting story of captivity and massacre, was fast turning the border back into a wilderness, which, indeed, was what the enraged savages aimed at.  Every attempt to reach and destroy these vigilant foemen in their own fastness proved worse than futile.  New England was losing ten lives for one; and in property more than fifty to one."155  

Accordingly, in early May 1690, delegates from New York and three of the New England colonies met at New York City to plan an English offensive against New France.  New York pledged 400 men, and Massachusetts, Plymouth, and Connecticut a total of 350 militiamen for an attack on Montréal via Albany and Lake Champlain.  The Iroquois later promised to join the expedition "with nearly all their warriors."  It would be Frontenac's turn to suffer the trauma of invasion.155a

But the New Englanders did not invade Canada first.  They chose instead a closer, much easier target which, in truth, contained Frenchmen who had done them no harm.  The New Englanders, however, did not see it that way.  "For years Acadia and its harbors had been a safe retreat for privateers and corsairs, who robbed and ill-used the New England fishermen until those seas were become no longer safe," the good Puritans believed.  "Bad as it had been, the evil was now made tenfold worse by a state of war.  For depredations of this sort, Acadia, or Nova Scotia, is remarkably well placed, and as New England subsisted mostly by her fisheries the alternatives were either to see them destroyed or to put them beyond the reach of future spoliation."  This was the same Acadia to which New England trading ships had sailed for years to ply their wares among the peaceful farmers of Chignecto and Minas.  Miraculously, those vessels had entered and exited the Bay of Fundy without being molested ... but truth is an enemy of rationalization.156

In late April, before the conference in New York and the attack on Casco, but after the French and Indian assault on Salmon Falls, an expedition of seven ships containing 700 New Englanders left Nantasket, Massachusetts, for Port-Royal, Acadia.  In command of this expedition was a remarkable fellow, 38-year-old Sir William Phips of Boston.  Phips had once been a humble ship's carpenter but, through luck and pluck, had risen to the rank of a gentleman in his native New England.  His most notable exploit, besides marrying a rich widow, had been the recovery of  a fantastic treasure from the hull of a sunken Spanish ship off the coast of Haiti, an effort which earned him his title.  His expedition arrived at Port-Royal on May 11, and 400 of his men hurried ashore to overwhelm the garrison of only 70 men under Governor Louis-Alexander des Friches de Meneval, who asked for terms.  After extracting from the New Englanders the promise that they would spare private property, leave the church untouched, and send him and his troops to Québec or to France, Meneval yielded without resistance.  To protect his force from the irate settlers who lived near the fort, Phips threatened to make them all prisoners of war if the men did not assemble in the church and swear allegiance to the King and Queen of England.  Most took the oath, and their property was spared.  Those who refused to take the oath had to stand by helplessly as the New Englanders plundered their belongings.  Discovering that some of the Port-Royal merchants had carried off property into the surrounding woods during the parley with Meneval, Phips nullified the surrender agreement and turned his New Englanders loose on the town.  "We cut down the cross," remembered one of the Puritans, "rifled their church, pulled down their high altar, and broke their images."  They also burned 28 houses near the fort as well as the church and left Port-Royal in charge of a council of settlers who were instructed to answer only to the government of Massachusetts.  Among the councilors were Alexandre Le Borgne de Bélisle, René Landry, and Daniel LeBlanc.  While Phips oversaw the destruction of Port-Royal, he sent an expedition under Captain Cyprian Southack to attack La Hève, Chedabouctou, and other Acadian settlements on the Atlantic side of the peninsula.  Another of Phips's lieutenants, Captain John Alden of Plymouth, who had already seized Saint-Castin's post at Pentagouët, took his sloop Mary into the Bay of Fundy to overawe the Acadian settlements at Minas and Chignecto, where the settlers were compelled to take Phips's oath of allegiance.  With Meneval, two priests, 21 cannon, and 59 captured French soldiers in tow, the victorious treasure hunter hurried back to Boston, leaving no troops to hold the Acadian capital.  A few months later, taking advantage of Phips's easy victory, English freebooters in two ships belonging to Jacob Leisler of New York descended on the defenseless town, plundered what was left of it, and hanged two unidentified Acadian settlers.157     [map]

Port-Royal was only a secondary objective for the determined New Englanders.  Their principal objective was Québec, which they would assault with an even larger force of 34 ships, including 4 men of war, and 2,200 men.  The Massachusetts council gave to the despoiler of Port-Royal the command of this formidable force.  Phips's expedition against Québec would cooperate with a land force from Connecticut and New York that would assault Montreal via Lake Champlain, the invasion of Canada that had been planned at the New York conference in May.  The land expedition met one disaster after another, however, and got no farther than the head of Lake Champlain.  Only a small party of 29 militiamen and 120 Indians under Captain John Schuyler of New York made it to the St. Lawrence valley, where they fell upon the settlement of La Prairie, across from Montréal, burned the houses, barns, and hayricks, slaughtered the cattle, and killed or captured 25 Canadians, including several women, before hurrying back to the main force on Lake Champlain.  Meanwhile, Phips's fleet took longer to assemble and leave Boston than he had anticipated.  He did not depart the rendezvous at Nantasket until August 9, and, because he failed to take along a St. Lawrence River pilot, he did not reach the river below Québec until mid October, late in the campaigning season.  Governor Frontenac and his lieutenants, meanwhile, made Montréal safe and transformed Québec into a fortress.158  

Phips was no match for the wily old Frontenac.  Having lost a substantial number of men on shipboard from a break out of small pox, Phips's first effort at Quebec was not military but diplomatic.  Before a single shot was fired, on the morning of his arrival, Monday, October 16, he sent an envoy with terms of surrender to Frontenac, who rebuffed such arrogance then invited the English commander to do his best to take the city.  That afternoon, Callieres, the governor of Montréal, arrived with 300 fresh men, including regulars and hot-blooded coureurs de bois aching for a fight, raising Frontenac's force in Quebec to a formidable 3,000.  But Phips stayed, and for six days he and his militia commander, Major John Walley, menaced Québec from land and water.  Phips called another council of war and cobbled together a plan that he was certain would give him the fortress city.  Walley would land his 1,300 Massachusetts militiamen at Beauport, just downriver from Québec, swing his column around to a ford on the St. Charles River behind Québec and attack the city's rear, which Phips wrongly assumed was unprotected.  Walley's militiamen landed on the morning of Wednesday, October 18 and fought their way up the slope towards the St. Charles, driving off a small force of French sharpshooters sent out to delay them.  Before the New Englanders could cross the St. Charles, however, Phips lost patience and ordered his warships to open fire on Frontenac's defenses.  The exchange of cannon fire rumbled for two days, crippling Sir William's warships and doing little damage to the tough old count's defenses.  Walley, unable to regain contact with Phips's vessels because of the fierce bombardment, and, not equal to the task given him, waited helplessly in his camp above Beauport, his men freezing, starving, and suffering from the small pox that they had contracted during their long stay in the lower St. Lawrence.  On Friday, October 20, while Walley consulted with Phips aboard the commander's battered warship, Walley's officers pushed their Puritans to the ford on the St. Charles, where Frontenac met them with three battalions of French regulars and a Canadian flanking force under two of the Le Moyne brothers.  The New Englanders fought valiantly, but they were no match for the French regulars and the Canadian militia, who laid one ambush after another.  The following day, Saturday, October 21, Walley withdrew his militiamen from in front of Québec against token opposition; Frontenac and his Frenchmen were exhausted, too.  Phips and his beaten Puritans lingered aboard their ships for two days, the men resting, the officers counseling their harried commander, until Phips finally weighed anchor and fell back down the St. Lawrence on Tuesday, October 24.  Phips anchored several leagues below the Île d'Orléans to repair his battered ships so that they could be made seaworthy for the long sail back to Boston.  Leaving the English unmolested, Frontenac agreed to a prisoner exchange, mostly women and children captured in the fighting in Maine.  Phips's expedition suffered more damage at the hands of Nature when it retreated into the Gulf of St. Lawrence.  A storm drove at least one ship onto Anticosti Island, and some of his vessels were blown down the coast all the way to the West Indies!  The only success of the expedition was Captain William Mason's assault on the French settlement of Percé, on the tip of the Gaspé Peninsula, which he destroyed with two frigates.159

The victory at Quebec saved Canada, but the English still clung to Acadia.

While Phips was dallying on his way to Quebec, a royal proclamation in London, dated 7 October 1690, decreed that Acadia was now part of Massachusetts.  Colonel Edward Tyng was named the new governor of English Acadia, and soon he arrived at his post in Port-Royal, though he did not stay there.  Meanwhile, the authorities in Massachusetts were determined to chastise the Abenakis.  They chose as the leader of a new expedition the noted Indian fighter from the Pilgrim settlement of Plymouth, 51-year-old Major Benjamin Church.  Fourteen years earlier, Church had won fame by defeating the Wampanoag chief Metacom, whom the whites dubbed King Philip, during the bloodiest Indian war in New England history.  In September 1689, Church had fought the Abenakis in a small expedition in the Casco Bay area with mixed results.  He now took command of a force of 300 men and headed back to Casco Bay, which he reached on 11 September 1690.  This expedition, which lasted two weeks, was no more successful than Church's earlier venture against the Abenakis.  For the rest of 1690 and into 1691, the Abenakis still held the upper hand in the war along the Maine frontier.160

With the defeat of Phips at Québec, Frontenac turned his attention to the liberation of Acadia.  In 1691, he sent Joseph Robineau de Villebon, nephew of the sieur de La Vallière of Beaubassin, to seize Port-Royal from the English, who had left no garrison there, and to serve as commandant of Acadia in place of the captured Meneval.  Perhaps to spare the Acadian settlements anymore grief, Villebon chose the Rivière St.-Jean as his base of operations.  He moved up the river to a new, more easily-defensible site at Nashouat, across from present-day Fredericton, New Brunswick.  On the St.-Jean, he captured a prominent New England merchant as well as the erstwhile Governor Tyng and sent them to Québec as prisoners of war.  In the King's name, Villebon took possession of Acadia and joined Saint-Castin and his Abenakis in Maine with a contingent of Malacites.161  

Villebon and Saint-Castin took the war to the enemy's door with as much energy and violence as Frontenac's attacks two years before.  In February 1692, a force of Abenakis from the Penobscot River, under the leadership of Jesuit Father Louis-Pierre Thury, laid waste the Maine town of York, massacring many of the settlers and taking more women and children into captivity.  In late May, a sea borne expedition of three ships that Phips has sent to destroy Villebon's new fort appeared in the lower St.-Jean.  Villebon was back at Nashouat, but most of his soldiers and Indians were still in Maine.  He prepared to meet the English with the small force at hand.  In early July, however, the English ships disappeared from the lower St.-Jean. They sailed across the bay to Port-Royal, instead, "where an effort was made to induce the settlers to submit to English rule, but no definite promise could be obtained from them.  With the announcement that a strong garrison would soon be sent from Boston, [the English] took their departure."162  

Meanwhile, in June, another force of Abenakis, this time led by Saint-Castin, with a hand full of Canadian officers under René Robineau de Portneuf, Villebon's brother, descended on the fortified Maine outpost of Wells.  This nut proved too hard to crack, however, and Portneuf and his force gave up the siege.  But they had done damage enough to liberate this part of Acadia from English occupation, except for Pemiquid, where, in late summer of 1692, at great expense, the New Englanders erected a sturdy edifice of stone which they named Fort William Henry.  In October, Frontenac sent a sea borne expedition under Canadian naval officer Pierre Le Moyne, sieur d'Iberville to subdue the new fort.  At Mount Desert Island, up the coast from Pemiquid, Iberville interrogated a boat load of suspicious Canadian captives and concluded that the new fort's stone walls and a reinforced garrison, plus the presence of powerful New England ships in the area, likely would overwhelm his force, so he abandoned the proposed attack on Pemiquid.  In fact, the fort was unfinished and could easily have been captured, and the New England vessels in the vicinity had left the area against Phips's orders and returned to Boston.  Iberville granted permission to Saint-Castin and his Abenakis to besiege the fort at Pemiquid, then he sailed down the coast as far as Nantucket to harass New England shipping.  He even lay off the harbor at Boston, hoping to destroy more English vessels, before sailing on to France.163

The war died down that winter of 1692-93.  Villebon left another brother, Daniel Robineau, sieur de Neuvillette, in charge of the fort at Nashouat and spent the winter at Chignecto.  "There he was in constant communication with Minas and Port Royal and the other settlements.  He dispatched messages to the Indians in various parts of Acadia asking them to join him in the spring to take part in a new expedition."  Beaubassin had become the new headquarters of Acadia.  Villebon sent Abraham Boudrot, a pilot from Port-Royal disguised as a trader, on a spy mission to Boston.  Boudrot's job was "to obtain information about conditions there, and learn if any plans were being made."  Weeks later, the wily Acadian returned from Boston with much useful information.  In the spring of 1693, Villebon learned that a merchant from Boston who traded regularly with Port-Royal was coming to Chignecto.  Such was the importance of trade between Acadia and New England that not even a full-blown war could stop it.  "The settlers were in urgent need of various necessities," so the commandant "decided to make a trip to Minas so that he might not be present when the vessel arrived, for it would be impolitic for him to sanction such unauthorized trade.  When he returned at the end of April, he learned that the vessel had arrived, but, instead of unloading goods, a party of men had disembarked and fired on the settlers, leaving an impression that they were pirates."  This would not be the last time in this war that Englishmen molested the settlers of Chignecto.164

In August 1693, most of the Abenaki chiefs of Maine signed a peace treaty at Pemiquid with the new governor of Massachusetts, Sir William Phips.  They left five of their leaders with Phips as hostages to seal the agreement.  The French authorities in Canada were alarmed by this development and did their best to stir the Abenaki bands against their former enemy.  Meanwhile, the fleet the English had gathered at Boston for another go at Québec was sent, instead, to the West Indies to capture the French island of Martinique.  Tropical disease devastated the ranks of the English soldiers and sailors, and when the fleet returned to Boston, it was in no shape to take on Frontenac again.  Other than an expedition in the far north by England's Hudson's Bay Company that recaptured three posts in St. James Bay which Iberville had taken from them a few years before, the war seemed to be over.  Peace had finally come to mainland Acadia.  New England settlers, wanting to believe that the war was over, rebuilt and even expanded the farms and villages that the French and Indians had pillaged over the past four years.  New England authorities prudently strengthened their garrison towns along the New Hampshire-Maine frontier and waited to see if the Abenakis had truly buried the hatchet.165  

Peace had come to peninsula Acadia, too, or so it seemed.  The council of inhabitants that Phips had set up in Port-Royal three years before continued to run the town, and the English never bothered to send a garrison to Port-Royal.  The settlers there and at Chignecto and Minas went about their business of building new dykes and transforming more salt marsh into pasture and field.  In 1693, Commandant Villebon ordered a new census, the fourth one, to be taken of the Acadian settlements from Pentagouët  to La Hève.  Port-Royal, with its wide basin and gentle-flowing river, remained the largest settlement with 504 inhabitants, and this despite the recent depredations at the hands of the English.  The Minas settlements, which probably included Pigiguit, numbered 307 settlers, Chignecto 119, Cap-Sable 32, Rivière St.-Jean 21, Pentagouët 14, Passamaquoddy on the Ste.-Croix 7, and La Hève 6, a total of 1,022 men, women, and children counted in the colony, compared to 373 in the first census at Port-Royal in 1671 and not quite 900 in the census of 1686.  Contrast this with the number of Frenchmen in all of New France at the time, about 15,000, and in the English Atlantic colonies, over 100,000!166

Except for a bloody raid by several bands of Abenakis into New Hampshire and Massachusetts in the summer of 1694, an expedition that autumn led by Iberville to retake the Hudson's Bay posts, and sundry raids along the Maine coast the following summer, the uneasy peace between the New Englanders and the French and their Indians allies persisted for nearly three years.  In February 1696, however, an incident occurred outside the gates of Fort William Henry that ended the tenuous peace and set the Maine frontier aflame once again.  Three Abenakis chiefs appeared at the fort under a flag of truce to parlay for an exchange of prisoners.  Something went terribly wrong in their negotiations with the hotheaded new commander of the post, and in the resulting melee the New Englanders killed two of the chiefs.  Soon the inhabitants of the Maine-New Hampshire coast felt the wrath of the vengeful Abenakis.  York was hit again, and Portsmouth, and Dover.  King William's War was on again.167  

Even worse for the hopes of New England security, Governor Frontenac, with urging from the King, launched another sea borne assault against Fort William Henry.  The redoubtable Iberville set sail from Québec in two warships in July 1696.  One of the vessels was commanded by Germain, son of Jacques Bourgeois, founder of the Chignecto settlement a generation before.  On the way down to Pemiquid, Iberville waylaid two English men of war in the Bay of Fundy, driving off one and dismasting the other, which he refitted as a third vessel for his expedition.  Continuing on to his objective, he picked up a force of Indians under Governor Villebon at Rivière St.-Jean and a contingent of Abenakis on the Penobscot under Saint-Castin.  Iberville's flotilla arrived at Pemiquid on August 14 and quickly invested the stone bastion by land and sea.  Amazingly, only 100 men defended the fort, and they were still under the command of the hotheaded incompetent who had killed the Abenaki chiefs, Captain Pascho Chubb.  On the afternoon of the 15th, Iberville's batteries were ready, and he demanded that Chubb surrender the fort or be blasted out.  The New Englander retorted with defiant words, and French shells soon exploded inside the fort.  That was enough for the hotheaded New Englander.  Fort William Henry surrendered after Chubb and his New Englanders put up a cursory defense.  Only the intervention of the honorable Iberville prevented the Abenakis from massacring Chubb and his Yankees.  They were paroled, instead, and some were allowed to return to Boston.  The French dismantled the stout stone walls before returning to Penobscot.  From there, Iberville sent messages to the Massachusetts governor, William Stoughton, acting for Phips, offering to exchange the New England prisoners he still held for French prisoners languishing at Boston.  Stoughton ignored him.  Shrugging off the stubborn Englishman, Iberville released his remaining prisoners to Saint-Castin, who promised to return them safely to Boston.  Iberville then sailed his little flotilla to Newfoundland to launch another offensive against the English side of the peninsula.168

The authorities at Boston, meanwhile, had enlisted Benjamin Church to organize yet another expedition against the Abenakis.  When Chubb and his parolees returned from Pemaquid, the Boston fathers threw the hapless captain in jail, where he languished for nearly a year, and they urged Church to hurry up his preparations for a strike against the enemy.  Meanwhile, five armed ships hurried from Boston to intercept Iberville's flotilla, but the clever Canadian got clean away.  In September, Church and his 500 New Englanders, with 50 Indian allies of their own, finally sailed out of Boston and headed north for the coast of Maine.  They hurried to Pemaquid and then to Penobscot Bay and up the river as far as Bangor, searching in vain for Abenakis to waylay and destroy.  Somehow the wily Indians had got word of his coming.  Moving east to Mount Desert Island and finding no enemy there, the angry Church swung out to sea again and sailed northeast ... to Acadia.169  

This time it was the settlements at Chignecto that bore the brunt of New England vengeance and Church's frustration at not finding the Abenakis.  When Church arrived at Chignecto, Germain Bourgeois, back from his adventures at Pemaquid, met the old Puritan on the shore and "produced a document which indicated that Phips after the fall of Port-Royal in 1690 had promised immunity to those who swore fealty to King William.  Church accompanied Bourgeois to his house, but his men lost no time in plundering and burning the settlement while the settlers took refuge in the woods."  Church remembered the scene vividly in his memoirs.  The people of Chignecto, he wrote years later, "were troubled to see their cattle, sheep, hogs, and dogs lying dead about their houses, chopped and hacked with hatchets."  Church could not contain his Puritan righteousness in the face of his hapless enemy.  "The inhabitants, both French and Indian, fled at his coming, but some of the former returned upon promise of good usage.  After reading them a sharp lecture upon the barbarities practiced by the savages upon the English, and forcibly contrasting it with his own magnanimity in now keeping his Indians from knocking them all in the head, Church took his departure for the St. John River."  One must wonder if the sights and smells of their burned-out dwellings and barns, of their dead animals, even of their pets, lying butchered all around them, would have brought the word "magnanimity" to the minds of these simple farmers who would take years to repair the damage the old Puritan had done.170

On the St.-Jean, Church skirmished with some workmen who were building a fort at the mouth of the great river.  He killed one and wounded another, who revealed where the big guns for the new fort were hidden.  Church secured the pieces and called a council of war to see what his lieutenants thought of the notion of heading up the river to attack Villebon's fort at Nashouat.  They agreed that the season was too late and the river too low, so they gathered up their spoils and headed back to Boston.  To Church's chagrin, on his way down he encountered a reinforcement coming up the coast to meet him and was replaced in command by Lieutenant Colonel William Hathorne, who outranked him.  Hathorne turned the force around and headed back to the Rivière St.-Jean to destroy Villebon's fort and the capital of Acadia.  The French defenders sent them flying back to Boston, however, and so ended the latest New England expedition against the French in Acadia.171

Meanwhile, Iberville and his elusive flotilla rounded the Acadian peninsula and Cape Breton Island and sailed up to Plaisance, the French settlement on the west coast of Newfoundland.  Despite the machinations of the French governor at Plaisance, Jacques-François de Monbeton de Brouillan, at the end of November Iberville seized St. John's on the Atlantic side of the island, an essential port for New England's cod fishing fleet.  Iberville could not hold the place, however, because "no measures had been concerted to hold what had been gained."  Brouillan burned St. John's while Iberville and his Canadians destroyed the other English settlements on the peninsula.172

Frontenac, Iberville, Villebon, Brouillan, and their Indian allies could smile contentedly as 1696 came to a close.  "For the English this had been a year of disasters, with hardly one redeeming feature for which to build hope for the future.  At its close the advantage rested wholly with the enemy.  East and west, the hostile tribes were now acting together as one man.  Acadia had been lost, Pemaquid demolished.  Much had been expected from the expeditions of Church and Hathorne; nothing realized."  Such was the perception of the New Englanders and of Frontenac and his lieutenants.  The Acadians at Chignecto, however, would not have given such a rosy summation of the year's results.173

But for a bloody raid by Canadian Indians against Haverhill, Massachusetts, in mid-March, 1697 proved to be a much quieter year than the one before.  Then news arrived in Boston during the summer that a fleet of warships had left France a few weeks before and was heading to North America to do the New Englanders no good.  It looked like Louis XIV was determined to end the war by destroying Boston itself, and there was some truth in the observation.  In late winter 1697, Louis, through his minister of marine, Louis Phélypeaux, comte de Pontchartrain, appointed the Marquis de Nesmond to gather together in Brest and Rochefort a squadron of 13 warships and four fire ships to sail to North America for the purpose of laying waste the New England coast from Boston up to Portsmouth, New Hampshire.  Meanwhile, one of the Le Moyne brothers would take five other warships from Rochefort to Plaisance and, after rendezvousing with brother Iberville, head north to Hudson Bay to recapture the valuable fur-trading posts that Iberville had seized twice during the war but that the English had again reclaimed.  Pontchartrain sent Frontenac secret orders to prepare 1,500 men, a formidable force in Canada, to move to at a moment's notice when he should receive further orders, the purpose of the expedition not revealed to him in order to maintain strict security.  Nesmond would sail first to Plaisance, where Frontenac would meet him, capture St. John's, Newfoundland, to protect his rear, and then end the war in North America once and for all by destroying Boston.  Luckily for the New Englanders, Nesmond's fleet did not reach Plaisance until July 24, he did not appear before St. John's until the end of August, and he failed to capture the place.  By then it was early September, too late in the season to move on Boston, so Nesmond returned to France.  The New Englanders nevertheless prepared for a climactic battle that never came.  Summer turned to fall with only the usual Indians raids marring the relative quiet of this ninth year of war.174

Peace came at last with the signing of the Treaty of Ryswick that autumn of 1697, news of it reaching North America by early December.  Some territory had been won and lost in Europe, but little had changed in America other than that Acadia was guaranteed as a French possession despite English claims to it, and, thanks to Iberville's end-of-the-war exploits, the French controlled the posts in Hudson Bay.  The New Englanders celebrated the end of the war as wildly as Puritans allowed such things, as well they should have, for the war had cost them dearly.175  

The war had cost Acadia, too, at Pentagouët,  Port-Royal, and Chignecto, but it was minor compared to New England's loss.  The Acadians nonetheless had learned a few valuable lessons from the long struggle with England.  The most bitter lesson was an ironic one.  They could see that the thing which made possible their peacetime trade with the English, the New Englanders' dominance of the coastal waters, could turn against them during wartime when their erstwhile trading partners--"our friends, the enemy"--turned into implacable foes.  They also learned that when danger should come from the sea again, they should be ready to defend themselves, not to submit meekly, otherwise their homes and possessions would be destroyed for nothing.  The New Englanders also remembered, among other important lessons, that, despite a long history of trade with the peace-loving Acadians, these Papist Frenchmen still were the enemy, still a part of the complex killing machine that sought to destroy their homes and families and their way of life.  With peace, trade would resume in earnest between these two very different people, but they would never look at one another quite the same again.175a

Queen Anne's War and the End of French Rule in Peninsula Acadia

The peace that followed the end of King William's War was frustratingly short and tenuous.  Indian raids continued along the New England frontier into 1698.  No treaty that was negotiated an ocean away could solve the Indians' most pressing problem of losing land to the aggressive New Englanders.  In Acadia, new settlements soon appeared near Chignecto at Chepoudy, Petitcoudiac, and Memramcook, but, again, these habitants hugged the tide lands of the upper bay and did not threaten the Mi'kmaqs and Malacites who lived above them.176

A sticking point unresolved in the Treaty of Ryswick was the boundary between French Acadia and New England.  The English claimed the Ste.-Croix River, while the French claimed the Kennebec.  In 1700, the contending parties compromised and named the St. George River as the boundary between the two provinces.177

A new century greeted the Acadians in 1701.  In a few years it would be a full century since Pierre Dugua, sieur de Mons and his companions had left their homes in Europe and founded Port-Royal and the Acadian venture.  And it was in Europe again that events piled one atop the other to threaten the peace that had finally come to this corner of New France.  

On 17 September 1701, James Stuart, England's former king, died in exile at St. Germain near Paris at the age of 67.  At least one account placed Louis XIV, now 63 and in the 59th year of his reign, at James' deathbed.  Louis promised the dying king that his son, James Francis Edward Stuart, whom Louis insisted was the Prince of Wales, would be recognized as the new English monarch when James breathed his last.  Eleven years before, early in the War of the Grand Alliance, in an attempt to keep William III from leading troops to the Continent, Louis had supported a counterrevolution in Ireland that he hoped would restore James to the throne, but the Battle of the Boyne in July 1690 had frustrated that effort.  And although one of the provisions of the Treaty of Ryswick was French recognition of William III as the legitimate ruler of England, if the story of James's deathbed encounter is accurate, Louis obviously had not given up on his hopes of restoring a Catholic monarch to the thrown of England.178

In March 1702, the Sun King's most hated rival breathed his last.  William III died in London from injuries suffered in a fall from his horse, Sorrel.  He had ruled alone since the death of Mary in December 1694, and she had given him no surviving children.  He was succeeded by Mary's Protestant sister, Anne, with whom he and Mary had fallen out early in their joint reign.  Louis XIV opposed the accession of Anne, of course, but the Sun King's principal concern at the time was who would be successor to the childless Hapsburg king of Spain, Charles II.  Louis feared that if the Austrian Hapsburgs regained the throne of Spain after the passing of Charles II, France would again be surrounded by implacable enemies.  After years of negotiations involving Louis's oldest son and then his oldest grandson, it was the grandson, Philip of Anjou, who, upon the death of Charles II in November 1700, ascended to the Spanish throne as Philip V.  Now the Bourbons ruled Spain as well as France, and Louis's southern flank was secure.  Moreover, new Spanish and French customs policies were keeping English and Dutch merchants from exploiting the lucrative Caribbean trade, especially in slaves--the coveted asiento.  The English, the Dutch, the Austrians, and many of the German states would have none of this.  By early 1702, Louis's enemies had formed a new Grand Alliance against him, and in May England declared war against France and her allies, Spain, Portugal, Bavaria, and Savoy.  The resulting conflict, which lasted this time11 years, was called in Europe the War of the Spanish Succession and in America Queen Anne's War.179

The war along the North American frontier got off to a much slower start this time, but when it did, the same savage pattern of warfare erupted between New England, whose population had risen to 120,000, and Canada, with its much smaller pool of settlers and a dwindling number of Indian allies.  The Abenaki and other Algonquian tribes, despite the recent treaties they had made with the New Englanders, were as eager as ever to aide their French benefactors.  There were just fewer warriors to take up the tomahawk this time because of New England retaliation in the previous war and European diseases.  When the war began in Europe and he was certain that it would spread to the colonies again, Philippe de Rigaud, marquis de Vaudreuil, the new governor-general of New France who had replaced the dead Frontenac, ordered the Abenakis to fall back into Canada and take up villages on two rivers along the south side of the St. Lawrence between Québec and Montréal.  This would give Canada a buffer of protection if the New Englanders struck the first blow.  Acadia, under Governor Jacques-François de Brouillan, his headquarters back in Port-Royal, was left as usual to its own devices, with no protection from attack by sea.180

The first "confrontation" between the Abenakis and the New Englanders, strangely enough, was not a bloody raid but a peace conference in which only words were exchanged.  The new governor of Massachusetts, Joseph Dudley, invited the Abenaki chiefs to parlay with him at the new fort at Casco, and several of the chiefs arrived there on 20 June 1703.  Promises were made by both parties, and they held a ceremony at a pile of rocks called the Two Brothers, which stood near the fort.  When the council was breaking up and each side fired its customary salute, the English fired first, using blank cartridges, but they noticed that some of the Indian celebrants used real bullets when they fired their salute.  Years later, after the war had turned bloody, Dudley sent a letter to the then governor of Acadia, Daniel d'Auger de Subercase.  In the letter, Dudley laid bare what he considered to be the treachery of Subercase's predecessor, Brouillan.  An historian of the conflict notes:  "Subercase had accused the provincial troops of committing a sacrilegious act in digging up the heart of Brouillan from the place where it was buried.  Dudley responds in these terms:  'About five years since[,] I had gone to Casco Bay to make an agreement with the Indians of my government.  There came to that place two Frenchmen of Port Royal, to whom M. de Brouillan had promised two hundred pistoles to kill me.  These Frenchmen came to Casco Bay disguised as Indians, and were present when I was making my agreement, but their hearts failed them in what they had undertaken.  Some time after, one of the two, being a prisoner, and brought here [to Boston], acknowledged it to me, in my house, on his knees.'"  One wonders who the two cowardly Acadians might have been, especially the humble penitent ... or if they really existed.181

Two months after the conference at Casco Bay, on August 10, the frontier war erupted again when Abenakis, Canadians, and so-called Mission Indians, under Lieutenant Alexandre Le Neuf de Beaubassin, attacked coastal villages from Wells east to Falmouth along the coast of Maine. After nearly a week of fighting, the French and Indians had killed or captured 130 settlers and destroyed most of the coastal settlements of the province.  Meanwhile, other bands of Abenakis attacked settlements in New Hampshire.  Governor Dudley beseeched the other New England colonies to help him throw together a retaliatory force.  Connecticut sent a troop of cavalry, but Rhode Island ignored the plea.  In October, a contingent of New Englanders, 360 strong, marched into upper Maine to chastise the treacherous Abenakis, but they lost their way on the seldom used trails, and nothing came of the venture.  Meanwhile, the Abenakis struck again and again, and English retaliation remained feeble.  In exasperation, the Massachusetts authorities in September offered a bounty of twenty pounds for each Indian scalp a settler would bring in.  At least one Puritan clergyman heartily applauded the measure!  This action led to the formation of at least seven companies of rangers who scoured the Maine woods for the grisly trophies that winter.  The rangers, or "snowshoe men" as they were called, enjoyed limited success, but they brought a new level of intensity to the fighting that would characterize the rest of this war.  Indian attacks continued, with persistent savagery, into early 1704.182

In Québec, Governor-General Vaudreuil, no doubt mindful of the successes of his predecessor in the previous war against England, set into motion a plan of attack against the Massachusetts settlements in the Connecticut River valley.   At least 250 Canadian rangers and probably a larger force of Indians, including Iroquois and Abenaki, under Jean-Baptiste Hertel de Rouville, braved an especially severe winter to get at the valley settlements.  On the early morning of 28 February 1704, they fell on the snow-covered town of Deerfield, burned most of the houses, killed 50 or so of the inhabitants, and took into captivity perhaps 100 more, 19 of whom perished on the long, cold trail back to Canada.183

The New Englanders were understandably horrified.  Retaliation was sure to follow.  Again, the hero of Plymouth, Colonel Benjamin Church, was empowered to lead an expedition against the French.  And, again, peninsula Acadia was chosen as the target of retribution.  But Port-Royal would escape violence this time.  Massachusetts "Governor Dudley would not sanction an attack on Port-Royal, though Church strongly desired to destroy that nest of contraband traders, among whom, it was whispered, some New England merchants might be found, base enough to turn the enemy's wants for carrying on the war against them to their own profit."184

In April, Church gathered a force of 550 men, including friendly Indians who were incorporated into the colonial companies.  Many of the men were armed with fine new muskets that had just arrived from England.  To convey them up the coast, Church secured two British warships and a Massachusetts armed vessel.  Aboard these larger vessels were numerous whaleboats that would be used to land the troops at any point along the coast.  There were enough of these boats to propel half the command against any point at once.  "In short, the expedition in all respects was as well, if not better, equipped as any that had been sent out on the same errand."185  

The colonel's strategy was predictable.  "Church was too old a campaigner not to know that the prospect of coming upon the hostile Indians unawares was poor indeed.  Burning their deserted wigwams might be compared with burning so much old brushwood.  They were almost as easily rebuilt as destroyed; and it was too early in the season to lay waste the Indian cornfields.  Church therefore had proposed to himself the rooting out of as many of the French trading and fishing stations of Nova Scotia as he should have time to visit, satisfied in his own mind, as he was, that it was there he could do the enemy the most harm.  It being impracticable to reach Canada, he argued that the next best thing to do was to strike where the enemy was most vulnerable--that is through Nova Scotia.  This was rude strategy, to be sure, but it was the only means left of making reprisals for such murderous raids as that of Hertel de Rouville."  Governor Dudley ordered that "all homes in Acadia be burned, that dikes protecting recovered land be smashed and that everything that could be carried be taken along with as many prisoners as possible."186

Sailing up the coast in early May, Church picked up reinforcements in New Hampshire and then fell upon the French settlements on Penobscot Bay.  Next, he attacked Mount Desert Island and then Machias, where he continued to scout out any French settlement he could destroy.  But Mount Desert and Machias were deserted.  In early June, his expedition reached the French settlement in Passamaquoddy Bay at the mouth of the Ste.-Croixe River.  One of his units scoured nearby Campobello Island, the future summer home of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  A small French settlement up the treacherous Ste-Croixe--Gourdain's--fell to Church's force on June 8.  The hand full of Frenchmen who had the temerity to resist Church's men were "knocked in the head" on the old colonel's orders before he moved the force up to the falls of the Ste.-Croixe, where he destroyed a tiny French fishing settlement.187

Church next turned on his primary target, peninsula Acadia.  In early July, he sent the large ships to blockade Port-Royal and then led his whaleboats up the peninsula to the Minas Basin.  They arrived at evening low tide and had to wait overnight for the morning flood before they could run the boats into the basin.  Meanwhile, the Minas inhabitants drove off their cattle to keep them out of the hands of the New Englanders.  Church's men pursued the Acadians, who waited in ambush for the incautious Yankees.  A Lieutenant Baker and a private died in the confrontation--Church's only fatal casualties in the entire expedition.  That evening, Church ordered his men to burn the Minas settlements and to destroy the precious dykes.  Land that had taken the Acadians years to reclaim from the basin again was covered with salt water.  Church rounded up as many hostages as he could find, threw them aboard the whaleboat transports, and hurried back up the peninsula to Port-Royal.188

Amazingly, Church and his much superior force simply lay before Port-Royal and did not attempt to take the fort that guarded the heart of Acadia.  The little garrison put on a brave demonstration, but mostly they held their collective breaths and waited for the onslaught that surely would doom them.  It never came.  In late July, Church burned and pillaged what he could along the basin, rounded up more prisoners, and headed back up the Bay of Fundy, to Chignecto, which he had attacked eight years before.189

On 28 July 1704, Church fell on Beaubassin during a heavy fog.  This time, however, the Chignecto Acadians did not attempt to negotiate with the old Puritan.  Having heard of Church's attacks down the coast and suspecting that they soon would be his next target, they drove their cattle out of harm's way and prepared to resist the invaders.  Church landed his force and deployed his men.  The Chignecto defenders fired a few shots and then disappeared into the countryside.  Again, the New Englanders plundered and burned an Acadian settlement before rounding up more unlucky hostages to be used in negotiating for the release of the New England captives the French were holding in Canada.  The old soldier and his men returned to Boston the way they had come, stopping at Passamaquoddy, Mount Desert, and Penobscot again to chastise any French and Indians there, but this time they found no one.190

And so ended Colonel Benjamin Church's final raid on Acadia.  The New Englanders had expected him to take Port-Royal and expressed keen disappointment when they learned that he had not.  When it became public knowledge that Governor Dudley had discouraged Church from taking the Acadian capital before the expedition had even begun, a cloud of gloom and frustration settled over the Bay colony.  In late July, the French and Indians from Canada struck in force again along the Connecticut River valley and massacred more settlers in western Massachusetts.  The war had degenerated into another stalemate and promised to drag on as long as the last one.191

The winter of 1704-05 offered hope for an end to the fighting when the belligerents in Boston and Québec opened a dialogue for an exchange of prisoners.  Governor Dudley took advantage of this lull in the fighting to offer Governor-General Vaudreuil a treaty of neutrality, which would essentially have ended the war in the colonies.  These negotiations continued into 1706, and the frontier between Canada and New England enjoyed a peaceful respite.  A number of prisoner exchanges during this period, some no doubt involving Acadian settlers, gave colonists on both sides reason to hope that the war at last was over.  But the spring of 1706 brought not only a renewal of nature but also a resumption of hostilities.192    

The French and Indians from Canada struck the first blow in raids along the western Massachusetts frontier that continued into summer.  At Port-Royal, meanwhile, a small merchant vessel arrived from Boston under a flag of truce ostensibly for a prisoner exchange.  The New Englanders who owned the vessel, however, were just as intent on trading goods with the Acadians, who were eager to receive them.  An exchange of prisoners was made, and soon the New Englanders returned for another trade.  The dubious business ended when the good Puritans back in Boston learned of the contraband trading.  A public scandal erupted, followed by a trial that imposed heavy fines on all of the merchants involved.  Even Governor Dudley was implicated in the scandal.  As the strong public feeling against trading with the enemy revealed, the war was far from over.193

In the spring of 1707, Governor Dudley sought to redeem himself by organizing yet another assault against Port-Royal.  There would be no trading in goods this time.  The New Englanders were intent on destroying the place.  Colonel John March, who had been successful in earlier fighting against the French and Indians in Maine, took command of a force of two regiments of militia infantry raised in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire, and a battery of militia artillery.  March's force numbered 1,100 men, twice the size of the expedition that Church had taken to Acadia three years before.  The force would have been even larger if the governor of Connecticut had cooperated with his fellow New Englanders.  Still, it was unusual for three New England colonies to join in such a venture.  The size of the force and the perceived quality of its leadership gave every promise of success.194

Acadia, meanwhile, had received a new governor when Brouillan died on his way back from France in 1704.  Daniel d'Auger de Subercase, former governor of Placentia and recent recipient of the Order of St.-Louis, would prove to be the last French governor of Acadia.  Alerted evidently by his intelligence system, Subercase was ready for March when the New Englanders dropped anchor in the Port-Royal basin on 26 May 1707.  In the fort at Port-Royal on its imposing hill overlooking the countryside was not only the small force of French regulars under Subercase, but also Acadian militia from the surrounding settlements; 150 Abenakis under Bernard-Anselme de Saint-Castin; and 60 Canadians from Québec under Louis Denys de la Ronde, brother of Simon-Pierre Denys de Bonaventure, who had run the colony before Subercase arrived from France.  March's New Englanders greatly outnumbered the defenders, but the Frenchmen made up for it with the twin advantages of standing on the defensive behind prepared works and, especially in the case of the Acadians, fighting to protect their own homes.195

On the afternoon of the 26th, March landed a thousand men in two columns seven or eight miles below the fort, one on the north shore, across from the fort, to serve as a covering force, the other, commanded by March himself, on the south side of the basin, on the direct approaches to the fort.  Unfortunately for the New Englanders, because of the late hour of its landing this main column could not reach the fort before darkness fell.  Subercase sent out skirmishers to delay both columns, and armed inhabitants swarmed to the area to ambush any New Englanders they could find.  Meanwhile, women and children hurried to the fort to seek its protection.  The next morning, the 27th, a ragtag force of Acadians ambushed March's advance along Allain's Creek, inflicting a number of casualties and further delaying its arrival at the fort.196

When March's column finally reached its objective on the afternoon of the 27th and threw itself into battle lines beneath the ramparts of the fort, the New Englander hesitated to assault Port-Royal with its sturdy walls and 40 guns, including some 36-pounders.  He chose, instead, to hold back his infantry and to knock down the fort with his artillery.  The artillery that could do that was not his, however, but belonged to the Royal Navy, whose officers insisted that their big guns could not be landed under the fire of the fort, and so it was not done.  Even March's own artillery commander refused to bring up his guns under the fire of the fort.  March lay siege to the fort instead, and the morale of his colonials plummeted with every swipe of the pick and shovel.  On May 31, after investing the place for only four days and consulting yet another council of war, March concluded that Port-Royal was just too strong to subdue by siege.  A week later, on June 6, March lifted the siege, re-embarked his men, and retreated to Casco, Maine.  There he awaited further orders from the authorities in Boston, to whom he sent three of his officers, including his troublesome artillery commander, to inform them of his failure.197

News of the disaster at Port-Royal reached Boston before March's officers arrived in the city.  A virtual mob of colonists greeted them at the dock and on the streets, mocking their military bearing and shouting, "Port Royal!  Port Royal!"  Governor Dudley was mortified by the official news and chose to send March right back to Port-Royal to finish it off properly this time.  Two prominent civilians accompanied the hapless colonel as advisors and with the power to overrule him if necessary.  Some of March's original force refused to accompany him on the second venture--men mostly from Plymouth and New Hampshire; and, again, Connecticut did not join in the venture--but his force remained largely intact and arrived before Port-Royal on August 10.  Subercase, meanwhile, had strengthened his position by erecting field fortifications where March's besiegers had camped beneath the guns of the fort.  The Acadian governor was surprised to see the New Englanders back so soon, but, again, his soldiers and Acadians, with the help of Saint-Castin's Abenakis, stood ready to repulse another English assault.198

March landed all of his troops on the north side of the basin this time, evidently with the object of using his artillery from that side to reduce the fort at a distance.  Subercase seized the initiative, however, and kept a steady fire on March's camps with his big guns, limiting their ability to maneuver during the day, while his skirmishers ambushed and harassed any New Englanders who ventured out into the countryside to gather provisions or to reconnoiter the approaches to the fort.  The besiegers soon became the besieged, with a predictable result.  Breaking under the strain of another failure, Colonel March relinquished his command to a trusted subordinate, Colonel Francis Wainwright of Massachusetts.  Wainwright wasted no time putting his troops into action.  He moved a column of infantry up the river to a point above the fort, with artillery to follow under cover of darkness.  His plan was to cross at night with the infantry and artillery and fall upon the rear of the fort the following morning.  Subercase learned of the movement from a loose-lipped New England prisoner and foiled the crossing by setting bonfires all along the upper river.  Wainwright pulled his force back to a point opposite the fort, but Subercase shelled him out of the position.  Wainwright then moved farther down the basin, out of the range of the fort's big guns.  Desperate to get at the fort and overwhelm it with raw numbers, on August 20, ten days into the siege, Wainwright crossed the lower basin with his entire force to attack Port-Royal from the south side, as March had tried to do two months before.  The ever watchful Subercase sent Saint-Castin's Abenakis to ambush the New Englanders as they approached his lines.  Wainwright hoped to draw Subercase's entire force out of the fort and into a knock-down, drag-out fight in the open, but the wily Frenchman refused to budge.  Wainwright ordered his men back to their boats, and soon the big English ships opened their sails and headed back to Massachusetts.199

Thus ended the third siege of Port-Royal in as many years, each a humiliating defeat for the New Englanders.  Would there be a fourth, or would the Englishmen finally relent and leave the Acadian colony alone?

The war dragged on into its sixth and seventh years with more pillaging and murder along the New England frontier.  The hapless village of Haverhill, Massachusetts, was the hardest hit when French and Indians from Canada swooped down on its inhabitants in late August 1708.200  

The Acadian settlements remained unmolested.  The war again seemed to be a distant thing, although the settlers at Minas had only to look at their dykes to be reminded of how quickly that could change.  New houses appeared there and at Port-Royal and Chignecto to replace the ones that the New Englanders had burned.  Families grew, new settlers arrived, more land was reclaimed from the marshy wetlands, and Acadian life went on.  Governor Subercase was not lulled by the interlude of peace that followed the retreat of Wainwright's force.  He beseeched his superior, the French colonial minister, Count Pontchartrain, to send him funds, reinforcements, and provisions without delay so that he could be ready for the New Englanders when they returned, as he was certain they would do.  The only assistance he received, however, were two small ships loaded with Parisian boys and provisions too meager to feed his garrison.  He received indirect assistance from French privateers who preyed on English shipping along the Atlantic coast and used Port-Royal as a base of operations.  But these cutthroats ruined what little trade there was between New England merchants who ignored the war and Acadians who were always eager to trade for English goods.  Worse yet, these depredations against New England's primary industry fueled the angry Bostonians' resolve to destroy the Port-Royal menace once and for all.201

In the spring of 1709, two colonial shakers and movers, Colonels Samuel Vetch and Francis Nicholson, returned to Boston from London with orders from Queen Anne herself to end the war in the colonies.  It would be done not by negotiation but by force of arms, and Canada would be the primary objective, Port-Royal a secondary one.  For the first time since Phips's failed attempt to take Quebec 19 years before, the English would try to capture Montreal and Quebec, again with overwhelming force.202  

No two more interesting men could have been chosen to lead the venture.  The 41-year-old Vetch was a native of Scotland who had settled in Albany 10 years before and established a successful trade with the Indians.  In 1706, he, too, had been implicated in the illegal trade with Port-Royal, but his conviction had been overturned by a friendly court ruling, and he remained in the good graces of the English authorities in London.  The plan of campaign was essentially his.  The queen's government empowered him to raise the necessary force in the colonies to subdue New France.  Nicholson, who was 54 at the time, was one of the most distinguished colonial administrators of the age.  He had served as lieutenant governor of the ill-starred Dominion of New England two decades before and had fled with Sir Edmond Andros to England when a revolt in New York toppled Andros's regime in 1689.  The next year Nicholson returned to the colonies as lieutenant governor of Virginia.  He governed Maryland from 1694-98 and returned to Virginia in 1698 as governor general.  Quarrels there led to his ouster in 1705.  He nevertheless remained a favorite of Queen Anne and her ministers, was made a colonel and placed in command of the Canadian operation.203

An historian of the war describes the objective of the expedition:  "In brief, the plan of operations was this:  The campaign was to be opened by a combined attack upon Quebec and Montreal, both by sea and land.  The fall of Canada would, of course, involve that of Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and all the rest of the French possessions on the continent, which would then come definitively under British rule, once and forever."  To this end, Massachusetts would supply 1,000 militiamen, Rhode Island 200, for the attack against Québec by sea from Boston.  The larger force for the sea borne operation would consist of five regiments of redcoat regulars, 3,000 men, for a total of 4,200 men in the attack upon Québec.  For the land expedition against Montréal, to be commanded by Nicholson with Vetch as his second in command, Connecticut would raise 350 men, New York 800, Pennsylvania 150, and New Jersey 300, a total of 1,600 militiamen to rendezvous at Albany in May.  The combined force of nearly 6,000 regulars and militiamen and hundreds more sailors and marines was over twice the size of Phips' expedition of 1690.  Surely if all went well for the English, both Canada and Acadia would be theirs at last and they would dominate North America.204

Things went terribly for the hapless English.  Colonel Nicholson's part of the operation started badly when New Jersey and Pennsylvania refused to furnish the 450 men allotted to them.  Undeterred, Nicholson made this up by employing 600 Iroquois warriors and their families, keeping his total force for the attack on Montreal at a respectable 1,500 men.  He moved up the Hudson from Albany on schedule, cutting a road for his supplies and a possible retreat route, and halted at Wood Creek, which would take his force into Lake Champlain.  Here he waited for word of the larger movement from Boston, built canoes and waited for flat boats to be floated up the Hudson and dragged overland to his position.  At Wood Creek he skirmished with a small French force from Montréal, which quickly slipped away to alert the big French garrison.205

In Boston, meanwhile, Governor Dudley and his lieutenants gathered their transports and waited for the English squadron filled with redcoats and marines to arrive from England.  Spring slipped quietly into summer, which gave way to autumn, and still they waited.  Nicholson's force waiting at Wood Creek dwindled with each passing day when dysentery struck the troops in their filthy camps.  Finally, a dispatch vessel from London arrived at Boston:  the English squadron and the redcoats the queen had promised them had been sent to Portugal instead.  The stout walls of Québec and Montréal would remain untouched by English fire.206

Colonel Nicholson would not give up.  "Unwilling to throw away what had cost so much time, trouble, and expense to get together, the New England governors met Nicholson, Vetch, and Moody at Rehobeth, October 14th, to see what was to be done.  It was unanimously decided to send the New England forces against Port Royal, provided the queen's ships then at Boston and New York would co-operate."  The Royal Navy balked, however, and there was nothing left to do but disband the entire force and send them home.207

And, again, Colonel Nicholson, Captain Vetch, and Governor Dudley refused to give up on an attack against the Acadian menace.  A recent historian of the conflict describes the preparations for yet another expedition against the French colony:  "Though deeply disappointed, the dogged New Englanders did not give up all hope of reprisal; once again they lowered their sights from Quebec to Port Royal.  England was again persuaded to provide ships, and in 1710 Massachusetts again rounded up its semidrilled throng of farmers, mechanics, plowboys, clerks and apprentices.  The soldiers of 1709 were asked to enlist again, this time lured by the promise that they might keep the muskets supplied them.  Once again, when volunteers fell below quotas, the colony calmly drafted the reluctant.  Seamen were impressed by the forefathers of that nation which would fight a war to protect its seamen from British press gangs, and the parents of those sturdy provincials who would make mock of the dainties in the elaborate war train of Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne did not hesitate to vote 20 sheep, 5 pigs, 100 fowl and 1 pipe of wine for the table of General Nicholson.  A dinner was held at the Green Dragon Tavern in honor of Nicholson, Vetch and Sir Charles Hobby, the British squadron commander, and on the following morning, September 18, the expedition numbering about 40 ships, large and small, sailed for Acadia."  Nicholson commanded the expedition with Vetch as his chief of staff.  The New England force numbered 2,000 men, including a regiment of Royal Marines and 4 battalions of provincial militia commanded by colonels Sir Charles Hobby and William Tailer of Massachusetts, Colonel William Whiting of Connecticut, and Colonel Shadrach Walton of New Hampshire.  A force of Iroquois also accompanied the expedition.  Nicholson's ships reached the entrance to the basin at Port-Royal on September 24.208

Daniel d'Auger de Subercase, the successful defender of Port-Royal in 1707, still governed the Acadian colony in 1710.  In the fort this time were only about 260 French regulars, "the greater part of whom he was afraid to trust outside of the fort for fear of them deserting."  Worse yet, the fort itself was in a ramshackle condition, its ramparts hardly defendable.  When the English ships appeared at the entrance to Port-Royal basin, Subercase rushed a dispatch to the authorities in France stating that "if the garrison received no succor, there was 'every reason to fear something fatal.'"209

How true were his words.  Deserters from the French garrison met the English in the basin and revealed the weakness of the fort to the enemy.  Though one of Nicholson's ships ran onto the rocks at the entrance to the basin and sank with the loss of 26 men, his other vessels anchored safely in sight of the fort.  The next day, September 25, the English landed virtually unopposed.  They moved immediately against the fort, two battalions under Vetch attacking from the north, two under Nicholson attacking from the south.  Subercase did not sally out to meet them.  The only resistance to the English approach came from some of the Acadians living on the line of march who fired at the New Englanders from their houses before hurrying into the countryside.  Meanwhile, the English warships lobbed shells into the fort while Subercase fired what artillery he had at the approaching New Englanders.  Moving within easy artillery range of the fort, Nicholson brought up his field artillery and supervised its emplacement.  Three breaching batteries stood ready on October 1, when they opened fire on the dilapidated old fort from a range of only 100 yards. After a desultory fire, "Subercase asked for terms.  Once more the golden Bourbon lilies came fluttering down Port Royal's flagstaff; the French soldiers--about 250 men--came marching out with drums rolling, colors flying and arms reversed; the English troops went marching in, the Union Jack went up the pole, the Queen's health was drunk--and in the morning the distressed French ladies of the fort were treated to a breakfast by the English officers."210

No one could know it, but the fleurs-de-lis would never fly over Port-Royal again.  Then again, perhaps Francis Nicholson could see into the future when he renamed the place in honor of his queen.  One hundred and five years after Poutrincourt had christened the fledgling French settlement that he and de Monts had planted on the shores of the wide basin, the name "Port-Royal" slid quietly into history; the town that clustered around the old French fort was re-christened Annapolis Royal.  The British resurrected "Nova Scotia" as their name for the entire colony.211

Determined to punish the Acadians for their role in the war that had just gone terribly against them, Nicholson then turned on the inhabitants of Nova Scotia.  The terms of surrender provided protection only to those Acadians who lived within three English miles of the fort--481 inhabitants.  All the others--those in the upper river above Port-Royal, at Minas, Pigiguit, Cobeguit, Chignecto, Chepoudy, Petitcoudiac, Rivière St.-Jean, Pobomcoup, and other settlements, that is, the majority of Acadians--would be "treated as prisoners at discretion, or as subject to such penalties as the conquerors might see fit to impose."  Nicholson promptly sent envoys overland to Québec to inform the Canadian governor, still Vaudreuil, that Port-Royal was now in English hands.  He warned the Frenchman that "if the discriminate massacre of innocent women and children by his hired cut-throats was persisted in, then the Acadians would be treated in a like manner."  He left Vetch to govern the captured garrison, with a battalion of marines to assist him.  No committee of citizens would be left to run the town as Phips had decreed 20 years before.  The French garrison took ship for La Rochelle.  A few Acadian families joined them.  Some families packed up and headed for Canada, but the majority of the Acadians stayed in their homes, determined to endure whatever else history threw at them.212

As autumn slipped into winter with its snow and ice and spring finally arrived with its welcome thaw, the Acadians became more and more agitated over the prospect of remaining under English rule.  One of the provisions of the hated terms of surrender dictated by Nicholson and Vetch was that "All French must be deported outside the country, save those who adopt Protestantism.  That it would be most advantageous for the Crown that this measure be effected with all possible speed and that they be replaced with Protestant families from England or Ireland ...."  The inhabitants within cannon shot--three miles--of Annapolis Royal were not affected by this decree, but every other settlement in Acadia fell under it.  The Acadians were devout Catholics who would never dream of converting to Protestantism or of giving up their land to foreigners.  They were not the sort of people who would sit idly by while the English destroyed their way of life.213  

The settlers at Minas and Chignecto heard, no doubt from their relatives in the Annapolis basin who hated the English as much as they did, that the garrison of Royal Marines had not fared well over the Acadian winter, that they had been replaced by semi-drilled New England militiamen, and that sickness and desertion had reduced the garrison by over half, making it vulnerable to attack.  The Acadians appealed to Anselme de Saint-Castin and his trusty Abenakis at Pentagoët to help them retake the old fort.  In late June 1711, Saint-Castin and his Abenakis crossed the Bay of Fundy undetected by the English and joined a group of armed settlers from Minas and Chignecto for a go at Annapolis Royal.  They approached to within a dozen miles of the fort and fell upon a party of 70 Englishmen searching for building timber at a place still called Bloody Creek.  A sharp skirmish left over a dozen of the Englishmen dead and the rest captured.  With the garrison much reduced and more armed Acadians sure to appear, the chances of retaking the fort were even greater.  The Acadians and Saint-Castin appealed to Vaudreuil for reinforcements.  They also alerted the governor of Plaisance in Newfoundland, who promised to send them what cannon he could spare via the ship of a French privateer named Morpain.  June became July as the Acadians patiently waited for the men and cannon that never came.214  

Unfortunately for the Acadians, their timing was terrible, and the assault on Annapolis Royal never came off.  Only days before the clash at Bloody Creek, "the most formidable armament ever dispatched to these shores" began to drop sail in Boston harbor.  Colonel Nicholson, the indefatigable enemy of the Acadians, had done much to bring this virtual Armada to America.  Flushed with victory, he had returned to Boston after his easy capture of Port-Royal and soon sailed to England to stir up the queen's government for another go at Québec and Montréal.  His timing could not have been better.  The Tories had just ousted the Whigs from power, and the queen's new Tory ministers were "eager to discredit the Duke of Marlborough, whose stunning victories over the French and Spanish had made him the darling of the Whigs.  The Tories reasoned that if France could be evicted from America, it could be shown that this triumph would be of greater value to England than all Marlborough's victories, which were already being belittled as of more benefit to Holland and Austria than to Britain."  The queen's new government cobbled together a force of 12,000 men, including 7 regiments of Marlborough's veterans sent to England from Holland for the expedition, 9 ships of war, 2 bomb ketches, and about 60 transports and supply vessels, 600 marines, and the requisite artillery, to be supplemented by 1,500 colonial militia to be raised in New England.  Nicholson was given the same mission he had tried mightily to complete the year before, to move a large force of New York militia and Iroquois from Albany to Lake Champlain and to fall upon Montréal when the formidable force from England fell on Québec by way of Boston.  The armada began arriving in Boston on June 24, 1711, and, after turning Boston inside out for supplies and recruits, set sail for the St. Lawrence on July 30.  Commander of the fleet was an armchair admiral, Sir Hovenden Walker.  In command of the army forces was a political appointee who had never seen battle, Brigadier John "Honest Jack" Hill, brother of the queen's new favorite, Mrs. Masham.  It was this force that gobbled up the cannon headed from Newfoundland to Acadia and reinforced the ailing garrison at Annapolis Royal with a fresh contingent of New England militiamen.  Saint-Castin's warriors alerted the force of 200 Canadians marching to the aid of their Acadian brethren. Vaudreuil's men, reluctant to attack a fort without cannon, turned back, and the enterprise against Annapolis Royal was ruined.  Meanwhile, on the foggy night of August 22, as he approached the mouth of the St. Lawrence River, Admiral Walker allowed part of his fleet to be dashed against the treacherous north shore of the lower St. Lawrence.  At least 900 soldiers and sailors perished in one of the worst maritime disasters of the age.  Despite still having a large enough force to capture Québec easily, Walker and Hill sailed back to England and blamed the disaster on the Bostonians, whose hopes of destroying the Canadian menace once and for all were dashed once again, and perhaps forever, this time literally on the rocks of the Île-aux-Oeufs.215

Queen Anne's War sputtered on along the New England-Maine frontier, but the Tories in London had had enough.  Peace negotiations began in earnest at Utrecht in Holland, where, in April 1713, Britain and France signed the first in a series of treaties that ended 11 years of warfare in Europe and America.  Among the complex provisions of the Peace of Utrecht was a clause that affected the Acadians in a most profound way.  Having won the recognition of a Bourbon to occupy the throne of Spain, the reason why the conflict in Europe was called the War of the Spanish Succession, France agreed, among other things, to cede some of its foreign territory to Britain--its holdings along the shore of Hudson Bay, the Caribbean island of St. Kitts, the region of Newfoundland, and, in the treaty's Article 12, Acadia "with the ancient boundaries."216

Unfortunately for everyone, especially the hapless Acadians, the treaty was vague about "the ancient boundaries" of the territory the French had given up around the Bay of Fundy.  The French would claim for decades that they had ceded only peninsula Acadia.  The British would insist that the Peace of Utrecht had awarded them mainland Acadia as well.  No matter, the deed was done.  French Acadia was now British Nova Scotia.  The great majority of Acadians lived on tidal lands bordering the deep inlets of the Bay of Fundy--along the shore that France clearly had ceded to Britain.  The long years of warfare with their implacable enemy, as well as the vaguely worded Peace that ended the conflict, sowed seeds that would bear terrible fruit in the decades ahead for simple farmers who wanted nothing more than to be left alone.217

The "French Neutrals"

The treaty signed at Utrecht in 1713 decreed that the French inhabitants of Nova Scotia who "are willing to remain there and to be subject to the Kingdom of Great Britain, are to enjoy the free exercise of their religion according to the usage of the Church of Rome, as far as the laws of Great Britain do allow the same."  If any of them chose to leave the colony and forgo British rule, the treaty gave them a year to do it.218  

At first, many Acadians gave serious thought to abandoning the colony and moving to Canada or some other French possession.  In the end, however, most of them stayed, for several compelling reasons.  

The first reason was the confusion created in North America by the Peace of Utrecht.  The treaty also said that "all of Nova Scotia or Acadia comprised in its ancient limits, as also the city of Port Royal" now belonged to the victorious British.  A provision of the treaty empowered commissioners from Britain and France to determine the exact boundaries between the two nations in the region around the Bay of Fundy.  The commissioners argued for months over what exactly were the "ancient limits" of Acadia.  Did the old French colony include not only peninsula Nova Scotia but also present-day Maine, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Cape Breton Island, and Newfoundland as well?  Such was the view of the British commissioners.  The French commissioners saw things differently.  They conceded to the British only Newfoundland and the peninsula of Nova Scotia; the rest of old Acadia belonged to France.  In the end, little was settled, and the boundaries remained a bone of contention between the two powers for the next half century.  Kept informed of this dispute by their parish priests, the inhabitants of Chepoudy, Petitcoudiac and even Chignecto insisted that they still resided in French territory.  The inhabitants of the Minas Basin were confident that, although they clearly resided in territory awarded to the British, their new masters in Annapolis Royal would be able to control them no more effectively than the French officials had done from Port-Royal.  Moreover, who could say that the British would remain in "control" of the peninsula?  They had "ruled" it before and given it back.  Why would this time be different?219

There was also a strong psychological reason for the Acadians to remain in British Nova Scotia:  despite the lure of French Canada and the kinsmen who had gone there, as well as incentives for them to resettle on French-controlled islands in the Maritimes region, Acadians still viewed their Fundy settlements as the heart and soul of their identity as a people.  Their roots were deep there.  By 1713, some families had lived in the colony for nearly three-quarters of a century.  The pioneers of Beaubassin had farmed the Chignecto peninsula for over 40 years. The  inhabitants of Minas had been transforming that incomparable basin into an agricultural paradise for three decades now, time enough to see their children produce children of their own.  They had expended so much time and energy wresting their pastures and fields from the bay and its tributaries, why would they want to abandon their lands simply because of a temporary change of masters?  Queen Anne, in her final days, had given them incentive to stay.  In late 1713, Louis XIV, in a rare fit of compassion, had "emptied France's prisons of all Protestants jailed because of their religious beliefs.  Queen Anne was so moved that she felt compelled to reciprocate, and she wrote her new governor in Nova Scotia 'to continue our subjects, to retain and enjoy their said lands and tenements without molestation, as fully and freely as our other subjects do or to sell the same, if they shall rather choose to remove elsewhere.'"  A few families, perhaps some of the newer ones, abandoned the colony, but the vast majority stayed.  They would take their chances with the British, come what may, as they had done many times before.220

There was a price to pay for staying, however.  After the year of decision was up, the treaty authorized the British authorities in Annapolis Royal to impose on the remaining "French Neutrals," as the British would call the Acadians and as they would come to call themselves, an oath of allegiance to the new British monarch, George I, who had succeeded his cousin Anne upon her death in 1714.  In their attempts to compel the Acadians to take this oath, the British officials learned first hand how stubborn Acadians could be.  The Acadians resisted taking an unconditional oath of allegiance to the British crown as long as they could, playing a dangerous game of cat and mouse with their foreign overlords.  This game went on for over four decades and was played skillfully by these simple farmers, until history once again came crashing down on the hapless Acadians.221

At first the mouse had certain advantages over the cat.  For most of those four decades, the only British presence of any substance in Nova Scotia was the garrison that occupied the old French fort at Annapolis Royal.  ...  

The Flowering of Acadian Culture

More New Acadian Settlements:  Île St.-Jean and Île Royale

France in Louisiana, 1682-1743

King George's War and the Acadians

For decades after the British acquired the colony in 1713 at the end of Queen Anne's War, the Acadians had insisted that they were "neutrals" in the struggle between France and Britain.  They steadfastly held on to their culture, their French language, their French customs, their Roman Catholic faith, but scrupulously avoided aiding their fellow Frenchmen in Canada when conflicts erupted between the imperial rivals.  Still, the Acadians were not above trading illegally with the French fortress at Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island, driving entire herds of cattle across the isthmus at Chignecto to the north side of the Nova Scotia peninsula.  Distrustful of these French settlers with their foreign ways and their clever trade arrangements, British officials in Annapolis Royal (formerly Port-Royal) tried mightily to compel the Acadians to take an unqualified oath of allegiance to the British crown.  The Acadians refused to take such an oath and clung stubbornly to their dubious notion of neutrality.  For the most part, the British governors shrugged off the matter; only the Acadians and their fecund farmsteads could guarantee steady sustenance to the British garrisons in Nova Scotia.  The Acadians went about their business as they had always done, constructing more dykes to create new grain fields and providing the necessities of life for the British as well as for themselves.  They prospered and multiplied under generally benevolent British rule ... as long as they maintained their strict neutrality.  

This handy arrangement began to unravel when war broke out again in Europe in the early 1740s after nearly three decades of relative peace between the old antagonists.  With the coming of war, the British were alarmed to learn that not-so-very-neutral Acadians had crossed into nearby French territory and aided their fellow Frenchmen in the fight against the British.  ...

A Tenuous Peace and the Coming of the Final French and Indian War

The War of the Austrian Succession, as King George's War also was called, despite the amazing victory of a ragtag New England militia that captured the French fortress at Louisbourg, proved as indecisive as the earlier wars between the European imperial powers.  It ended with a treaty signed at Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748.  By this treaty, Nova Scotia remained in British hands ... but Cape Breton Island--and Louisbourg--were returned to the French, who promptly poured more millions into making it even stronger than before!   The British retaliated the next year by building Halifax on the Atlantic side of the Nova Scotia peninsula and moving the colonial headquarters there from Annapolis Royal.  With peace, the Acadians resumed their dubious neutrality, trading with Louisbourg as well as with Halifax and the other British posts, a dangerous game for the independent-minded Acadians, but one that they were certain they could master indefinitely.  Louisbourg was isolated, and the French there paid good prices for cattle driven from Beaubassin to the fortress.  British settlers were still few in Nova Scotia, so the British garrisons still depended on the Acadians for their sustenance.  Though Halifax lay on the opposite side of the peninsula from the main Acadian settlements along the Bay of Fundy, the Acadians blazed a trail between their settlements and the new capital down which they drove their cattle and grain-laden wagons.  The trade with Louisbourg worried the British terribly, however, and British governors pressured the Acadians to take the unqualified oath.  The Acadians politely but firmly refused, and there the matter lay ... until war erupted again and threatened the delicate balance between Acadian neutrality and British tolerance.  

As every student of American history knows, this final war between the British and the French erupted in the Ohio country, where the French established posts to hem in the British colonies along the Atlantic seaboard.  Robert Dinwiddie, the royal governor of Virginia, which claimed the Ohio region, sent young militia officer named George Washington to the Ohio in the spring of 1754 to drive the French away.  In the opening round of the new war, Washington ambushed a small French force, killed the French commander, and built Fort Necessity nearby as a base for further operations against the French.  Before Washington could attack French Fort Duquesne, however, the French surrounded Necessity, captured Washington's entire force and sent the young colonel and his militiamen marching back to Virginia.  The British retaliated the following year by sending a column of regulars under General Edward Braddock to obliterate the French presence in the Ohio country.  Again, using their Indian allies to good effect, the French ambushed the British column, mortally wounded Braddock, and compelled Washington and the British survivors to fall back to Virginia.  What had started as a dispute over territory claimed by both nations gave every promise of erupting into a war of annihilation.  

This latest conflict between the two powerful imperial rivals made worse the decades-long antagonism between the British officials who controlled Nova Scotia and the French Acadians, who still made up the majority of settlers in the colony.  In September 1754, Charles Lawrence, a British officer who neither trusted nor respected the Acadians, became lieutenant-governor of Nova Scotia.  With war, the authorities in London expected him to control the large French population and make certain that they did not aid their fellow Frenchmen in a contest that was spinning out of control.  Lawrence was ready to use the harshest methods to subdue the troublesome Frenchmen, even banishing them from the colony and replacing them with British settlers if his superiors would approve such a radical scheme.  ...

Le Grand Dérangement: Exile of the Acadians from Nova Scotia, 1755-56

Le Grand Dérangement:  Exile of the Acadians from the Maritime Islands, 1758-59

Le Grand Dérangement:  The Acadian Resistance

Le Grand Dérangement:  The Acadians in France, 1759-85

La Nouvelle-Acadie: Joseph de Goutin de Ville and the First Acadians in Louisiana, 1764

The De Goutins were a small but privileged family in French Acadia.  From the late 1680s to the fall of Port-Royal in 1710, Mathieu, the family's progenitor, was second only to the governor in power and influence; at one time, he held four important positions--chief judge of civil and criminal matters, counselor, colonial secretary, and paymaster.  He complained at one point that he had "no set time for drinking and eating, (for) I am more busy on feast days and Sundays than on working days, (because) the settlers use these days to conduct their business when they come to Mass."  One of those settlers was Pierre Thibodeau.  When De Goutin married Jeanne, one of Thibodeau's daughters, the young colonial official established a lasting connection with a significant number of settlers, from Port-Royal all the way around to the upper Fundy settlements.  One Acadian governor complained that it would be difficult for De Goutin to render an objective judgment in many civil and criminal cases "because a third of the settlers are related to his wife."  De Goutin may have been, in fact, the only colonial official that the Acadians trusted to look after their best interests.  His long career in Acadia ended with Britain's final seizure of Port-Royal in 1710.  Although De Goutin was given an important position on Île Royale, now Cape Breton Island, when the French established a colony there in 1714, he died within a year of his appointment.  His wife and children--they had 13 of them--remained on Île Royale.  De Goutin's oldest son, François-Marie, also became a colonial official, on Île Royale and Île St.-Jean, today's Prince Edward Island, and was nearly as highly placed as his father had been at Port-Royal. 

It was De Goutin's youngest son, Joseph de Ville, who was the first Acadian to emigrate to Louisiana.  In the 1740s, a decade before the British sent his cousins into exile and probably soon after the fall of Louisbourg during King George's War, Joseph came to Louisiana as a middle-aged army officer, serving in a regiment that had connections to both Louisbourg and New Orleans.  In 1747, he married a local Creole girl who was only in her teens and remained in the colony.  By the early 1750s, the retired officer was a captain in the colonial militia and "settled (in business)" at New Orleans.  He fathered at least eight children, including five sons, all born at New Orleans.

Joseph De Goutin de Ville's kinship with many of his fellow Acadians may have been a factor in so many of them coming to Louisiana.  Scholars note that Olivier Landry, whom the British had deported from Chignecto to Georgia in 1755, was a kinsman of the De Goutins (Joseph de Ville's mother was Olivier's paternal grandmother's younger sister).  As the story goes, while Olivier and his family languished at Savannah at the end of the Seven Years' War, he somehow communicated with his cousin in New Orleans, who informed Olivier that the French authorities in Louisiana would welcome Acadians there. The Landrys and three related families from Chignecto--the Cormiers, Poiriers, and Richards, 21 in all--left Savannah for Louisiana via Mobile in December 1763 and reached New Orleans the following February--the first recorded Acadian families in Louisiana.  Olivier and Joseph may have enjoyed a tearful reunion, and it would be no surprise if Joseph was kin to other members of the party as well (De Goutin's eldest son Jean-Baptiste De Ville, only 12 years old, served as godfather for 3-year-old Jean-Baptiste, one of Jean Poirier's sons, soon after the party reached New Orleans).  Olivier, Jean, and their fellow exiles went on to Cabanocé, on the river above the city, and may have sent out word by the remarkable Acadian grapevine that the French authorities in Louisiana had indeed welcomed them to the colony. 

Exactly a year later, in February 1765, the first large contingent of Acadian exiles--200 men, women, and children led by resistance fighter Joseph Broussard dit Beausoleil, another kinsman of Joseph De Goutin de Ville--reached New Orleans from Halifax via Cap-Français, St.-Domingue.  Hundreds more came from Halifax later that year, and more from Maryland in the next four years.  It is possible, then, that Joseph De Goutin de Ville, the first Acadian in Louisiana, played a quiet but significant role in his kinsmen's mass migration to the lower Mississippi valley.232

La Nouvelle-Acadie: Halifax Refugees Find a New Home in Louisiana, 1765

... During the early 1760s, at Fort Cumberland, Fort Edward, and Georges Island, Halifax, the Broussards and their kin were joined by hundreds of other Acadians whom the British had rounded up at Restigouche, Miramichi, Île St.-Pierre, Île Miquelon, and other places of refuge in the Maritimes region.  Many of these prisoners were kin to the Broussards by blood or by marriage and thus were part of their extended family.  They included fellow Acadians named Arseneau, Babineau, Bergeron, Bernard, Boudrot, Bourg, Bourgeois, Breau, Brun, Caissie dit Roger, Comeaux, Cormier, Darois, Doucet, Dugas, Gautrot, Girouard, Godin, Guénard, Guidry, Guilbeau, Hébert, Hugon, Landry, LeBlanc, Leger, Martin, Michel, Pellerin, Pitre, Poirier, Prejean, Richard, Robichaux, Roy, Saulnier, Savoie, Semer, Surette, Thibodeau, Trahan, and Vincent.

Most of these captured Acadians, especially the resistance fighters and their families, were held in close confinement at these prisoner-of-war compounds, but some Acadians were enticed to leave the compounds and help fulfill a dream of the hated Charles Lawrence.  The result was one of the strangest ironies of the Acadian experience. 

In 1760, Governor Lawrence's most cherished scheme to rid Nova Scotia of Acadians began to come to fruition in the Annapolis valley.  New England "planters" began to occupy the Acadian lands in the vicinity of Annapolis Royal, but these transplanted Yankees had no idea how to maintain the dykes and aboiteaux that kept the basin's farm land from degenerating into tidal marsh again.  Responding to the crisis, Halifax authorities enticed young Acadian men being held at Fort Cumberland and Fort Edward to go to Annapolis and rebuild and maintain the dykes that had transformed their corner of the world into an agricultural paradise.  The young Acadians worked diligently for their New England "masters," who paid them in Canadian card money.  Despite their plunge from proud landowners to mere laborers on their former lands, many of these young Acadians harbored the forlorn hope of reclaiming their fathers' homesteads once the war was over. 

This was not to be.  The war against Britain finally ended with the Treaty of Paris of February 1763.  Article 14 of the treaty gave all persons dispersed by the war 18 months to return to their respective territories.  In the case of the Acadians, however, this meant that they could return only to French soil.  The Acadian settlements in Nova Scotia had not been part of French territory for half a century, and Chignecto, Chepoudy, and Petitcoudiac now were part of Nova Scotia as well, so British authorities refused to allow any of the Acadian prisoners in the region to return to their farmsteads as proprietors.  If Acadians chose to remain in Nova Scotia, they could live only in the interior of the peninsula in small family groups, away from their lands along the Bay of Fundy, or they could continue to work for low wages as laborers on their former lands.  If they stayed, they must also take the hated oath of allegiance to the new British king, George III, without reservation.  

Most of the Acadians held in Nova Scotia in the last years of the war were still there in the autumn of 1764.  Nova Scotia's new governor, Montague Wilmot, "tender'd to them" the oath of allegiance as well as "offers of a settlement in this Country."  Most of the Acadians rebuffed the oath as well as the offer.  British leaders in Halifax, led by former lieutenant governor and current colonial chief justice Jonathan Belcher, Jr., a protégé of the now deceased Charles Lawrence, still felt threatened by the Acadian presence in Nova Scotia.  They were especially fearful of Beausoleil Broussard and other resistance leaders.  Belcher encouraged Governor Wilmot to remove the Acadians from the province despite orders from London to keep them in Nova Scotia and entreaties from the New England "planters" in the Annapolis valley to keep them as cheap but highly skilled labor.  Wilmot resisted Belcher at first, so the chief justice hatched a scheme to send the Acadians from Halifax to Baskenridge, New Jersey, to work as indentured servants on an English nobleman's land; Belcher's father just happened to be the governor of New Jersey at the time, and the nobleman was one of his father's political allies.  Governor Wilmot also received a proposal to send 30 Acadian families to New York colony to work as indentured servants.  Neither scheme came to fruition.

Infected, finally, by Belcher's fear of Acadian treachery, Wilmot proposed to his uncle, the powerful Earl of Halifax, the deportation of the Acadian "prisoners" in Nova Scotia to the British West Indies, but the earl ignored his nephew's scheme.  Determined to be rid of the Acadians, Wilmot conceived a plan that he was certain would discourage them from remaining in Nova Scotia.  First, he crafted a new ironclad oath for them that insulted their Roman Catholic faith.  Most compellingly, and against every directive from his superiors in London, he gave the resistance leaders and their families a very hard choice:  either submit to deportation to the British West Indies or remain imprisoned at Georges Island. 

Too proud to work for wages, unwilling to work as indentured servants in colonies where they could lose their religion and their culture, unable to return to their precious farms in the upper Fundy basin, and determined not to take the hated oath, the Broussard party had to find a suitable place to put down new roots.  The St. Lawrence valley was out of the question.  They were hearing stories of how the French Canadians treated with contempt Acadian refugees who had settled among them.  Besides, Canada was as much a British possession now as Nova Scotia, and settling there would require them to take the oath.  Nor was it likely that Wilmot would allow the troublesome Broussards and their partisan compatriots to settle as close as Québec to their former lands along the Fundy shore.  The Illinois country was a viable option, but the British would not let them take the shortest route there via Canada, and France had just ceded the eastern part of Illinois to Britain.  Moreover, Indian rebellions, including one led by the Ottawa chief Pontiac, were ravaging the western frontier, and the fighting there could last for years.

But there were other regions of North America still controlled by France, such as the western bank of the upper Mississippi across from the old French settlements in Illinois. The French, or so most of the world believed, also retained control of the Isle of Orleans and the western bank of the lower Mississippi in what was left of French Louisiana. France also controlled St.-Domingue, today's Haiti, in the Caribbean Basin, where hundreds of Acadian exiles from the British colonies had gone recently to start a new life in the French West Indies. However, letters from Acadians in St.-Domingue detailed the horrors of the climate and maltreatment there at the hands of French officials. There was always the mother country itself, where the British had deported hundreds of Acadians during the war and to where the Acadians held in England had been recently repatriated. Even with permission from the French crown to go there, however, a cross-Atlantic voyage would be difficult and expensive, but so would a voyage to the French West Indies. There was much for the Broussards and their kinsmen to consider, and time was running out.

After much deliberation, the old resistance fighters and their compatriots chose to go to St.-Domingue.  No higher authority planned their move from Halifax to Haiti, though Wilmot was happy to provide them with rations for the voyage.  Pooling the money their sons had saved from their months of labor on land their fathers once had owned, the Broussard party left Halifax in late November 1764 aboard a chartered English schooner.  They numbered over 200 men, women, and children.  They reached Cap-Français, St.-Domingue, in January and could see even in that winter month that the island's climate was unsuitable for them.  They had hoped to reunite with relatives there, but many of the St.-Domingue Acadians were either dead or dying from tropical diseases, starvation, and overwork.  Just as disturbing, there was little chance of acquiring productive farm land for themselves in the island's plantation-slave economy.  They could see no future for their children in St.-Domingue, despite its being a French colony.  

So the Broussard party changed ships at Cap-Français, welcoming aboard a hand full of St.-Domingue Acadians related to members of the party.  They sailed west through the Florida Strait into the Gulf of Mexico and then on to the lower Mississippi.  Their arrival at Belize, at the mouth of the river, was a complete surprise to the French authorities still in control of the colony.  As official French correspondence as well as baptismal and marriage records at St.-Louis church attest, the Broussard party reached New Orleans in late February 1765.  They were not the first Acadian refugees to come to Louisiana--21 individuals from four related families had reached the colony from Georgia via Mobile exactly a year before the Broussards arrived--but Alexandre and Joseph dit Beausoleil and their 200 kin were the first large group of Acadian refugees to reach the lower Mississippi valley. ...

La Nouvelle-Acadie:  Maryland Exiles in Louisiana, 1766-69

La Nouvelle-Acadie:  The Seven Ships Expeditions, 1785

La Nouvelle-Acadie:  Adjustment and Assimilation, 1764-1803

...  Without realizing it, the Acadians in Louisiana were creating something new.  Their children and grandchildren still spoke French, but, later, some of them learned rudimentary English to communicate with their influential Anglophone neighbors.  They clung tenaciously to the Roman Catholic faith, but their priests were just as often Spanish and Irish as French.  They ate very different food than what their ancestors had eaten.  Their houses were built out of different wood, with moss and mud mixed into the walls.  Their boats were different.  And, to accommodate the climate, so was their clothing.  Influenced by local Africans, Germans, and Spaniards, they learned to play new musical instruments.  Mostly they married their own kind, but they also took as husbands and wives Frenchmen, Germans, Spaniards, Englishmen, Americans, Italians, Native Americans, even African Creoles.  And so, along the river, down on the Lafourche, and out on the wide prairies west of the Atchafalaya Basin, a new, exotic culture quietly evolved.  The Acadiennes were becoming Cadiens.234

The Louisiana Purchase and the Beginning of "Americanization"

...  An example of the Acadian capacity for assimilation into the new American culture was that of the first "Acadian" governor of Louisiana, Henry Schuyler Thibodaux.  His origins are obscure, his early life perhaps the stuff of legend, and most historians even insist that he was French Canadian, not Acadian.  If he was Acadian, he certainly was not a typical one.    

According to one researcher, during the fall of 1755, British forces deported Alexis Thibodeau, his wife Anne Blanchard, and two of their young sons from the Thibodeau settlement at Pigiguit to Pennsylvania, perhaps aboard the British transport Three Friends.  When the French and Indian War finally ended in early 1763, instead of moving north to Canada or going to Louisiana via Maryland, Alexis and his family moved to upper New York, where son Henry was born at Albany in c1769.  The lad was orphaned at an early age.  Family tradition says that he was raised by one of the wealthiest, most powerful men of New York colony, General Philip Schuyler of Albany, and that the general sent the bright young orphan to Scotland to receive a formal education. 

Henry Thibodaux, as he preferred to spell his surname, took Schuyler as his middle name.  During the early 1790s, in his early 20s, he emigrated to Louisiana.  According to family tradition, Henry's trade was that of shoemaker.  In May 1793, history finally gives way to legend when he married Félicité, daughter of Jacques Bonvillain, a French Creole from the German Coast, at the Acadian Coast community of St.-Jacques; Félicité's mother was an Hébert.  Henry remarried to Brigitte, daughter of French Canadian Nicolas Belanger of Pointe Coupée, at Baton Rouge, in June 1800.  By 1804, Henry had moved his growing family to upper Bayou Lafourche.  He soon moved down bayou to near the headwaters of Bayou Terrebonne, an effluence of Bayou Lafourche. 

The humble shoemaker did not remain humble long.  He promptly threw himself into local politics while he amassed land and slaves on upper Bayou Terrebonne near present-day Schriever.  In 1805, at age 36, his neighbors sent him to the legislature of the United States Territory of Orleans.  In 1808, he became a justice of the peace for Lafourche County.  In 1812, he was chosen as a delegate to the state constitutional convention that helped create the State of Louisiana.  His neighbors promptly elected Henry S., as he was called, to the new state Senate, in which he served for over a dozen years.  In 1824, now 55, Henry S. was serving as president of the Senate when Governor Thomas B. Robertson resigned his office.  The Louisiana state constitution of that day designated the president of the state Senate, not a lieutenant governor, to succeed a governor who resigned from or died in office.  Henry Schuyler Thibodaux served as interim governor of Louisiana from November to December 1824, until the inauguration of Robertson's elected successor, Henry Johnson.  Three years later, while he was campaigning for a regular term as the state's chief executive, Henry S. was struck down by a liver ailment at his home on Bayou Terrebonne.  He died on 24 October 1827, age 58.  His will, dated 28 July 1817, named his wife Brigitte and his oldest son Léandre as his executors.  His succession inventories were filed at the Houma courthouse in November 1827 and at the Thibodauxville courthouse in January 1828, so he owned property in Lafourche Interior as well as Terrebonne Parish. 

Governor Thibodaux had five sons, two by his first wife and three by his second.  All of his sons created families of their own.  Most of them married French or German Creoles, though two of them married Acadians.  Henry's daughter by his first wife married into the Acadian Bourgeois family.  His daughters by his second wife married into the Barras and Porche families.  The governor's grandsons also tended to marry French Creoles, and at least three of them married Anglo-Americans.  Judging by the number of slaves the governor's sons held during the late antebellum period, the family prospered on their farms and plantations on bayous Terrebonne and Lafourche. 233

The settlement on Bayou Lafourche named after the future governor, originally called Thibodauxville, became the seat of Interior Parish in 1807 and of Lafourche Interior Parish in 1812.  The village was not incorporated until 1830, three years after the governor's death.  In 1838, it was renamed Thibodeaux, but its name was usually spelled like the governor's surname.  Not until 1918 was it officially called Thibodaux.  ...

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The second Acadian governor of Louisiana and the state's first popularly-elected chief executive was a paragon of assimilation into American culture.  No Acadian of antebellum Louisiana accumulated more personal and political influence than Alexandre Mouton of Lafayette Parish. 

"Here is this one on a smooth green billow of the land, just without the town [of Vermilionville].  It is not like the rest--a large brick house, its Greek porch half hid in a grove of oaks.  On that dreadful day, more than a century ago, when the British in far-off Acadie shut into the chapel the villagers of Grand Pre, a certain widow fled with her children to the woods, and there subsisted for ten days on roots and berries, until finally, the standing crops as well as  the houses being destroyed, she was compelled to accept exile, and in time found her way, with others, to these prairies.  Her son founded Vermilionville.  Her grandson rose to power--sat in the Senate of the United States.  From early manhood to hale gray age, the people of his State were pleased to hold him, now in one capacity, now in another, in their honored service; they made him Senator, Governor, President of the Convention, what you will."

So writes the bard of the Creoles and Cajuns, George Washington Cable of New Orleans, in his story "Carancro," which appeared in the January and February 1887 issues of the then-popular Century Magazine.  He goes on:  "I have seen the portrait for which he sat in early manhood to a noted English court painter:  dark waving locks; strong, well-chiseled features; fine clear eyes; an air of warm, steady-glowing intellectual energy.  It hangs still in the house of which I speak.  And I have seen an old ambrotype of him taken in the days of this story:  hair short-cropped, gray; eyes thoughtful, courageous; mouth firm, kind, and ready to smile." [photo]   In the story, Cable is describing a character referred to only as "the ex-governor," but anyone familiar with the southwest Louisiana of that day would know the identity of the character's original.  "I am a Creole," a destitute widow says to the ex-governor when she comes to him for assistance.  "Yes," he tells her, "and, like all Creoles, proud of it, as you are right to be.  But I am an Acadian of the Acadians, and never wished I was any thing else."222  

Alexandre Mouton indeed was an Acadian whose paternal ancestors had lived in old Acadie.  Although Cable's character, the ex-governor, was based on Mouton, the character's genealogy is not quite the same as that of the real former governor of Louisiana.

The Moutons came to Acadia later than most of the families who populated the colony.  In 1703, during the early months of France's second long war with England, Jean Mouton of Marseille, age 14, arrived from France and settled in Port-Royal, later Annapolis Royal, then the capital and main settlement of the Acadian colony.  At age 22, in 1711, the year after the British captured Port-Royal from the French, Jean married Marie Girouard of Port-Royal, a member of one of the first families to arrive in Acadia.  The next year he moved with her to Grand-Pré, a thriving Acadian settlement in the Minas Basin that possessed the added virtue of being more distant from the center of British authority in the colony.  Jean earned his living as a surgeon and was called Sr. Jean by his contemporaries.  Sons Jean, fils, Jacques, Charles, and Justinien, and daughters Marie-Josèphe and Marguerite were born at Grand-Pré before the family resettled at the even more distant Acadian community of Chignecto in 1725.  Four more children were born to Sr. Jean and Marie at Chignecto:  sons Pierre, Salvator, and Louis, and daughter Anne.

The Moutons lived at Chignecto for thirty years, their families prospering and growing under distant British rule ... until trouble with the French and Indians erupted in the early 1750s and evolved into a fourth and final struggle between the contending European powers.  In the fall of 1755, British forces rounded up the older Mouton sons and their families and deported them along with other Chignecto Acadians to the distant English colony of South Carolina.  The three younger sons, Salvator, Louis, and Pierre, somehow escaped the British roundup and, with Salvator's wife and children, fled to Restigouche at the head of the Baie des Chaleurs, where Louis married a younger sister of Salvator's wife in 1760.  But they did not live there in peace.  The war caught up to them the year of Louis's marriage when, in July, the British attacked the fort at Restigouche with overwhelming force.  Pierre died in the fight, and Salvator and Louis fell into the hands of the victorious British, who imprisoned them in Fort Edward, Nova Scotia, at the former Acadian settlement of Pigiguit, for the rest of the war.  

After the war with Britain ended in 1763, the surviving Mouton brothers, forbidden by the British to return to their homes at Chignecto, converged on the French colony of Louisiana, where they finally reunited.  Charles, Salvator, Louis, and the survivors of their  families made their way to New Orleans, now controlled by the Spanish, and settled along the Mississippi River above the city on what became known as the Acadian Coast.  

Salvator was the grandfather of "the Acadian of the Acadians."  Before Le Grand Dérangement, he had married Anne Bastarache of Port-Royal in January 1752.  His oldest son Jean, named after Salvator's father, was born at Chignecto in 1754, the year before Le Grand Dérangement began.  Reunited with his wife, children, and brothers, Salvator settled in present-day St. James Parish by 1766.  Anne died soon after they arrived in Louisiana.  Salvator remarried to Anne Foret in New Orleans in 1768, but they had no children.  He died in a New Orleans hospital in 1773, when his son Jean was 19 years old.223 

Jean served under Spanish Governor Don Bernardo Gálvez in the fight against the British during the American Revolution.  In c1780, he crossed the Atchafalaya Basin and settled along upper Bayou Teche in the Attakapas District.  There, in June 1783, at age 29, he married Marie-Marthe, called Marthe, daughter of a prominent resident of the Attakapas Post, surgeon Antoine Borda, a native of France and second husband of Marguerite Martin dit Barnabé, an Acadian born at Chignecto.  Jean and Marthe produced a large family:  sons Jean-Baptiste, Joseph, François, Charles, Louis, Pierre-Treville, Alexandre, Antoine-Émile, and Césaire, and daughters Marie-Modeste, Marie-Adélaïde, and Marie-Marthe--a dozen children in all.  Alexandre was born in November 1804, the year after the United States purchased Louisiana from France.  He was born at his father's plantation house on Bayou Carencro in present-day Lafayette Parish, where Jean had become a prominent sugar planter at the northern edge of the Attakapas District.224  

Alexandre, like other children of prominent planters, received an elementary education in the local district schools, where he was instructed in his native French.  He also learned to speak English fluently, which stood him in good stead when he enrolled in a prominent Jesuit school, Georgetown College in Washington, D.C.  Back home in Louisiana, he studied law first in the offices of Charles Antoine, then in St. Martinville with Judge Edward Simon.  In 1825, at age 21, he was admitted to the Louisiana bar and began his practice in Lafayette Parish.225

His career in the law was short-lived, however.  His father gave him a plantation near the village of Vermilionville, now the city of Lafayette.  Alexandre transformed the plantation into a major sugar-producing operation.  He would henceforth make his substantial living as a sugar planter, not as a lawyer, and become the quintessence of what a twentieth-century folklorist called a "genteel Acadian."  He lived first in a townhouse in Vermilionville that had been built by his father around 1805, when the community was called Grand Prairie.  Over the years, Alexandre amassed a plantation of 19,000 arpents, which he ran from the Greek revival home that he built in the 1830s on the banks of the Vermilion, a house he called Île Copal after the exotic trees that graced the property.  By 1860, he owned 121 slaves to work his extensive holdings.  No one in Lafayette Parish owned more slaves than ex-governor Mouton.226

Like his grandfather Salvator, Alexandre Mouton also married twice.  In 1826, he married French Creole Célestine Zelia, called Zelia, Rousseau, a granddaughter of Jacques Dupré, one of the wealthiest cattle ranchers in St. Landry Parish who later served briefly as acting governor of the state.  Among the four children of Alexandre and Zelia was Jean Jacques Alexandre Alfred, their third child and second son and the only son to survive infancy.  Alfred, as he was called, was born in February 1829 in St. Landry Parish.  Their other surviving children were daughters Henriette Odèide, Marie Cecilia Arcade, and Marie Céleste Mathilde.227

In the same year of his marriage, at age 22, Alexandre's political career began when he was elected to represent Lafayette Parish in the lower house of the state legislature.  He served in that body until 1832 and as its speaker in 1831-32.  He was an avid Jacksonian Democrat and served as an elector for that party's national tickets in 1828, 1832, and 1836, the year he was sent back to the state legislature to represent Lafayette Parish again.  The following year, in 1837, the state legislature chose him as United States Senator to serve out the term of Alexander Porter, who had resigned.  Alexandre was only 33 years old when he assumed this high office, only three years older than the minimum age of 30.  At the end of the Senate term, in 1838, he was elected to the United States Senate in his own right and served in Washington until March 1842, when he resigned his senatorial seat to run for governor of Louisiana.  

Alexandre's wife Zelia had died in Lafayette Parish  in November 1837, early in his senatorial career.  Two months before he left Washington to return to Louisiana to run for governor, in January 1842, at age 38, he remarried to Anne, 12-year-old daughter of Charles K. Gardner of New York.  Gardner had served as adjutant general of the United States Army during the War of 1812 and was at the time of his daughter's marriage to Mouton a clerk in the United States Treasury Department.  Alexandre and Emma had seven children, six of whom survived to adulthood:  daughters Marie Thérèse and Anne Eliza, and sons Alix Gardner, who died an infant, George Clinton, William Rufus King, Paul Joseph Julien, and Charles Alexandre.  

Alexandre Mouton, the first popularly-elected governor of Louisiana, was inaugurated in January 1843 and served until February 1846.  When he assumed the governorship, the state was deeply in debt, but by the time he left office, most of the state's indebtedness had been liquidated.  During his governorship, he was active in the 1844 presidential campaign of Jacksonian James K. Polk, helping the Democratic ticket carry Louisiana in the federal election.  He promoted the development of railroads in the state and pursued this interest after he returned to private life.  He was chosen president of a railroad convention held in New Orleans in January 1852.228

Though he held no more elective offices after his term as governor, Mouton remained active in Democratic politics.  He served as a delegate to the Democratic national conventions at Cincinnati, Charleston, and Baltimore in 1856 and 1860.229

His most interesting public service after his governorship was as president of the 1858 vigilance committee created by prominent local leaders to rid the Lafayette and St. Landry parish region of marauding cattle rustlers.  For years these outlaws had raided local cattle herds from their hiding places on the prairies west of Vermilionville.  By 1858, their numbers and depredations had increased to the point that local law enforcement officers could not control them.  The vigilance committee's armed force, led by the governor's son Alfred, a graduate of West Point, brutally suppressed the band of rustlers, and even hanged some of its leaders without trial.  

After Lincoln's election to the Federal presidency in November 1860 and the calling of a convention in South Carolina the following month to consider the fate of the Union, the Louisiana legislature authorized the election of a convention to address the question of secession.  Delegates were elected on 7 January 1861 to meet in Baton Rouge on January 23.  Lafayette Parish chose Alexandre Mouton as its delegate to the convention.  Reflecting the fact that he was still a popular and respected leader in his native state, the convention at its opening session elected the 56-year-old former governor as its president.  Mouton openly supported secession, as did a majority of the delegates.  After three days of debate and deliberation, on 26 January 1861, the convention voted 113 to 17 to secede from the Union, making Louisiana the sixth state to do so, after South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, and Georgia, who soon formed a southern Confederacy.  

The business of secession concluded, Governor Mouton returned to Île Copal to await the consequences of the convention's work.  In the weeks following Louisiana's secession, Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated as President of the United States, the Confederates fired on the Federal garrison in Fort Sumter, Lincoln called for volunteers to suppress what he insisted was a Southern rebellion, more Southern states seceded, and the Confederate government that had been formed in February moved its capital from Montgomery to Richmond.230  

Always an enthusiastic Confederate, Mouton offered himself as a candidate for a seat in the national senate, but for the first time in his political career he failed to win election.231  "The Acadian of the Acadians" would endure the War Between the States as a private citizen.  His son Alfred and thousands of other Louisianans, however, including Acadians like himself, both high and low, would endure the war as soldiers, wearing the gray and butternut uniforms of a new American nation that Alexandre Mouton helped create. ...

The Acadians and Chattel Slavery

Acadians in Gray

_______________________________________

NOTES

01. Much of the information in this section is general knowledge that can be found in any good textbook or encyclopedia article on the Age of Exploration.  A recent detailed treatment of the subject is Fernández-Armesto, Pathfinders, chaps. 4-6.  

A. Taylor, American Colonies, 25-26, offers a fine review of Islam's triumph over the European Crusaders & further Muslim advances in southeastern Europe during the 15th century that created "a powerful sense of geographic and religious claustrophobia" among European thinkers, which, ironically, motivated them "to break out and circumvent the Muslim world."  Quotes from p. 26.  On p. 29, Taylor emphasizes the private, capitalistic nature of the Genoese & Iberian ventures down the northwest coast of Africa, including the discovery & exploitation of the Canaries, Madeira, & the Azores. 

The Norsemen or Vikings settled in North America during the early 11th century, perhaps even in Nova Scotia, but nothing came of their discoveries other than temporary settlements in the region.  The rest of Europe did not hear of these ventures much less benefit from them economically or intellectually.  

Other early explorers of the region were the Portuguese Corte Real brothers, who sailed along the North Atlantic coast from Newfoundland down to Nova Scotia in 1500-01, not long after Cabot's voyage, and another Portuguese navigator named Fagundes who, in 1520 & 1521, sailed along the coast of Nova Scotia and into the mouth of the Bay of Fundy.  See the superb map in Historical Atlas of Canada, 1: plate 19, which tracks the voyages of every known explorer of the North American coast from 1497-1632.  

For a detailed description of the North American fishery, especially as it developed in the region of Newfoundland & Nova Scotia, see Historical Atlas of Canada, 1:47-49, plate 22.  Quote from 1:47.  See 1: plate 28 for the distribution of North American cod in Europe. 

For a more detailed description of the fishing & fur trading operations along the Nova Scotia shore, see Faragher, A Great & Noble Scheme, 5; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, chap. 2; & below.  Mathé Allain, in her essay "Colbert's Colony Crumbles," in Conrad, ed., The French Experience in Louisiana, 32, says that the Canadian fur trade was "Born of the fishing industry."  See also Taylor, A., pp. 94ff. 

The first Indians to make contact with the European fishermen were the Beothuk of Newfoundland, Thule Inuits from Labrador who moved to the northern shore of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, Montagnais on the upper St. Lawrence coast, and Mi'kmaq on Cape Breton Island, peninsula Nova Scotia, and the Gaspé Peninsula.  See Historical Atlas of Canada, 1: plate 20.

02.  For a discussion of the origin of the name "Acadia," see Clark, Acadia, 71-72, especially note 1; Faragher, A Great & Noble Scheme, 6; Parkman, France & England, 1:184n.  (One of Clark’s sources in this discussion is P. C. Cormier’s L’Origine et l’histoire du nom Acadie, avec un discours su d’autres noms de lieu Acadiens, published in 1966.)  Arsenault, History, 11, insists that Verrazano “was so overwhelmed by the beauty and majesty of the primeval forest reaching down to the sea that it reminded him of descriptions of Arcadia in ancient Greece.”  Current scholarship says that the French corruption of a Mi'kmaq word, La Cadie, which means "fertile place," not Verrazano's "Arcadia," is the true origin of the colony's name.  Whatever.  The colony came to be called L'Acadie or Acadie &, most importantly, the colonists called themselves Acadiens/Acadiennes ... Acadians. 

The attempted settlement of Canada led by Admiral Jean-François de la Rocque, sieur de Roberval, in the early 1540s came to nothing; Cartier for a time served as captain-general of the expedition.  Parkman, 1:145ff, gives a detailed account of the ventures of Verrazano, Cartier, & Roberval.  On 1:149, he points out that the Frenchman Denis of Honfleur had explored the Gulf of St. Lawrence as early as 1506.  Eccles, Canadian Frontier, 12ff, provides a recent account of Cartier's voyages and his sojourn on the St. Lawrence.  See also Taylor, A., American Colonies, 92.  For an untranslated copy of Roberval's instructions from the French court, dated 1540, see Jerry A. Micelle, "From Law Court to Local Government Metamorphosis of the Superior Council of French Louisiana," p. 422 n. 32, in Conrad, ed., The French Experience in LA. 

Milner, "Chignecto," says that Diego Homen, "a Portuguese settled at Venice," ventured into the Bay of Fundy in 1558 & "made a map showing Chignecto Bay."  Milner goes on to say:  "It is probable that Portuguese and French fishermen cast their nets into these waters even before that date."  Milner implies that not until Dugua's appearance in 1604 did a European expedition sail along the Chignecto shore.  

03.  Quote from Roberts, Europe, 230-31.  See also Eccles, Canadian Frontier, 17; Parkman, France & England, 1:175.  It was of course the Edict of Nantes of 13 Apr 1598 that gave the Huguenots these guarantees.

04.  Quotes from Johnson, American People, 10.  Eccles, Canadian Frontier, 18, says the Portuguese attacked the Huguenot colony in Brazil in 1560.  For the classic study of these Huguenot efforts in Brazil & Florida, see Parkman, France & England, 1:33-123, whose dates & details are used here.  See Taylor, A., American Colonies, 76-77, 92, for a concise, more recent interpretation of Menéndez's actions & their result.  

Unlike Ribaut, Laudonnière managed to elude the Spanish swords & return to France, where he wrote a stirring account of the fate of Fort Caroline & its inhabitants.  In 1568, a French expedition under Dominique de Gourgues attacked Fort Caroline, renamed Fort San Mateo, & killed most of the Spanish garrison in revenge for Menéndez's slaughter of Ribaut & the Huguenot settlers.  Gourgues, however, did not re-establish a French settlement in Florida; he was there only for vengeance; nor was he able to get his hands on Menéndez, who was in Spain at the time.  See Parkman, 1:124ff.

Samuel Wilson, Jr., "Colonial Fortifications and Military Architecture in the Mississippi Valley," p. 379, in Conrad, ed., The French Experience in LA, describes Fort Caroline as "a triangular timber structure with bastions and a symmetrical arrangements of buildings within."

05.  Clark, Acadia, 77, 78, note 6, mentions the failed attempts of Troilus, Marquis de La Roche de Mesgouez, to establish a French colony in the New World, first in 1578 & then in the late 1590s on Sable Island, employing convicts. Clark notes that de La Roche's "record of continuous failure" was "unrivaled in the history of the northeastern shores of North America."  Miraculously, the poor souls left by de La Roche on Sable Island survived there for five years, until they were rescued in 1603, probably by fishermen who frequented that coast.  For details of La Roche's Sable Island venture, see Parkman, France & England, 1:176ff, who says the convicts survived on the remote island for 12 years before being rescued.  Eccles, Canadian Frontier, 20, mentions a failed settlement at Tadoussac on the lower St. Lawrence River in 1600.  See Parkman, 1:179ff, for details of 3 failed attempts to establish a fur-trading settlement at Tadoussac in the early 1600s.

See Rudin, Remembering & Forgetting in Acadie, passim for the slow, even reluctant, recognition by Acadians themselves that 1604 was the "birthday" of their history.  

06.  Clark, Acadia, 72; Eccles, Canadian Frontier, 20, says that Dugua received the title "Vice-admiral and Lieutenant General of New France" from the king.  

Dugua's family name also is spelled du Guast.  See Parkman, France & England, 1:184.  For a discussion of the evolution of Dugua's name in Acadian historiography, see Rudin, Remembering & Forgetting in Acadie, 18, 281 note 3.  Most sources call him De Monts or variation of that name.  DCB, 1:291-94, is a detailed treatment of Dugua's life.  

Quote from Parkman, 1:184.  Parkman notes that the French considered La Cadie to run from the 40th to the 46th degree of north latitude, "or from Philadelphia to beyond Montreal."  

06a.  See Parkman, France & England, 1:1071, 2:928-29; Ganong, Champlain's Island, 20.

Taylor, A., American Colonies, 92ff, gives a recent analysis of the historiographical debate over the nature of the Canadian fur trade & its place in the French settlement of North America.  It includes the role of Tadoussac in the trade. 

06b.  A recent detailed account of the Dugua expedition is Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, chap. 1.  Arsenault, History, 10, says more than 120 men crossed with Dugua; Clark, Acadia, 78, says 79; Faragher, A Great & Noble Scheme, 2, says 75; Parkman, France & England, 1:189; & Historical Atlas of Canada, 1:48, say 79; Ganong, Champlain's Island, 21, says "somewhat over 120."  It is likely that the original expedition contained 120 men, & that the expedition was reduced to 79 after Poutrincourt & Pontgravé returned to France in Aug.  

The name of the 150-ton vessel is from Griffiths, p. 7.  She says Dugua was on the smaller ship, so the larger one must have been Pontgravé's.

Quote about Poutrincourt's "pleasure" from Ganong, p. 79, citing Champlain's narrative of 1613.  

Parkman, especially 1:180ff, is a good source for details of Champlain's life & adventures before he sailed to New France with Dugua, including an exploration of the upper St. Lawrence River under Aymar de Chastes, governor of Dieppe, a year or so before the Dugua expedition.  Parkman points out that de Chastes held the royal patent to settle New France before Dugua did, but de Chastes died before he could return to the St. Lawrence Valley.  The king then gave Dugua the monopoly on the fur trade & the concession to start a colony.  See 1:184.  Rudin, Remembering & Forgetting in Acadie, 18, points out that Champlain was not a nobleman, that he added the "de" to his name later to give the impression that he was from the nobility.  DCB, 1:186-99, is a detailed treatment of Champlain's life.  

Champlain was born in Brouage & Dugua in Royan.  

Arsenault, p. 10, calls Dugua's second in command Dupont-Gravé; Clark calls him Gravé du Pont; Faragher uses Pontgrave; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, prefers Pont-Grave; Parkman, 1:179ff, calls him Pontgrave.  Ganong's translation of Champlain's 1613 narrative favors Pont.  

Other names in Dugua's expedition, found in Ganong, Champlain's Island, are:  Sieurs d'Orville, Champdoré, Boulay or Boulé, Champlain's future brother-in-law, Genestou, Sourin, Beaumont la Motte, Bourioli, & Fougery, none of whom established families in the colony.  That would not happen for another 30 years.  

Ganong is the source for use of the pinnace to explore the coast & the Bay of Fundy.  Dugua's expedition sailed in 3 ships of various sizes similar to Columbus's first voyage of 1492 & the Virginia expedition under Christopher Newport in 1606-07.  The taking along of a pinnace, which was little more than an open longboat with sails, was essential for exploration of rock-strewn coasts, shallow bays, & rivers, where full-sized ships could not go.  

07.  For the French name of the Bay of Fundy, see Historical Atlas of Canada, 1: plates 29, 30, the standard for all Acadian and Canadian place name spellings here; Arsenault, History, 11; Clark, Acadia, 80; Eccles, Canadian Frontier, 20, 22.  The French name for the bay is so little known that, except in the case of context which calls for the French name, the more modern name for the bay will be used here.

It is interesting to note that during the several weeks in which Dugua & Champlain explored the coast of present-day western Nova Scotia and southern New Brunswick before determining upon a settlement site, they laid eyes on the future sites of most of the major Acadian settlements--Cap-Sable; St. Mary's Bay, which would become a refuge for post-dispersal Acadians after the 1760s; Port-Royal, where the first Acadian families settled in the late 1630s; Minas, which was settled in the early1680s; & Chignecto, which was settled in the early 1670s.  They probably observed the mouth of the river up which Cobeguit would be established in the late 1680s, as well as the Chepoudy shore & the mouths of the Petitcoudiac & perhaps the Memramcook, where settlements would arise in the late 1690s & early 1700s.  The middle Rivière St.-Jean settlements would come into their own also in the 1690s.  

07a.  Île Ste.-Croixe, also called Dochet (pronounced DOE-shay) Island, Met-a-neg-wis, Isle Saincte Croix, St. Croix, Dosias, Doceas, Docias, Dochez, Doshays, Doucett, Douchette, Douchet, or Ducie Island, Big Island, Great Island, Neutral Island, Bone Island, De Monts Island, & Hunt's Island, is on the United States side of the St. Croix River estuary.  The best map of its location vis-à-vis the surrounding area is Ganong, Champlain's Island, 29, Fig. 4.  In a revised & expanded edition of a work published originally in 1902 that includes translations of many passages from Champlain's 1613 narrative, Ganong also provides a comprehensive history of the island & its brief time as the "capital" of Acadia.  Perrin, W.A., Acadian Redemption, 2, says, without citation, that "Dugua named the island St. Croix because it was near the confluence of rivers resembling the arms of a cross."  Ganong, pp. 22-23, 45, says that the story of the cross-shaped river originated with Marc Lescarbot, who came to Acadia after the Île Ste.-Croixe settlement was abandoned but was a companion of Champlain at Port-Royal in 1606-07 & visited the island in the latter year; see note 09, below.  Ganong also points out that the eventual name of the river, St. Croix, came from the island, not vice versa.  The original French version of the name--Ste.-Croixe--is used here. 

08.  Quote from Arsenault, History, 12.  See also Clark, Acadia, 78; Ganong, Champlain's Island, 24, 62-69, including maps from Champlain's narrative of 1613, 80, 82-86.  

The French called the Indians in the area of Île Ste.-Croixe the Etechemins.  Champlain in fact called Rivière Ste. Croixe the River of the Etechemins.  Only later did the river take the name of the island.  See Ganong, p. 63; map.  The actual Indians in the area were the Passamaquoddy, after whom the bay into which the Ste.-Croixe flows is named.  See Rudin, Remembering & Forgetting in Acadie, 20.

The death toll during the winter on Île Ste.-Croixe was 34, 35, or 36, depending on the source, all of which agree that after Pontgravé & Poutrincourt left, 79 remained with Dugua and Champlain.  Ganong, p. 24, says 59 fell sick & 34 died.  Champlain's 1613 narrative says 35.  See also Ganong, p. 83.

08a.  A detailed account of Dugua's exploration down the coast from Nova Scotia to the Cape Cod area in 1605 is in Parkman, France & England, 1:191ff, taken largely from Champlain's 1613 narrative.  One account says that Champlain chose the name Port-Royal because he was so impressed with its spacious anchorage.  See Drake, Border Wars, 55n; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 10.  Parkman, 1:187-88, says that Poutrincourt was so impressed by the beauty of the basin that he named it in honor of the king.  Faragher, A Great & Noble Scheme, 10, says Poutrincourt called the fort at Port-Royal his "manor house" because he owned it.  

09.  Clark, Acadia, 79; Faragher, A Great & Noble Scheme, 1-9.  Faragher, p. 1, says:  "The French colonization of l'Acadie began in earnest on 13 May 1606, when the Jonas, a vessel of 150 tons, loaded with provisions and carrying forty men, weighed anchor at the port of La Rochelle and sailed for the infant outpost of Port Royal on the far side of the Atlantic."  This was Poutrincourt's return voyage.  The Jonas stopped at Canso before moving on to Port-Royal.  Parkman, France & England, 1:196-98, provides details of Poutrincourt's return to Acadia & the condition of the settlement in 1606.  

The French name for the Micmac or M'ikmaq (pronounced MICK-maw) was Souriquois.  See map.

Among the new personnel who came with Poutrincourt to Acadia in the summer of 1606 was Louis Hébert, an apothecary and horticulturist & a relative of Poutrincourt by marriage, whose surname one day would be added to the prominent families of Acadia, though Louis himself was not the progenitor of the Acadian Héberts (see Appendix).  Hébert moved later to Champlain's Québec, where he arrived in 1617 with his wife & 3 children.  He was in fact the first permanent settler of what was then only a fur trading post.  See Eccles, Canadian Frontier, 24, 34; Parkman, 1:305, 319.  

Also arriving with Poutrincourt in 1606 was Marc Lescarbot, a gifted writer & friend of Dugua who also was Poutrincourt's lawyer.  After he returned to France in 1607, Lescarbot wrote a history of the Acadian colony which was published in 1609, 4 years before Champlain's history of the venture appeared.  

An amazing result of Dugua's Protestantism was that the Port-Royal settlement harbored not only a priest but also a Huguenot minister.  The two clergymen, according to a disgusted Champlain, who was Catholic, often came to blows over theological differences.  As the story goes, when the contentious clergymen died, their fellow colonists buried them in the same grave in hopes that they could live in peace at least in the afterlife.  See Champlain's description of these characters in Milling, Exile Without End, 3, which claims that Acadia harbored a number of Huguenot adventurers & settlers well into the 17th century.  Milling, pp. 3-4, points out, however, that "no Protestant congregation survived" due to the influence of the priests and intermarriage with the Catholic majority.

10.  Quote from Clark, Acadia, 79.  See also Parkman, France & England, 1:145-47.  The old fisherman Lescarbot met was a Basque named Savalet.  See Parkman, 1:205.

11.  Quote from Clark, Acadia, 79.  See also Faragher, A Great & Noble Scheme, 14.  

Despite the one good winter at Port-Royal, the severity of the winters in the Bay of Fundy region drove Poutrincourt & Champlain in late 1606 to try again to find a more southern location for the colony.  Parkman, France & England, 1:199ff, details their second exploration down the coast as far as present-day Hyannis, Massachusetts, & a fatal encounter with hostile Indians on the eastern shore of Cape Cod that discouraged further thought of settling south of Port-Royal.  Lescarbot was left in charge of Port-Royal when Poutrincourt & Champlain explored to the southward.  

Parkman, 1:200ff, using Lescarbot as his major source, describes the settlement at Port-Royal in fine detail, including Champlain's L'Ordre de Bon-Temps, which kept the notables of the colony well fed.  See also Faragher, pp. 15-16, who includes Membertou & his Mi'kmaq in L'Ordre de Bon-Temps.

12.  Quotes from Arsenault, History, 13; Clark, Acadia, 79.  

Eccles, Canadian Frontier, 22, insists "The amount of furs obtained from the Indians was insufficient to offset the costs of maintaining the settlement at Port Royal."  Faragher, A Great & Noble Scheme, 18, agrees & adds that Poutrincourt beseeched some of his men to stay at Port-Royal but that all of them chose to return to France with him.  

It was Marc Lescarbot who reported that, in contradiction to the king's expectations, "after three years of enjoying the said privileges, he [Dugua] made no [Indian] converts as yet."  See Mathé Allain, "Colbert's Colony Crumbles," in Conrad, ed., The French Experience in Louisiana, 34, for a discussion of the role of conversion in French colonization, including the statement:  "Evangelization of the natives was an obligation every charter imposed on companies or individuals granted a colonial monopoly." 

Parkman, France & England, 1:205-06, concludes about France's early efforts in Acadia and the role of religion:  "First of Europeans, they had essayed to found an agricultural colony in the New World.  The leaders of the enterprise had acted less as merchants than as citizens; and the fur-trading monopoly, odious in itself, had been used as the instrument of a large and generous design.  There was a radical defect, however, in their scheme of settlement.  Excepting a few of the leaders, those engaged in it had not chosen a home in the wilderness of New France, but were mere hirelings, without wives or families, and careless of the welfare of the colony.  The life which should have pervaded all the members was confined to the heads alone.  In one respect, however, the enterprise of De Monts was truer in principle than the Roman Catholic colonization of Canada, on the one hand, or the Puritan colonization of Massachusetts, on the other, for it did not attempt to enforce religious exclusion."

12a.  For Champlain at Québec, see Eccles, Canadian Frontier, 23ff; Parkman, France & England, 1:241-324.  Parkman calls the site of Québec Stadacone.  Historical Atlas of Canada calls it Stadacona.  See 1: plate 33.  

Parkman, 1:198, emphasizes the good relations of Dugua's settlers with the local Mi'kmaq, who were sad to see the Frenchmen go.  Faragher, A Great & Noble Scheme, 9-14, details the good relations between the "Normans," as the Mi'kmaq called them, & the Indians at Port-Royal, with emphasis on the role of Membertou.  

Parkman, 1:266, also relates the efforts of Dugua to re-establish his monopoly on the fur trade in New France & its ultimate failure, made hopeless by the assassination of King Henry IV in 1610.

A. Taylor, American Colonies, 99-100, touts the superiority of Canada in the trade for furs but its inferiority in matters of agriculture & contrasts the "open access" of peninsula Acadia with the superior defensive geography of the St. Lawrence River valley. 

13.  Mathé Allain, "Colbert's Colony Crumbles," in Conrad, ed., The French Experience in Louisiana, 34; Clark, Acadia, 79-81; Faragher, A Great & Noble Scheme, 22-29.  

Eccles, Canadian Frontier, 22, says that the Jesuit presence at Port-Royal in 1611 was the first mission of the famous Society of Jesus in New France.  Parkman, England & France, 1:216, concurs & devotes two chapters (1:207-23) to the efforts of the Jesuits to intrude themselves into the Acadian venture.  The 2 Jesuits were Pierre Biard & Enémond Massé.  

For Biencourt's age when he arrived in Acadia, see Parkman, 1:210.  Biencourt's ship on this voyage was Grace de Dieu or Grace of God.  

The younger Gravé du Pont, whose name was Robert, built his camp on the Rivière St.-Jean 6 leagues up the river.  See Parkman, 1:216ff. 

For a detailed account of the assassination of Henry IV, see Parkman, 1:210-11.  

Parkman points out, 1:221, 1071, that the Marquise de Guercheville's domains included all of North America from the St. Lawrence down to Florida, excepting only Poutrincourt's settlement at Port-Royal.  For details of the Jesuit venture on Mount Desert Island, called St.-Sauveur, see Parkman, 1:224ff.  The 1613 Jesuit expedition, under La Saussaye, sailed in the Jonas, the same ship that Poutrincourt had hired for his return trip to Port-Royal in 1606.

14.  Quotes from Clark, Acadia, 81; Eccles, Canadian Frontier, 23.  

For details of Argall's character, his attacks on the Acadian settlements, & the fate of the French captives, see Parkman, France & England, 1:228ff; Faragher, A Great & Noble Scheme, 29-33.  

Argall's Jesuit guide was Pierre Biard, who had quarreled most bitterly with Poutrincourt & Biencourt at Port-Royal.  

Jamestown was founded, of course, by a joint stock company of London merchants in the spring of 1607 after the English had failed miserably to settle their North American claims two decades before at Roanoke Island in present-day North Carolina.  Parkman makes a strong case against "the lawless inroads" of Dale & Argall, whom he says had no authority to molest the Acadian settlements.  Quote from 1:1072.  Dale & Argall felt justified in destroying French settlements in territory claimed by the London Company charter.  

See Historical Atlas of Canada, 1:48, for a list of failed English settlements in Newfoundland in the three decades after the founding of Jamestown: at Conception Bay in 1610, Renews in 1617, Harbour Grace in 1617, Renews again in 1623, St. John's in 1624, & Ferryland in 1632, this last failed venture led by George Calvert, later Lord Baltimore, who founded Maryland 2 years later; & Ferryland again in 1638.  It took a while for the stubborn English to realize that sustainable agriculture was not possible in this frozen, forbidding land, only fishing and fur trading, so they concentrated their efforts farther south, along the Chesapeake and Cape Cod bays. For more details of English colonial efforts down the coast, see below.  The Newfoundland sites can be located on plate 22 of Historical Atlas of Canada, 1.  Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 37, on the other hand, says that the English settlement at Ferryland was well established by the late 1620s.

15.  Clark, Acadia, 82; Faragher, A Great & Noble Scheme, 33.  

Louis Hébert was one of the Port-Royal settlers who returned to France with Poutrincourt.  

Parkman, France & England, 1:239, 1072, says that Biencourt rebuilt Port-Royal & built a fort at Cap-Sable called Fort Lomeron.  

16.  First quote from Parkman, France & England, 1:1072.  Subsequent quotes from Clark, Acadia, 67, 58, 68, 69.  

Claude La Tour's full name was Nicolas dit Claude Turgis dit de Saint-Étienne, sieur de La Tour.  See White, DGFA-1,1431, & also Arsenault, Généalogie, 1643-46, for more on the La Tour family, who were from Champagne. 

For a thorough history of the Mi'kmaq, see Micmac History.  For a reasoned discussion of the Frenchmen in Acadia at the time of Biencourt's leadership & their relations with the Indians, especially with Indian wives & children, see Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 34-37.  

The only French missionaries in Acadia at the time were Franciscan Recollets, who, from 1620-24, established posts at Port-Royal, on Rivière St.-Jean, & at Miscou on the Baie des Chaleurs as well as in Canada.  The Jesuits had abandoned their efforts in Acadia when Poutrincourt abandoned Port-Royal, & they would not return to New France, & then only to Québec, until 1625.  When the English held Québec from 1629-32, only a single Jesuit remained at the post.  With the restoration of Canada to France in 1632, the Recollets were entirely replaced by the Jesuits, who turned Québec into a mission post as well as a center for trade with the Indians.  See Arsenault, History, 20; Parkman, 1:309-10, 328, 403ff.  

17. Arsenault, History, 18, says that Biencourt died in 1624 and was buried at La Prée Ronde (Round Hill), near Port-Royal.  Clark, Acadia, 82-83; & Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 37, say that Biencourt died in 1623.  Clark adds that after Biencourt's death the headquarters of the Acadian venture moved from Port-Royal to the Cap-Sable area, where Charles La Tour held sway.  

18. The history of early Virginia & the founding of Plymouth Colony in present-day Massachusetts, like the discussion of Columbus and other early explorers of the New World, are too well known to document here.  Consult any good encyclopedia for details of these important historical events.  See Parkman, France & England, 1:312, 314-15, for a classic, & entirely biased, expression of the contrast between authority-ridden New France & liberty-loving New England.  

One must also keep in mind that in the early 1600s the Indians of Virginia were part of a powerful Indian confederacy that had escaped the white man's diseases until the English came, but the Indian tribes of the Massachusetts Bay area had been devastated by European diseases by the time the Separatists appeared on the scene.  It was easier for the Pilgrims & the Puritans to overawe the Massachusetts Indians because there were so few of them left.  

For a recent study of the Virginia & New England colonial ventures that does justice to Native & African contributions, see Taylor, A., American Colonies, chaps. 6-9. 

19. Clark, Acadia, 83-84; Arsenault, History, 19; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 40-43; Parkman, France & England, 1:1071-72.  

Clark, p. 91, says the Scottish fort at Port-Royal was built adjacent to the old French one.  However, Griffiths, p. 43, says that the younger Sir William Alexander, who chose the site, built the Scottish fort "close to what would be the site of the later Fort Anne, on the banks of what would be named the Allaine (or Lequille) River," that is, near present-day Annapolis Royal, across the basin & upriver from the old French fort.  See Historical Atlas of Canada, 1:29.  

Leckie, Wars of America, 14, places the 1629 English expedition against Québec into the context of Europe's Thirty Years War of 1618-48.  According to Leckie, Champlain had "only 16 starving men inside his rickety fort when Lewis Kirke sailed up the St. Lawrence and summoned him to surrender."  Champlain was taken to England as a prisoner and released after the treaty of 1632 was signed.  Eccles, Canadian Frontier, 33-34, details the activities of the Kirkes in Canada, says their names were David and Jarvis, & that they were brothers.  Parkman, 1:316-17, says that Gervase, not Jarvis, Kirke led the family group that included his sons David, Lewis, & Thomas.  Clark, p. 84n, agrees with Parkman, who offers the most detailed narrative of the plight of Québec at the hands of the Kirkes, 1:316ff.  Griffiths, p. 40, says that there were 5 Kirke brothers, David, Lewis, Thomas, John, & James.  

Griffiths, p. 42, details the Daniel expedition on Cape Breton Island.

20. Quote from Arsenault, History, 20.  

For the capture of Claude La Tour, see Arsenault, p. 19.  Parkman, France & England, 1:1072-73, says that the elder La Tour, a widower, married well in England, &, being a Protestant, renounced his French allegiance.  Sir William made the La Tours "baronets of Nova Scotia."  Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 43-44, details the life & adventures of the elder La Tour & points out that son Charles refused to accept the English honor & remained loyal to French interests in Acadia.

Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 103, says "The term, métis, was never employed in Acadia."  He goes on to say:  "The degree to which peaceful relations between Acadian settlers and Mi'kmaq people were consolidated by marriage and similar unions is unclear."

21. Quote from Arsenault, History, 21.  See also Clark, Acadia, 91, including note 36; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 48-49.

Parkman, France & England, 1:1074, calls Razilly Claude, not Isaac.  Griffiths, p. 48, & Massignon, "Trahans of Acadiana," 119, call him Claude de Launay-Razilly.  Claude was Isaac's brother.  White, DGFA-1, 1171, & DGFA-1 English, 251, say that Razilly "came to Acadia" on 4 July 1632.  Griffiths says that the expedition left France in July.  Parkman, 1:1074, says they reached Port-Royal in August.  Clark, p. 91, says they left France on 4 July in L'Esperance à Dieu, but mentions no other ships, & arrived at La Hève on 8 Sep.  Griffith, p. 49, agrees with this date, which is used here.  La Hève is now La Have, near present-day Lunenburg, Nova Scotia.  

See Griffiths, pp. 39, & Parkman, 1:313, for details of the founding of Richelieu's Company of New France.  In 1632, Richelieu also reclaimed Québec from Thomas Kirke, who had held it since its capture in 1629.  The Héberts, sans patriarch Louis, now dead, had remained at Québec under English rule.  Champlain returned to command at Québec in the spring of 1633.  He died there on Christmas Day, 1635, at age 68.  See Parkman, 1:320, 326ff.  

Parkman, 1:1079, points out that Englishmen from Plymouth built the trading post at Castine.  Pentagouët also is spelled Pentagoët

For the forced return of the Scots at Port-Royal to Britain, see Griffiths, p. 49.

Why did Razilly sail from Auray, which is in southern Britanny, west of Nantes? 

22. Clark, Acadia, 91-92; Arsenault, History, 21-22.  

Parkman, France & England, 1:1074-76, 1078, says that La Tour preferred the name Fort La Tour for his Rivière St.-Jean holding, but it was more commonly called Fort St.-Jean.  Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 44, 479, note 14, says it was called Fort Sainte-Marie & that Fort La Tour was the name of La Tour's establishment on the Atlantic coast.  Arsenault, Clark, and others assume that La Tour's fort on the St.-Jean was located at Jemseg, about 70 miles up the river.  Parkman, 1:094, note 1, insists that the fort was located at the mouth of the river, specifically Portland Point, "on the east side of the St. John, at its mouth," and offers compelling evidence that is followed here.  Griffiths agrees & says that La Tour built his fort on the St.-Jean around 1630, 2 years before Razilly's expedition reached Acadia.  One of the fort's purposes was to give La Tour a place from which to keep a close eye on the Scots settlement at Port-Royal across the bay. 

Griffiths, pp. 44, 47-48, 52, also points out that Charles La Tour's commission as lieutenant general of Acadia dated from Feb 1631, also before Razilly appeared, & that La Tour's commission was not revoked when Richelieu sent Razilly to Acadia, probably the basis of their compromise.  

Razilly named his settlement & its fortifications at La Hève Fort Sainte-Marie de Grace.  See Griffiths, p. 50.

23. Clark, Acadia, 90-95; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 50.  See Mathé Allain, "Colbert and the Colonies," in Conrad, ed., The French Experience in Louisiana, 15ff, for a discussion of the seigneurial system of Canada & Louisiana which also could be applied to Acadia during French control of the colony. 

Arsenault, History, 22, gives the ages of d'Aulnay & Denys as 36 & 34 respectively.  White, DGFA-1, 487, 1170, gives the birth years of the 2 men as c1604 & 1603 respectively.  

Parkman, France & Acadia, 1:1075n, explains the variations in the spelling of d'Aulnay's name, using a descendant of d'Aulnay as authority for his version of the name, d'Aunay, which differs from Arsenault, Clark, Griffiths, White, & most other sources, which prefer d'Aulnay, like the French town in the Aunis region.  

Chaunisay also is spelled Chaunizay; see White, DGFA-1,1170, & White DGFA-1 English, 251.  

Clark, pp. 93-94, says Denys did not build the post at “St. Peters” until 1650.  

For Pierre Comeau and his family, see Arsenault. Généalogie, 484ff; White, DGFA-1, 369-93; White DGFA-1 English, 83-88; Dave Comeau, descendant of Pierre.  Comeau did not marry until c1649, when he was 51 years old.  Age did not slow him down a bit; he fathered 9 children, the last one born when he was 67!  For Germain Doucet and his family, see Arsenault, Généalogie, 505ff; White, DGFA-1, 526-51; White, DGFA-1 English, 112-16. White calls him sieur de La Verdure, which denotes membership in the lesser nobility.  Arsenault says simply dit Laverdure.  According to White, Doucet was married in France in c1620; his son Pierre was born in c1621, his daughter Marguerite (Arsenault calls her Marguerite-Louise) in c1625 (Arsenault says in c1634), so they would have been 11 & 7 if they had accompanied their parents to Acadia in 1632.  White does not say if Doucet took his family with him to Acadia in 1632.  A second Doucet daughter, unnamed, was born about this time (she married in Port-Royal in c1650, so if she was 18 at the time of her marriage, she would have been born in c1632).  Doucet's second son, Germain, was born in c1641 probably at Port-Royal (Arsenault says the second Germain was the son of Pierre & thus the grandson of the first Germain).  All 4 of these children were from Germain père's first wife, whose name has been lost to history, as has the name of his second wife, a daughter of Guillaume Trahan, whom Germain married in c1654 & who gave him no children who survived in Acadia.  White, DGFA-1 English, 112-13, shows evidence, however, that Germain's second wife may have been the sister of surgeon & prominent settler, Jacques Bourgeois, who served as Doucet's "lieutenant" in 1654 when the English seized Port-Royal & who married Jeanne Trahan in c1643.  See Appendix for more on these Acadian pioneers.  In the case of Acadian genealogy, whenever there is conflict of information between Arsenault & White, not an unusual occurrence, this author follows White, the more recent and more accurate of the two genealogical sources, unless otherwise noted.  

Professor Griffiths, whose study is recent & thoroughly researched, points out on pp. 48, 50-51, that it still cannot be determined by the historical record if there were women & children on Razilly's 1632 expedition.  She concludes: "It seems most unlikely that women were part of this particular expedition. ... No women are reported as passengers on any of these ships."

24. Arsenault, History, 22; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 44, 52.  

Parkman, France & England, 1:1078-79, points out that Englishmen from Plymouth had established the trading post at Machias in the early 1630s.  There had been 5 Englishmen there, but La Tour had killed 2 of them when he attacked the place.

25.  Arsenault, History, 22-23, 25; Clark, Acadia, 93-94; Parkman, France & England, 1:1075.  

Arsenault, pp. 22-23, & Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 53, say that Razilly died in 1635, but White, DGFA-1, 1369, followed here, says 2 Jul 1636.  Arsenault, p. 23, says that Razilly was buried at La Hève but that his remains were removed to Louisbourg in 1749.  

Griffiths, pp. 53-54, points out the dubious nature of d'Aulnay's claim to Razilly's title & interests in Acadia.

26.  Arsenault, History, 25; Clark, Acadia, 94-95; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 54.  

D'Aulnay chose a different location for his headquarters at Port-Royal than the site of the old fort occupied by Dugua, Pourtrincourt, and Biencourt in earlier days.  The old fort, as previously noted, was located north of the basin opposite Goat Island.  D'Aulnay chose a site 8 miles farther up, or east, of the old fort in a bend on the south side of the main river channel that flows into the basin, at the present site of Annapolis Royal.  The French called the river that flows into the basin Rivière au Dauphin & also Rivière Port-Royal; it is today the Annapolis River.  See map, Figure 4.3, Clark, p. 102.  

Clark insists that d'Aulnay "was primarily interested in quick profits from the fur trade," so he moved his headquarters from La Hève to Port-Royal to be "nearer to the chief source of furs which was on the continent, not on the peninsula," an advantage that La Tour, on Rivière St.-Jean, already enjoyed.  See pp. 98-99, quote from p. 98.  

The settlers who remained at La Hève after 1636 most likely had taken Indian wives from local villages and were allowed to remain there with their métis families.  See Clark, p. 95.  

The principal source for genealogy in Acadia, White, DGFA-1, finds no "permanent" families in Acadia before 1636.  Arsenault, History, 37, agrees. 

27.  Arsenault, Généalogie, 673-74, 816; Arsenault, History, 37-38; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 54-55; Hébert, D., Southwest LA Records, 1-A:547, 788, for the marriage of Pierre Martin & Catherine Vigneau on 30 Jun 1630 in France, & 1-A:203, 767, for the marriage of Guillaume, son of Nicolas Trahan & Renée Desloges, to Françoise Corbineau of the parish of St.-Étienne, on 13 Jul 1627, in France; White, DGFA-1, 1125, 1535-36; White, DGFA-1 English, 243, 323-34.  Quotes from Taylor, D. J., "Bruns-Lebruns," 33; Arsenault, History, 44.  The St.-Jehan left La Rochelle on Apr 1.  

Arsenault gives Guillaume Trahan's age in 1636 as 35, but he was 60 at the time of the first census of Acadia in 1671, placing his birth in c1611, so he was actually only 25 when he left France for Acadia.  Guillaume's second daughter, whose name has been lost, is the one who married Germain Doucet, sieur de La Verdure.  For a detailed analysis of the origins of the Martins & Trahans of Acadia, see Massignon, "Trahans of Acadiana," which also mentions, on p. 117, the birth of Mathieu Martin & his distinction as "first-born" in Acadia.  Massignon spells Françoise Corbineau's family name Charbonneau.  Françoise died by c1666, when Guillaume Trahan remarried to Madeleine, daughter of Vincent Brun, at Port-Royal.  See White, DGFA-1, 1536.  Massignon also notes, pp. 118-19, that Guillaume Trahan had been severely fined in 1634, 2 years before his passage on the St.-Jehan, for cutting down trees in the forest of Bourgueil, a possible motivation for his going to Acadia, where trees could be felled with impunity.  See Appendix for more on Antoine Bourg, Vincent Brun, Jean Gaudet, & François Gautrot.  Arsenault, History, 37, is the source for Jeanne Motin's heading the list of passengers aboard the St.-Jehan.  Her marriage to d'Aulnay is in White, DGFA-1, 1170.  Faragher, A Great & Noble Scheme, 51, says they were married in France.  For details of Jeanne Motin's life, see George MacBeth, "MOTIN (Mottin), Jeanne," in DCB, 1:514.  

La Chaussée, in the Orleanais region, is 75 miles northeast of Martaizé.  Professor Barry Ancelet in Zachary Richard's video, "Against the Tide," asserts that many of the early Acadian settlers knew one another before they reached Acadia, that about 60 percent of them came from a 20-mile radius around a small community in northern Poitou.  He must be referring to Martaizé & Bourgueil, which are 20 miles apart.  For the significance of these towns in Acadia's early settlement, see the list in Appendex of the names, known dates of arrival, origins, & occupations of the pioneers of Acadia.  Note also the author's caveat about research on the origins of the first Acadians:  "The reader must keep in mind that the years of arrival and the origins of the patriarchs of Acadia given in this history come mostly from Arsenault, Généalogie, whose dearth of documentation renders the information not much more than speculation.  The arrival dates and origins in White, DGFA-1, based on more careful research, are used when they are available.  Arsenault's information is based largely on the research of Ms. Geneviève Massignon, whose findings have been questioned by Acadian historian/genealogist, Rev. Clarence d'Entremont (see his article reprinted in AGE, October 2003, pp. 66-68; May 2004, pp. 31-32).  Father d'Entremont reminds us that the Port-Royal church records before 1700, which could have provided the true origins of the Acadian pioneers, were burned, and this information is therefore lost to history.  He contends that Ms. Massignon's basic assumption about the origins of the early Acadians--that people with names similar to the early Acadians lived in the area from which the sieur d'Aulnay recruited the first settlers of the colony, particularly Martaizé and La Chaussée in the Loire valley--is a flawed assumption.  First, Razilly, not d'Aulnay, recruited the earliest Acadian families; second, the names of these families can be found in other regions of France as well."

Isaac de Razilly's brother Claude also recruited for the colony in the Loire valley.

<acadian-home.org> contains an English version of the St.-Jehan's passenger list, found in the records of the Department of Charente-Maritime at La Rochelle & in the Paris archives.  On it can be found Isaac Pesselin (from Champagne), Pierre Martin (laborer ... from Bourgueil), & Guillaume Trahan (an "officer of the cavalry" ... also from Bourgueil), but not Antoine Bourg, Vincent Brun, Jean Gaudet, or François Gautrot.   Were the presence of Bourg, Brun, Gaudet, & Gautrot aboard the vessel a matter of family legend? 

28.  Arsenault, History, 25.  A detailed account of the struggle between La Tour & d'Aulnay is Parkman, France & England, 1:1075-95.  This is part of chapter 1 & all of chapter 2 of his volume, The Old Regime in Canada, long a classic description of this era in American colonial history.

29.  Quotes from Arsenault, History, 25, 26; Parkman, France & England, 1:1090.  Arsenault says the assault on Port-Royal was in August; Parkman, followed here, says July.  For the 14 Jul 1640 inquiry at Port-Royal, see White, DGFA-1 English, 113, 274, 324.

30.  Quote from Arsenault, History, 27, who says that there were 50 men with Madame La Tour at Fort St.-Jean.  Parkman's number is used here. 

According to Parkman, Madame La Tour was the former Marie Jacquelin, a Huguenot, "daughter of a barber of Mans," who "proved [to be] a prodigy of mettle and energy, espoused her husband's cause with passionate vehemence, and backed his quarrel like the intrepid Amazon she was."  Quotes from 1:1079, 1080.  Parkman's account of La Tour's adventures after his loss of the fort and "his indomitable wife" is found on 1:1098ff.

Among those killed in the assault was Isaac Pesseley, a merchant from Piney in Champagne and major of Port-Royal who had come to the colony aboard St.-Jehan.  Pesseley had testified against La Tour in d'Aulnay's inquiry at Port-Royal in July 1640.  He left behind a wife and eight children, the youngest of whom was a newborn daughter named Marie.  Twenty years later, Marie married Jean Pitre, an edged tool maker who came to Acadia in the late 1650s, and with him created a distinguished line of Acadian settlers.  See White, DGFA-1, 1288-89, 1321-26; White, DGFA-1 English, 274.

31.  Clark, Acadia, 93-94.  See Parkman, France & England, 1:1091-92, 1096-97, for d'Aulnay's successful peace missions to Boston in 1644 and again in 1646 conducted by a Capuchin friar dressed as a gentleman, "one Monsieur Marie."

32.  Arsenault, History, 28.  Parkman, France & England, 1:1099-1100, concludes, p. 1100: "Acadia, in short, was made an hereditary fief, and D'Aunay and his heirs became lords of a domain as large as a European kingdom."  Parkman says nothing of the concession to Denys.  

Louis XIV, born in 1638, had become king on the death of his father, Louis XIII, in 1642.  Because of Louis XIV's youth, his mother ruled as his regent until 1651, when her lover & the young king's godfather, Cardinal Mazarin, essentially took control of the kingdom as Louis XIV's chief minister.  This arrangement lasted until Mazarin's death in 1661, after which Louis XIV ruled without a chief minister.

33.  See Clark, Acadia, 53-55, 101, 103, for a discussion of dyking in the context of Acadian soil fertility and previous knowledge of the process in France.  Faragher, A Great & Noble Scheme, 48-50, details the construction of aboiteau; quote from p. 49.  Faragher also says, p. 49:  "Although [Nicolas] Denys attributed the diking to d'Aulnay, it is doubtful that the lieutenant-governor had much to do with it."  Giovanni Cherubini, in his essay "The Peasant and Agriculture," in Le Goff, Medieval World, 115, notes:  "... in Brittany and Poitou ... peasants successfully drained the salt marches...."  Thus, the early Acadians from those regions would have had experience in this process when they arrived in the New World.  See Historical Atlas of Canada, 1: plate 29, for an excellent depiction of the extent of salt marsh dyking in the valley of the Rivière au Dauphin, now the Annapolis River valley, by 1710.  Hint of an English Puritan prejudice against the practice of dyking the salt marshes can be found in Drake, Border Wars, 201n, which says:  "They [the Acadians] made the mistake of cultivating the low meadows instead of the uplands, to avoid the labor of felling the timbers."  It was no mistake to "cultivate the low meadows" as long as others did not tamper with their dykes.  Moreover, considering the prodigious efforts it took to build & maintain these dykes, the implication in Drake's statement that the Acadians were lazy because they avoided cutting down forests is patently absurd & can be attributed to English prejudice against all things French.  However, even their fellow Frenchmen disdained the Acadians' dyking process.  See Faragher, p. 49.  

34.  Arsenault, History, 28-29, 31, says that d'Aulnay was traveling alone and that he died of exhaustion and exposure.  Moody, Acadians, 17, indicates that he may have been pushed from the canoe and thus murdered, an accusation found nowhere else.  Parkman, France & England, 1:1100, followed here, says that d'Aulnay traveled with his valet, that they were "in a birch canoe in the basin of Port Royal, not far from the mouth of the Annapolis," and that d'Aulnay died "not from drowning but from cold, for the water still retained the chill of winter."  Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 61, says he "drowned in a canoe accident on the Saint John."  D'Aulnay was 46 at the time of his death.  He left his widow with 8 children, including 4 sons who perished on French battlefields and 3 daughters who became nuns.  See White, DGFA-1, 1170-72, DGFA-1 English, 251, for details of d'Aulnay's birth, marriage, & the lives of his children.  Also Parkman, p. 1103; DCB, 1:502-06, which is detailed.  As always, Parkman says it best.  On p. 1101 is his summation of d'Aulnay's character & accomplishments:  "He seems to have been a favorable example of his class, loyal to his faith and his king, tempering pride with courtesy, and generally true to his cherished ideal of the gentilhomme Français.  In his qualities, as in his birth, he was far above his rival, and his death was the ruin of the only French colony in Acadia that deserved the name."  

35. Arsenault, History, 31, 32; Parkman, France & England, 1101-03, who suspects that the proclamation naming La Tour as governor and lieutenant-general of Acadia was a fabrication.  Parkman is no more impressed with Le Borgne's claims to d'Aulnay's assets, which in Parkman's account of the affair sound more like extortion than a creditor's claims.  See especially p. 1102.  See White, DGFA-1 English, 218, for a chronology of Le Borgne's dealings with d'Aulnay & Denys & his efforts to recoup the large debt.  Appendix A details Le Borgne's progeny in Acadia, who eventually called themselves Bélisle, and also the descendants of d'Entremont.

36. Quote from Arsenault, History, 32.  See also Parkman, France & England, 1102-03.  After summing up La Tour's activities after the death of his rival and noting that descendants of the old outlaw remained in Acadia up to the present day, Parkman, p.1104, leaves us with these sad words about the fate of La Tour's old rival:  "As for D'Aunay, no trace of his blood is left in the land where he gave wealth and life for France and the Church."  George MacBeth,"MOTIN (Mottin), Jeanne," in DCB, 1:514, says that La Tour married D'Aulnay's widow in July 1653, that they lived for a time on the St.-Jean but moved to Cap-Sable in c1656, where she died by 1667.  

37. Arsenault, History, 32, 33; Clark, Acadia, 94; Parkman, France & England, 1:1103.  Arsenault, Généalogie, 406, hints that Le Borgne did not go to Acadia, his two sons in tow, until 1654, the year of the English attack.  Parkman shows clearly that Le Borgne was at Port-Royal in 1653, when La Tour married the widow d'Aulnay. 

38. Arsenault, History, 32-34; Clark, Acadia, 94; Parkman, France & England, 1:1103; White, DGFA-1 English, 113, for the Doucet/Bourgeois part of the story.  Nepisiguit, also spelled Nepigiguit, Nepisquit and Nipisiquit, is present-day Bathurst, New Brunswick.  Arsenault, p. 34, says that Denys was 90 when he died.  White, DGFA-1, 487, says he died probably in Paris in July 1688 at age 89, but White gives his birthday as 2 June 1603.

38a.  Quotes from White, DGFA-1 English, 218-19.  See also Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 77; Appendix.

39. Denys quote from <acadian-cajun.com>.  Commentary quote from Clark, Acadia, 108.  Arsenault, History, 35, 36, asserts that the English occupation "had prevented new immigration to Acadia," but his own genealogy contradicts this.  The Port-Royal basin described here included the Rivière au Dauphin, now the Annapolis River, which forms the basin at it widens on its way to the Bay of Fundy via the Gut.  

A personal note:  I am convinced that my Acadian pioneer ancestor, Robert Cormier, slipped back to France with his wife & younger son sometime during the English occupation.  His older son Thomas remained, however, and established the Cormier family in Acadia.  See Appendix.

39a.  See Moogk, La Nouvelle France, 176; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 95, 99-100.  The authors of Historical Atlas of Canada offer this insightful summary on 1:48:  "The chartered colonization schemes [of Dugua, Poutrincourt, Biencourt, Razilly, and d'Aulnay for the French, and the many English ventures in Newfoundland] were financial disasters for their investors, but they demonstrated that overwintering and extended residence were possible, and they left behind a few men who began prosecuting the fishery on their own accounts, encouraging settlement to develop out of the migratory fishery.  In Acadia descendants of a few colonists sent after 1632 began to farm the tidal marshes around the Bay of Fundy."  From many failed efforts to exploit the fishery and the fur trade in the first decades of the 1600s emerged an almost accidental permanent agricultural venture--the colony of Acadia.  

40. Clark, Acadia, 107, 108.  Arsenault, History, 35, notes:  “Unlike his predecessors in Acadia, Grandfontaine was not just a mere concessionary but the designated representative of the King of France,” who was still Louis XIV.  “However, like all French governors who succeeded him in Acadia, Grandfontaine received his instructions from the Governor of Canada, his immediate superior.”  In other words, Acadia was now a royal colony, not a proprietary one, as it had been when it was in the hands of the French before and even during the English occupation.  This royal arrangement also placed Acadia under the jurisdiction of the powerful royal intendants of Canada.  See Parkman, France & England, 1:1288ff, for a detailed explanation of the relative roles of the governors-general & royal intendants of Canada, a scheme initiated by Louis XIV in 1663 while Acadia was still under English occupation.  Also as part of the royal arrangement, the parish priests of Acadia were subject to the ecclesiastical authority of the Bishop of Quebec, the first of whom, Laval, took office in 1659, during the English occupation of Acadia.  All of this was followed Louis XIV's assumption of full royal power after the death of Mazarin in 1661.

Another, more recent, perspective on the transition from proprietary to royal colony is offered by Mathé Allain in her essay, "Colbert and the Colonies," in Conrad, ed., The French Experience in Louisiana, 6:  "... he [Louis XIV's chief minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert] understood the distinction between settlement colonies and trade colonies.  Therein lies Colbert's contribution, and in its corollary, that a settlement colony needed to produce so as to export and needed to be populated so as to produce.  Eventually another corollary would follow:  while the trading colonies, colonies d'exploitation commerciale, could be entrusted to companies, the colonies de peuplement would be administered directly by the Crown since they were to be overseas extensions of the mother country."  Consider this:  the peopling of Acadia began in earnest in 1636, but not until 1670 did it become a royal colony.  Louisiana would begin as a trading colony in 1699 & become a  royal colony in 1733.  Do the math:  each colony (Acadia from 1636-70, Louisiana from 1699-1733), took 34 years to evolve from trading colony to settlement colony.  Coincidence?  Probably, but still an interesting observation. 

41. Quote from Clark, Acadia, 108.  See also Clark, Acadia, 111, 139, 143, 149, 175-76; Arsenault, History, 36.

42. Arsenault, History, 36, says 50; Parkman, France & England, 2:243, note 1, says, "In 1671, 30 garcons and 30 filles were sent by the king to Acadia, at the cost of 6,000 livres."  Judging from genealogical sources, the new male arrivals aboard the L'Oranger did not settle for very long in the Port-Royal valley.  Some of them helped pioneer newer settlements along the Baie Française.  See Appendix. 

For a brief history of the Carignan-Salières Regiment, see Parkman, France & England, 1:1233.  It was this regiment that arrived in Canada with the French viceroy, the Marquis Pouville de Tracy, in the summer of 1665, "the first regiment of regular troops ever sent to America by the French government."  De Tracy used it to chastise the Mohawks and to intimidate the English in upper New York in early 1666.  See Parkman, 1:1240-45.

In discussing French mercantilism and the role of monopoly, Mathé Allain in "Colbert and the Colonies" in Conrad, ed., The French Experience in Louisiana, 23, note 34, says:  "It should be noted ... that Colbert was willing to expand freedom of trade to include foreigners when necessary; he, for example, encouraged trade between Acadia and New England because commerce between Acadia and Canada was expensive and difficult." 

43. Arsenault, History, 43; LeBlanc, Acadian Miracle, 21, which reproduces the census with errors and omissions.  The copy of the 1671 census used here comes from <acadian-cajun.com>, which says that Fr. Molin counted 392 colonists in Acadia, 350 of them at Port-Royal, & that Massachusetts at the time had about 40,000 inhabitants!  The 1667 census of Canada had counted 4,312 souls.  The town of Québec alone contained 448 people, more than in all of Acadia.  See Parkman, France & England, 1:1270, note 1.  The 1671 census counted colonists not only at Port-Royal but also at Pobomcoup, Cap-Nèigre, & the Rivière aux Rochelois, all on the southwestern tip of the peninsula facing the Atlantic and part of the seigneurie of Philippe Mius d'Entremont, former lieutenant of Charles La Tour & the King's attorney for Acadia.  For an excellent analysis of the census, its shortcomings as well as its invaluable insights into the state of the colony, especially at Port-Royal, see Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 90-99.  Griffith's numbers for the census are different from other sources; she says on p. 90 that the total number of men, women, & children "of European descent, living in six different locations" in the colony (Port-Royal, Pobomcoup, Cap-Nègre, Pentagouët, Mouskadabouet, & St.-Pierre on Cape Breton Island) was 302; on pp. 90, 92 she says that the Port-Royal population numbered 68 families of "just over 250 individuals: 65 men, 67 women, and 125 sons and daughters."  

For an explanation of why so relatively few French men & women emigrated to New France during the seventeenth century, especially in contrast to English North America, see Taylor, A., American Colonies, 368-69. 

44.  Arsenault, History, 38, contains a list of families.  See Appendix for my own list of Acadian pioneers counted in the first census, those who arrived aboard the L'Oranger, and those who came to Acadia after 1671, with emphasis on the progenitors of the families that emigrated to Louisiana.  

White, DGFA-1, the most conservative, & thus reliable, source on Acadian genealogy, is silent on the birth places of many of the early Acadian pioneers who some writers, especially Geneviève Massignon & Bona Arsenault, claim were from Martaizé & La Chaussée.  See Appendix for a brief discussion of this controversy.

89.  Quotes from Erskine, Nova Scotia, 30; Clark, Acadia,141; & Clément Cormier, "Bourgeois, Jacques (Jacob)," DCB, 2:94.  See also Arsenault, History, 48-9.  

Milner, "Chignecto," provides a delightful description of the area around Beaubassin written by a Jesuit priest during an expedition to the isthmus in the early years of the colony.  Father Briand, who accompanied Governor Jean de Poutrincourt & 4 Indians on the expedition, wrote:  "At Chignecto, there is a beautiful prairie as far as you can see.  Several rivers discharge themselves into the Bay.  The Indians number 60 or 80 souls, and they are not so vagabondish as others, because this spot is more retired and more abundant in chase for food.  The country is for the most part agreeable and to my mind of great fertility if cultivated."  

The traditional date of the founding of the Chignecto settlement is 1672.  See, for example, Arsenault, pp. 47, 48; DCB, 2:94.  Clark, p.139, says 1671. 

The importance of the trade with New England is well documented in Arsenault, Clark, & other sources & will be a recurring theme in Acadian history. 

90.  Clark, Acadia, 141-42, quote from 142; Arsenault, Généalogie, 393, 457, 827, 845, 859, 909, 929, 976, 1012; Arsenault, History, 47-48; <acadian-cajun.com>.  Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 116-117, says that, although there is no question that Jacques Bourgeois & his family were the first to settle at Chignecto, it was not until "either immediately before or at the very time" of Bourgeois's settlement that the governor of New France, Count Frontenac, awarded Michel Le Neuf de la Vallière a huge grant in the area.  La Vallière's grant was dated 24 Oct 1676, & his seat was on present-day Tonge's Island, a ridge overlooking the Missaguash, and originally was called Île La Villière.  See  Milner, "Chignecto." Griffiths, p. 116, adds:  "A number of writers quote La Valliere's concession as containing a clause that enjoined him not to disturb 'inhabitants of the province that are to be found in possession of land and inheritance that they are cultivating, living on and working to increase its value,' but documentation of this does not seem to have survived."  La Vallière served as commander & then governor of the colony from 1678-84, but his governorship was not confirmed by the king until 1683.  See Griffiths, p. 117.

According to Milner, "Chignecto":  "La Vallière was a member of the Poterie family, that came with the Repentigny family from Caen to Quebec in 1638," & that the Poteries, along with the Repentignys, were among the 4 noble families in Canada who lived by the sword, not by the plow, and who were helpless without "their official pay."  Milner goes on:  "Outside of his poverty, La Valliere was a man of consequence.  While he held the Commission of Captain of the Court's guards, he was a voyageur, a wood ranger, a mariner, a trader and a diplomat, and in one capacity or another was constantly on the move on the frontiers of French domain in Canada--at one time in the wilds of Hudson's Bay and at another a beau gallant at Boston."    

Interestingly, Jacques Bourgeois did not remain at Chignecto but returned to Port-Royal, where he died in c1701.  See DCB, 2:94.

91.  Arsenault, History, 48; Arsenault, Généalogie, 629, 729, 846, 863, 884, 886, 946, 952-53, 959-60, 964, 982-84, 989, 1007-09, 1013-14, 1026, 1030-31, 1054, 1057, 1067, 1086; White, DGFA-1, 348, 791.  

For the genealogy of Gabriel Chiasson, see Arsenault, Généalogie, 897; White, DGFA-1, 350; White, DGFA-1 English, 78-79.  

For the genealogy of Michel Haché dit Gallant, see Arsenault, Généalogie, 983-4; White, DGFA-1, 791-94; White, DGFA-1 English, 162-63.  The family name evolved into Haché-Gallant then Haché then Achée by the time Michel's descendants reached Louisiana. The family name in Canada is usually spelled Gallant, but also Galland, Hachey, Larché dit Gallant.  Milner, "Chignecto," says that La Vallière "had a secretary named Hache Galand, who married an Acadian lass named Anne Courmier and their descendants today [1911] number hundreds of families."  So spelling isn't everything. 

92.  Arsenault, History, 53-54, quote from p. 53; Arsenault, Généalogie, 804-05, 1081, 1086, 1092, 1101, 1104-05, 1108, 1116, 1121, 1125, 1132-34, 1136-38, 1143, 1150-51, 1153, 1155, 1158, 1160, 1170, 1174, 1183, 1195, 1198-99, 1216-17, 1261-62, 1273, 1276, 1279-80, 1284, 1285, 1293-94, 1303, 1308; Clark, Acadia, 148, which says the settlement at Minas began around 1682; White, DGFA-1, 1098; White, DGFA-1 English, 130.  Arsenault's genealogy says that Pierre Thériot & Cécile Landry were married in 1685, but White, DGFA-1, 1484, 1489, says in 1678.  

The Minas settlement was also called Les Mines.  The name Grand-Pré is often applied to all of the settlements at Minas, but, in truth, Grand-Pré was only one of the settlements in the area.  Besides Grand-Pré, there were Rivière-St.-Antoine, Rivière Gaspereau, Rivière-aux-Canards, & Rivière-des-Habitants.  Even Pigiguit could be considered a Minas settlement because Rivière Pigiguit, now the Avon River, also flows into the Minas Basin.  

93.  Quotes from Clark, Acadia, 148, 149.  See also Arsenault, History, 56.

94.  Arsenault, History, 56; Arsenault, Généalogie, 1320, 1322, 1330, 1336, 1346-50, 1365-68, 1374, 1383, 1386, 1388-89, 1392, 1401, 1411, 1415, 1419-23, 1427, 1430, 1432, 1434, 1441, 1454; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 193, who points out that the original land grants in the Pigiguit area have been lost, so no one can now say who founded the settlement.  Pigiguit, pronounced PIDG-ee-gwit, also is spelled Pesaquid, Pisiguit, Pisiquid, Pisiquit, Piziguit, Piziquid, Piziquit.  The settlement was large enough to support 2 separate church parishes--Notre-Dame-de-L'Assomption on the east side of the Avon River (today's Windsor), & Ste.-Famille on the west side (today's Falmouth).  

The St. Croix River at Pigiguit, which is in present-day Nova Scotia, should not be confused with the St. Croix River that forms the boundary between Maine & New Brunswick. 

95.  Arsenault, History, 56-57; Arsenault, Généalogie, 1465, 1470-71, 1474, 1480-82, 1484, 1488, 1490, 1492-94, 1496, 1504, 1506-07, 1511, 1528; BRDR, 1a(rev,):155; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 193.  Clark, Acadia, 127, has a good map to show the relative distances among the Beaubassin, Minas, Pigiguit, and Cobeguit settlements.  Cobeguit may have been founded later than Arsenault claims because in the census of 1693 Mathieu Martin, the Bourgs, and Martin Blanchard were still being counted at Port-Royal.  See <acadian-cajun.com>.  Cobeguit also is spelled Cobequid, Cobequit.

Arsenault, p. 56, implies that Mathieu Martin secured his seigneury at Cobeguit because he was the first-born Frenchman in Acadia, which follows Massignon, "Trahans of Acadia", 117.  Griffith, p. 193, calls Martin "one [of] the first children born in Acadia, both of whose parents were European ..." & says, "The early years of settlement [at Cobeguit] were troubled with disputes over ownership with [colonial official Mathieu] de Goutin." 

96.  Arsenault, History, 50; Arsenault, Généalogie, 431, 508, 643-44, 646, 807, 1535, 1539-40, 1543, 1545-46, 1557-62, 1564, 1566, 1568-69, 1572, 1574, 1581; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 191-92, offers the most detailed description of the founding of these settlements, including the conflict of land claims between the Thibodeau & Blanchard settlers & La Vallière.  See also White, DGFA-1 English, 319-20.  

Chepoudy also is spelled Chipoudy, Shepody.  Petitcoudiac is sometimes spelled Petitcodiac & Petit Codiac.  See, for instance, Brasseaux, Scattered to the Wind, 28, 30, 33.  

A chronology of the history of Memramcook can be found at the end of the article "Memramcook: Birthplace of the New Acadia" at <acadian-home.org>.  The time line was taken from the Monument Lefebvre at Memramcook.  

For the best map of the Bay of Fundy settlements, using colors to show topography & including the standard spellings of place names used here, see the incomparable Historical Atlas of Canada, 1: plate 29.  This map even includes the tidal ranges in meters:  7-9 at Port-Royal, 13-14 in the Bassin des Mines, 15 at Cobeguit, 13 at Beaubassin, Chepoudy, & Petitcoudiac.  In feet this is ... awesome.  Few other places on earth have such dramatic tidal bores.

97.  Arsenault, Généalogie, 1614-49.  

98.  Arsenault, Généalogie, 391-819.  

99.  Arsenault, Généalogie, 1585-1609.

139.  This follows Arsenault, History; Clark, Acadia; Faragher, A Great & Noble Scheme, 46-48, which emphasizes the role of métissage, or the intermarrying of Acadian & M'ikmaq, in the cultural relationship; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadia, 11, 56; A. Taylor, American Colonies, 99; & <museum.gov.ns.ca/infos>, source of the quote.  See also Greer, People of New France, 93-94, for a succinct summary of the relationship between the Mi'kmaq & Acadians.  The tribe's name is pronounced MICK-maw & is often written as Micmac.  M'ikmaw is singular, M'ikmaq plural.  See Faragher, p. 494, note 2.  For a poetic description of the English lust for Indian land, see Leckie, Wars of America, 7-8.  

Thanks to implacable imperial rivalries & the machinations of French missionary Abbé Le Loutre, Acadian/M'ikmaq relations turned sour during the early 1750s.  But before then, for over a century, the two cultures lived in remarkable harmony.  

140.  See Webster, Acadia, 211-14, quote from pp. 213-14;  Greer, People of New France, 84; Leckie, Wars of America, 3-5.  For a classic description of the Indian tribes from New England to the Hudson Bay & the heroic efforts of French missionaries to convert them to Catholicism, see Parkman, France & England, 1:345-402 & ff, also 2:115, 162.  Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 138-39, provides a careful analysis of the difficulties the eastern Abenakis endured with the English settlers in Maine.

141.  Quotes from Arsenault, History, 45-46, which says that Saint-Castin, also spelled Saint-Castain, came to Acadia with Grandfontaine in 1670 & married the chief's daughter in 1680.  See also Clark, Acadia, 111; Webster, Acadia, 27; Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 336.  Parkman, France & England, 1:1281-87, provides the classic description of the Canadian gentilhomme, or untitled nobleman, from whose ranks sprang the captaines de sauvages.  White, DGFA-1, 6, gives the marriage date to Mathilde, Saint-Castin's first Indian wife, of 1670; Arsenault, Généalogie, 1646, gives no date for this marriage & calls her Marie-Mathilde Pidicwanmiskwe, but Arsenault is describing Saint-Castin's second wife, whom he married in c1685, and who, according to White, p. 7, was named Marie Pidiwammiskwa & was a sister of the first wife Mathilde.  Saint-Castin fathered 10 children by the first wife, including Bernard-Anselme, his sixth child & second son, born in c1689, who married Charlotte d'Amours de Chauffours at Port-Royal in October 1707; Bernard-Anselme also became a captaine de sauvages.  Jean-Vincent's second wife bore him 2 daughters. 

142.  Quote from "Louis XIV", Encarta, "III. Absolute Monarchy."  Again, Parkman says it most eloquently:  "The king [of France], once powerless among a host of turbulent nobles, was now a king indeed.  Once a chief, because his equals had made him so, he was now the anointed of the Lord.  This triumph of royalty had culminated in Louis XIV.  The stormy energies and bold individualism of the old feudal nobles had ceased to exist.  They who had held his predecessors in awe had become his obsequious servants.  He no longer feared his nobles; he prized them as gorgeous decorations of his court, and satellites of his royal person."  Quote from France & England, 1:1274; see also 2:138-39.

143.  Quotes from "Louis XIV", Encarta, "II. Early Life," and "V. Early Reign."

144.  Quotes from "Louis XIV", Encarta, "VI. Expansion of French Power in Europe."  For the action in Acadia, see <acadian-cajun.com>; Clark, Acadia, 112. 

The secret Anglo-French treaty between England's Charles II & Louis XIV, signed in June 1670, is called the Treaty of Dover.  See Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 268, part of a chapter (pp. 267-300) that details the Franco-Dutch War of 1672-78 & its impact on French colonies, especially in the West Indies.  Pritchard explains that the Treaty of Dover came at the beginning of the Third Anglo-Dutch War of 1670-72, "a brief two-year struggle," Pritchard notes, that was "fought entirely at sea."  The treaty allowed the English to fight the Dutch without French interference.  The English response to France's aggression in the Low Countries in 1672 was to step aside as the French had done in 1670. 

England was an erstwhile ally of France in the first years of the war, but in Feb 1674, Parliament denied Charles II funds for the war against Holland, & so Charles abandoned his ally & made peace with the Dutch in the Treaty of Westminster, leaving the French to fight the Dutch coalition alone.  This emboldened the Dutch & led to their attack on the French West Indies, which was repulsed at Martinique.  See Pritchard, cited above. 

For the Dutch attack on Acadia, see Pritchard, p. 282, which adds that Aernouts had been encouraged to attack French Acadia by the English at New York, whom the Dutchman had overawed on his way north from the West Indies.  Pritchard adds that "At Fort Jemseg on the St. John River, he [Aernouts] captured Chambly's lieutenant."  Jemseg lay about 70 miles up Rivière St.-Jean, so the fort that the Dutchman attacked probably was Charles La Tour's old fort at the mouth of the river.  See note 22., above, for a discussion about the fort's location & identity. 

145.  Quote from "Louis XIV", Encarta, "VI. Expansion of French Power in Europe."

Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 269, concludes that Louis XIV's "victory" over the Dutch in 1678 "set the stage for the subsequent struggle between the English and French in the Americas."  He adds:  "By excluding the Dutch from major political and military roles in the New World, the French also brought to the fore the irreconcilability of their own and England's colonial ambitions, a consequence they had not envisioned"--a consequence that would greatly influence Acadian history. 

In Aug 1684, France & Spain negotiated a truce at Regensburg & agreed to call off hostilities for 20 years. 

146.  Quotes from "Louis XIV", Encarta, "II. Early Life" and "VII. The Beginning of Decline."

147.  A good discussion of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes & its consequences, & source of the first quote, is Glenn R. Conrad, "Alsatian Emigration to Louisiana," in Conrad, ed., The French Experience in Louisiana, 163-73, quote from p. 164.  Conrad says that 400,000 Huguenots fled France between 1685 & 1710.  Other estimates range from 210,000 to 900,000.  Louis XIV's revocation of the Edict of Nantes was accomplished by the Edict of Fontainebleau in Oct 1685.  Huguenots fled to England, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Brandenburg-Prussia, Denmark, the Protestant area of the Holy Roman Empire, South Africa (where they became Boers), and the English colonies of North America, especially South Carolina & Virginia. 

Second & third quotes from "Louis XIV", Encarta, "VII. The Beginning of Decline" and "VIII. The European Wars."  

For the Treaty of Whitehall, see Webster, Acadia, 1, 8, 228, which provides the text of the treaty that includes the colonies.  Webster speculates on p. 1:  "It is doubtful if the terms of the Treaty of Whitehall were ever known in the Colonies."  But see Parkman, England & France, 2:127-28, which hints that it was known at least to the French in the summer of 1688.

In Sep 1783, Colbert's son, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, fils, marquis de Seignelay, had replaced his father as finance minister. 

148.  The account of the rise of William of Orange and the fall of James II is from the Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition.  

149.  This description of Andros is from the Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition.  Andros, born in 1637, had served as governor of New York from 1674-81, during the reign of Charles II, & had not been popular with the colonists.  This did not deter James II from appointing him governor of the Dominion of New England.  In early April 1689, when the colonists in Boston heard of the overthrow of James II, they revolted against Andros & sent him packing.  He returned to England as a prisoner of war along with other officials of his government.  They were soon released.  Later, Andros found favor with King William & also with Queen Anne & served as governor of Virginia (1692-97) and of Guernsey (1704-06), his birthplace.  See also Parkman, France & England, 2:124-25, 164.  

150.  Drake, Border Wars, 10-11, 27; Parker France & England, 2:162-64.  La Vallière, the seigneur of Beaubassin, also served as the unconfirmed governor of Acadia from 1678 to 1684, and it was he who moved the military capital from Pentagouët to Chignecto.  One of his successors, Meneval, who became governor in 1687, moved the capital back to Port-Royal.  See Hébert, T., Acadian-Cajun Genealogy & History <acadian-cajun.com>; and Appendix.  

If one counts European incursions against Indians as part of the conflict between the European powers, the North American antecedents of the war that erupted between England & France in 1689 go back even farther than Andros's depredations in Maine in the spring of 1688.  In July 1687, the governor of Canada, the Marquis de Denonville, with nearly 3,000 French regulars, Canadian militia, coureurs de bois, & Indian allies, the largest force mustered in Canada up to that time, had waged a campaign against the Seneca in northern New York & destroyed their villages before returning to Montréal in August.  Before Denonville struck the Seneca, some of his men had seized two parties of New York traders in the Great Lakes area.  After he struck the Seneca, Denonville built a new fort on Lake Ontario at the mouth of the Niagara River in territory claimed by the English.  The governor of New York colony at the time, Thomas Dongan, protested mightily.  The Iroquois exacted their revenge in the months that followed until they signed a treaty of neutrality with Denonville in late 1688.  These events are not considered by historians to be part of King William's War, but they certainly are part of the causation of the conflict.  They had stirred animosities between the English & the French in North America, as well as the wrath of the Iroquois Confederation against the French & their Indian allies in the late 1680s and thus played a part in the eruption of all-out war between the various antagonists in 1689.  See Parkman, 2: chapters 8 & 9; Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 333, 341.

Pritchard, p. 341, notes:  "The local conflict involving the Indians known as Abenaki was over sovereignty and influence along 150 miles of coast between the Kennebec and Sainte-Croix rivers in present-day Maine and the access of New England fishermen to offshore waters off Acadia.  Neither issue directly concerned Acadian colonists, whose relations with neighbouring New England were friendly and subordinate."  Italics added. 

In August 1688, New Englanders attacked and destroyed the French fishing establishment at Chedabouctou, on the Atlantic coast of Acadia.  This also factored into the developing conflict between France & England.  See Pritchard, p. 342. 

151.  Drake, Border Wars, 14-22, 34; Parkman, France & England, 2:163-65.

152.  Drake, Border Wars, 27-30; Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 335, 342.  Parkman, France & England, 2:163, note 2, citing a French source, says that 143 men, women, & children were killed in the raid on Pemaquid.  See Parkman, 2:165-66, for details of the attack; he says little about Saint-Castin's role in the raid & much about the Abenakis' spiritual leader, a Jesuit called Père or Father Thury, adding: "Religion was one of the impelling forces of the war.  In the eyes of the Indian converts, it was a crusade against the enemies of God.  They made their vows to the Virgin before the fight; and the squaws, in their distant villages on the Penobscot, told unceasing beads, and offered unceasing prayers for victory."  One has only to study the so-called King Philip's War of 1675-76 to see how barbarous the hyper-religious English Puritans could be when their battle blood was up.  Brebner, Canada, 62, says 1,400 Iroquois attacked Lachine.  Parkman, 2:133, says the Iroquois who fell on Lachine numbered 1,500 warriors & got into the settlement undetected during a violent hailstorm the night of August 4-5.  Denonville was still governor of New France at the time.  Details of the Lachine fight, described by Parkman as "the most frightful massacre in Canadian history," can be found in 2:133-34.  Parkman says that at the head of the 200 French regulars from Montreal who arrived at Lachine in the wake of the massacre was a French officer named Subercase, the name of the last governor of Acadia (1706-10; was this the same man?).  Parkman, 2:133, describes the fate of some of the Lachine men, women, & children who fell into the hands of the Iroquois--"scenes ... of indescribable and nameless horror."  Parkman, 2:136, note 1, is convinced that the Iroquois struck Lachine on their own, without instigation from the English officials in New York.  He does not give the Abenakis who struck the Maine settlements such open-minded treatment.  See 2:163.   For French abandonment of Fort Frontenac on lower Lake Ontario & other posts before Denonville's successor, Count Frontenac, arrived at Quebec, & Frontenac's anger over this, see Parkman, 2:143-44.

153.  Drake, Border Wars, 38-43.  In England, King William's War was also known as the War of the League of Augsburg, but the more accurate European name may be the War of the Grand Alliance.  It was also called in Europe the War of the Palatinate.  Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 303, uses a different name entirely for the 1688-97 struggle, with the following explanation:  "The War of the League of Augsburg is a misnomer.  the name fails to link the great maritime struggle between 1689 to 1697 to the European continental conflict.  Known in American and English historiography as King William's War or the War of William III, these names do not capture its complexity either.  Various Indian nations in North America were major participants rather than imperial pawns.  Some historians have recently referred to it as the War of the English Succession, for it was the arrival of an heir to James II of England in the summer of 1688 and William of Orange's coup d'état in early November that rapidly transformed Louis XIV's attack inthe Rhineland into a larger war involving the United Provinces, the Emperor, Spain, and England, and reached across the Atlantic to the Americas, but this new designation ignores the fact that Louis XIV initiated the war.  Though not entirely satisfactory, the neutral appellation, the Nine Years' War, is used hereafter."  Pritchard, p. 341, adds:  "An unofficial war between the French and English had been in progress in Acadia for at least two years before European hostilities began," making the name Nine Years' War a misnomer when applied to New France. 

Leckie, Wars of America, 14, says that Frontenac was the first "professional soldier on the new European model" to appear in the New World.  Frontenac, born in 1620, first arrived at Québec as governor-general in 1672 and left 10 years later after quarreling bitterly with the bishop and the intendant of Canada.  But, luckily for the French, he was restored as governor-general in the autumn of 1689, replacing the Marquis de Denonville just in time for the war against England; it was the outbreak of war between the European powers that doubtlessly motivated the king to restore Frontenac to the governorship of his most important colony.  See Parker, France & England, 2:139.  For details of Frontenac's life & accomplishments, including the interesting relationship with his headstrong wife, see Parkman, 2: chapters 1-4, 10-20, the bulk of the volume entitled Count Frontenac and New France Under Louis XIV; DCB, "Buade de Frontenac et de Palluau, Louis de," 1:133-42, by W. J. Eccles, Frontenac's latest biographer, who, according to Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 242 n.42, demolishes "the myth created by Francis Parkman." 

154.  Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 335-36.  For Frontenac's preparations for the raid into New York & New England with the limited resources available to him, see Parkman, France & England, 2:143-46, 154-55.  For details of the Schenectady raid, see Brebner, Canada, 62; Leckie, Wars of America, 15, 17-18; Parkman, 2:155-61.  Sixty or more settlers died at Schenectady, including 22 women and children, and between 80 and 90 settlers were taken as prisoners.  There were 400 residents of the town in Feb 1690, yet a New York official estimated that only 1/6 of the inhabitants of Schenectady escaped death or capture.  See Parkman, 2:160n.  Only 1 Frenchman died in the assault.  Interestingly in the context of this narrative, three of the French officers on the Schenectady raid were sons of prominent Canadian nobleman Charles Le Moyne, one of whom, the Pierre Le Moyne, sieur d'Iberville, would pioneer French settlements in the Gulf of Mexico in the late 1690s & early 1700s.  

Remember that Frontenac arrived at Quebec only two months after the massacre at Lachine, and that the Le Moynes and other colonists, as well as the Christian Iroquois, witnessed the aftermath of the Lachine massacre, which may have stimulated the ferocity of the attack on Schenectady and the New England settlements.  Drake, Border Wars, 45n, addresses this assertion:  "It is claimed that this [the Schenectady massacre] was done in retaliation for outrages committed by the Iroquois in Canada.  But the Iroquois also were savages, neither governed by the rules of civilized war, nor led by English officers."   The Trois-Rivieres column, commanded by François Hertel, numbered 24 Frenchmen, 20 Sokoki Abenakis, & 5 Algonquins; their surprise attack resulted in "about thirty persons of both sexes and all ages ... tomahawked or shot; and fifty-four, chiefly women and children, ... made prisoners."  See Parkman, 2:161-62, 167-68, quote from 167.  The third column, led by René Robineau de Portneuf, brother of a future governor of Acadia, left Quebec in Jan with only 50 Frenchmen & 60 Abenakis.  However, when it reached the Kennebec in May, it numbered 400 or 500 men, mostly Abenaki reinforcements, some of them under Saint-Castin, & 36 men under Hertel who had fought at Salmon Falls.  See Parkman, 2:168-71.  For other overviews of Frontenac's grand offensive, see Drake, chap. 6; & Crouse, Lemoyne d'Iberville, chap. 3, which highlights the participation of the Le Moyne brothers & details the attack on Schenectady, then called Corlear.  

The raid on Schenectady was the only fruit of a grand scheme to capture Albany & New York & to dispossess the entire colony of its Protestant inhabitants, a plan concocted not by Frontenac but by his predecessor, Denonville, Denonville's second in command, Callieres, governor of Montréal, & Louis XIV himself.  See Parkman, 2:140-42, who, in pointing out that Frontenac could not have captured the entire New York colony with the resources given to him, makes, on p.142, the sad assertion:  "In the next century, some of the people of Acadia were torn from their homes by order of a British commander.  The act was harsh and violent, and the innocent were involved with the guilty; but many of the sufferers had provoked their fate, and deserved it."  Parkman goes on to say:  "Louis XIV. commanded that eighteen thousand unoffending persons should be stripped of all that they possessed, and cast out to the mercy of the wilderness.  The atrocity of the plan is matched by its folly.  The king gave explicit orders, but he gave neither ships nor men enough to accomplish them; and the Dutch farmers, goaded to desperation, would have cut his sixteen hundred soldiers to pieces. It was the scheme of a man blinded by a long course of success.  Though perverted by flattery and hardened by unbridled power, he was not cruel by nature; and here, as in the burning of the Palatinate and the persecution of the Huguenots, he would have stood aghast, if his dull imagination could have pictured to him the miseries he was preparing to inflict."  Italics added.  If Parkman were alive today (he died in 1893), any descendant of those hapless Acadians would be happy to remind him of the difference between a plan & an actual event, that what happened to our ancestors in the 1750s transcended a mere scheme of some distant king.

155.  Drake, Border Wars, 55.  See also Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 336. 

155a.  Drake, Border Wars, 58n; Parkman, France & England, 2:173, says that "the plan of a combined attack on Canada seems to have been first proposed by the Iroquois" & that the English colonists met in New York City to embrace the plan.  Parkman goes on to describe the Iroquois pledge to join the expedition with all their warriors as "worthless."  Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 336, insists that the English colonials "intended to conquer New France," not just retaliate against Frontenac's offensives. 

156.  Quote from Drake, Border Wars, 57.  See also Leckie, Wars of America, 18-19.  Parkman, France & England, 2:174, says that depredations against New England's commerce from French cruisers "which found convenient harborage at Port Royal" occurred that winter of 1689-90, and that hostile Indians also drew supplies from Port-Royal, hence the necessity of a New England expedition against Acadia, which Parkman characterizes as "less remote and less critical" than the attack on Canada. 

One is hard put to find balanced history viz. the Acadians in the works of New Englanders like Drake & Parkman.  Still, they are valuable secondary sources, though Parkman's work, especially his point of view, is now just as "historical" as the things he describes. 

157.  Arsenault, History, 63; Clark, Acadia, 112; Drake, Border Wars, 55-58; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 150-55; Hebert, T., Acadian-Cajun Genealogy & History <acadian-cajun.com>; Parkman, France & England, 2:174-75, who provides the detail of the embarkation from Nantasket, a peninsula a few miles southeast of Boston; Webster, Acadia, 9-10.  Parkman also provides details of Phips's remarkable rise to power.  See 2:177-79.  Arsenault says that Phips's Port-Royal expedition arrived on May 19 & numbered 30 ships & 2,000 men and that he burned 30 houses.  Drake, p. 57, gives no date of arrival & says 8 vessels & "seven or eight hundred men afloat."  Leckie, Wars of America, 19, says that Phips' force arrived on May 11, numbered 7 ships & 500 militia, & that Meneval's garrison numbered only 70.  Parker, 2:174, agrees with Leckie's date & numbers, listing 7 ships, 288 sailors, & 400 to 500 militia, & giving Meneval only 70 soldiers.  Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 343, says Phips too with him a frigate of 44 guns, 6 small sloops & ketches, & "about 700 men."  Drake, p. 57, insists that Phips's expedition against Port-Royal was the first of its kind by New Englanders.  He seems to have forgotten the 1654 assault on Acadia by Robert Sedgwick of Boston.  Meneval later testified that Phips's New Englanders were "excessively irritated at the late slaughter of settlers at Salmon Falls and elsewhere" & obviously took it out on the Port-Royal settlers.  See Parkman, 2:175n.  Quote from Parkman, 2:174.  Despite the widespread destruction & the mayhem, fueled by vengeance, that would have accompanied it, no one was killed at Port-Royal as a result of this expedition.  Another factor in the relatively mild treatment of the Acadians by Phips's Puritans is hinted at in Parkman, 2:193, when discussing the rude welcome that Phips received at Quebec later in the year:  "Phips imagined that the Canadians would offer little resistance to the Puritan invasion; for some of the Acadians had felt the influence of their New England neighbors, and shown an inclination to them.  It was far otherwise in Canada, where the English heretics were regarded with abhorrence."  Italics added.  Parkman doubtlessly is referring to the relationship established between the New Englanders & the peninsula Acadians by their illicit but extensive trade over the years--the Acadians, in fact, referred to their New Englander trading partners as "our friends, the enemy."  Names of the Port-Royal councilors are from Griffiths, p. 155.  Phips was back at Boston on May 13, only 2 days after he had descended on Port-Royal.  See Parkman, 2:175.  Arsenault says that Phips brought away 38 French soldiers; Parkman's number is used here.  The pirate depredations are from Clark, Hebert, T., & Webster.  Leisler's part in the attack is from Webster, p.9n, who calls him "a Walloon settled in New York."  Parkman, 2:157, describes Leisler as a New York demagogue who tried to take over the colony after the ouster of Andros in 1689.  

Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 343, adds a cynical note to the New England expedition:  "Massachusetts's attack on Port Royal at the end of May in 1690 was in response to the attacks of combined French and Indian war parties sent out from Canada.  The officially sanctioned private war begun in Massachusetts by land speculators, fishing interests, and Boston merchants was going nowhere until news of the Canadian attacks on Schenectady and Salmon Falls reached New England and reinvigorated the plan by allowing Puritan divines to portray the proposed attack on Port Royal as a religious crusade, disguising its true nature as an affair of pillage with no strategic or military objective." 

158.  Drake, Border Wars, 58-60, says 32 ships & 2,300 men in Phips's expedition; Leckie, Wars of America, 19-21, counts 36 ships and 2,200 men; Parkman, France & England, 2:179-81, 191-92, says 34 ships, including 4 large ones, & that the 2,200 men in the expedition included sailors.  Parkman, 2:179, details the failed efforts of the Massachusetts authorities to seek aid for the attack from the mother country, something New England had never done.  Despite this fact, the English government refused the aid because "its resources were engrossed by the Irish war" that King William had begun earlier that year.  After some bickering among colonial officials, the land expedition was placed under command of a Connecticut officer, Fitz-John Winthrop.  The expedition failed for a number of reasons, among them contention between the New York political factions that had grown out of the recent rebellion against Andros, lack of birch & elm bark to fashion more canoes, small pox, & reluctant Iroquois.  See Parkman, 2:173, 181, 187-89.  For Frontenac's almost comic struggles with the supreme council in Québec after he assumed the governorship, see Parkman, 2:181-84.  For his preparations to secure Québec & the other settlements against the Iroquois & the English, including the happy arrival at Montréal of hundreds of Indian allies from the Great Lakes, laden with furs, about the time that Phips's expedition had departed Boston, see Parkman, 2:184-91.  Final, vital additions to the defenses at Québec were supervised by the city's mayor, Prevost, while Frontenac was at Montréal.  See Parkman, 2:190, 192-93.

159.  Arsenault, History, 63; Drake, Border Wars, 59-65; Leckie, Wars of America, 20-22, a most entertaining description of the fight at Québec based on Parkman; Parkman, France & England, 2: 189-91, chapter 13, the best account of the entire Québec venture.  See Parkman, 1:1408-09, for a description of the dilapidated condition of the fort at Québec during Frontenac's second governorship.  The dates in these sources differ significantly.  Drake, p. 59, says that Phips arrived in site of Québec on Oct 5 & that he withdrew soon after Oct 11.  Leckie, p. 20, says Phips did not arrive until "well into October" but cites no specific dates; he uses Parkman as his secondary source.  Parkman, 2:189ff, says that Frontenac was at Montréal on October 10 when he received word of the approach of the English fleet, that he reached Québec on October 14, 2 days before Phips arrived, that the lights of the English fleet were finally seen from the heights of Québec by sentinels before dawn of Oct 16, & that Phips sent his envoy to Frontenac at 10 a.m. on Oct 16.  Parkman's times & dates are followed here.  Amazingly, Phips remained 3 weeks at Tadoussac, within 3 days sail of Québec!  See Parkman, 2:192.  Part of the exchange of words between Phips's subaltern & Frontenac on the morning of the16th concerned the official French position on the overthrow of King James II of England by his son-in-law, William of Orange, & his daughter Mary, a major cause of the present war, as well as Phips's rough treatment of Meneval.  See Parkman, 2:195-96.  In the fight at the St. Charles ford on Oct 20, the elder Le Moyne brother, the sieur de Sainte-Hélène, fell mortally wounded, & the other brother, the sieur de Longueuil, was wounded.  See Parkman, 2:202.  One of the prisoners exchanged in late October was Captain Davis, who had been captured the previous May at Casco Bay.  See Parkman, 2:203.  Parkman, 2:204-05, gives a thorough evaluation of Québec's condition after Frontenac's victory & makes the case that, despite Phips's defeat, the campaign was a close thing, that Québec could have fallen if Phips's timing had been better.  On his way down the St. Lawrence, Phips nearly captured the annual autumn supply ships from France that Québec still relied so much on.  See Parkman, 2:206.  Captain Mason's exploit is from Arsenault.

Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 336, is no more impressed with Frontenac's conduct than with Phips's, & concludes:  "Neither side displayed much military talent.  A more enterprising general than Governor Frontenac, who enjoyed the advantages of defence and superior numbers including trained, regular infantry, might well have destroyed the 1,200-1,300-man English landing force had he chosen to; while Sir William Phips, completely without military experience and a protege of the Puritan divines who had transformed the expedition into a religious crusade, displayed no military talents at all."

160.  Drake, Border Wars, 38-42, 66-72.  For an excellent description of Church's role in King Phillip's War, see Leckie, Wars of America, 10-13.  King Phillip's Indian name sometimes is given as Metacomet.

161.  Arsenault, History, 63-64; Drake, Border Wars, 72.  Drake says that Villebon recaptured Port-Royal in November 1691; Arsenault, p. 63, says that it happened in June.  Port-Royal would not be restored as the Acadian capital until 1700. 

Meneval never returned to Acadia.  After being held in Boston on Phips's insistence, the erstwhile governor was released by the Massachusetts authorities, & he was free to slip quietly away to France.  Phips refused to return the more valuable of Meneval's private possessions, doubtlessly keeping them as a prize of war.  See Parkman, France & England, 2:175-77.

Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 339, calls Meneval's successor a protégé of Frontenac & says that Villebon served as "commandant of Acadia."  Others sources call him governor.  I follow Pritchard here. 

Webster, Acadia, 11, says Villebon named the new fort at Nashouat Fort St. Joseph (probably after his patron saint, his first name being Joseph).  Nashouat is also spelled Nashwaak & Naxouat &, according to Pritchard, p. 344, was located "about 90 miles upstream on the St. John River at the mouth of the Nashwaak River," opposite today's Fredericton, the capital of New Brunswick.  The capital is on the west side of the river.  The town on the east side, opposite the capital, is called Nashwaaksis, which is Malicite for "little Nashwaak," & is on the side of the river where the fort was located.  A depiction of Fort Nashouat can be found in Chartand, Forts of New France: Northeast America, 17.  A description on p. 16 reads:  "Fort Saint-Joseph, also known as Fort Nashwaak, 1695.  Built during March and April 1692 and abandoned in 1698, this stockade fort built on a square plan of about 100 ft. plus its bastions was located on the southwestern tip of the meeting of St John and Nashwaak rivers.  The buildings within were the commander's quarters, the soldiers' barracks ... and the guard house. ... The bastion on the left had a baking oven."  Pritchard, p. 343, says that after he went to Port-Royal in 1691 to drive out the English, Villebon & his 45 soldiers "landed their munitions and stores upriver at Jemseg," that two English privateers came up the river & seized his ships, & so he retreated overland to Québec before returning to France to get more aid.  The attack at Jemseg may have motivated the new commandant to move even farther up river after he returned from France.  Chartrand, Forts of New France: Northeast America, 19, says:  "In 1690[sic], Governor de Villbon had it [Fort Jemseg] repaired but found it unsuitable and moved farther north two years later." 

Pritchard adds that while Villebon was in France, the King declared to him "that conditions in Europe did not permit reestablishing Port Royal."  Quote from  p. 344.  The King was referring, of course, to the reestablishment of French military presence at Port-Royal, not to the settlement there, which would remain regardless of who controlled the place.  This pronouncement by from the royal authority precluded Villebon's returning to Port-Royal & compelled him to look elsewhere for his headquarters.  On p. 343, Pritchard implies that Villebon went to Rivière St.-Jean to protect the Acadian settlements on the Bay of Fundy from anymore English attacks, but on p. 344 he goes on to say that the new Acadian commandant was no favorite of the settlers, & for good reason:  "During the next three or four years Commandant de Villebon devoted himself to fur trading, going so far as to appropriate supplies for his own use and failing to furnish aid to regular troops and war parties from Naxouat.  If Villebon's reputation among Acadians that he was a thug who terrorised the countryside with the aid of family members in pursuit of his own interests, was accurate, it reinforced the Indian-centeredness of French policy."  This mitigates any notion that Villebon was looking out for the interests of the Acadian settlers & makes a strong case that he was more interested in exploiting than protecting them.  He went to Rivière St.-Jean because of its strategic position, especially its defensibility, & because he could not return to Port-Royal. 

162.  Drake, Border Wars, 73-76; Webster, Acadia, 11-12, quote from p. 12.  See also Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 344. 

163.  Drake Border Wars, 76-85, 92n; Arsenault, History, 63-64; Webster, Acadia, 12-13; Crouse, LeMoyne d'Iberville, 73-79; Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 344-45.  Iberville, despite his youth (he was only 31 in 1692) was an old hand at fighting the English, having several times attacked the English fur-trading posts on Hudson Bay.  He also had participated in the bloody 1690 raid against Schenectady, which had been led by his older brother, Jacques Le Moyne, sieur de Ste.-Hélène.  See Crouse, LeMoyne d'Iberville, chaps. 3 & 4.  Pritchard, p. 339, asserts that Frontenac "was no supporter of Iberville or his ambitions in the Bay...."

The Fort William Henry at Pemaquid, Maine, should not be confused with the more famous fort of the same name on the southern end of Lake George in New York colony, which was built in a later war. 

It was in the spring and summer of 1692 that the witchcraft hysteria hit Salem and other communities in Massachusetts, a state of mind aided no doubt by the bloody warfare on the New England frontier.  Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 337, concludes, sarcastically:  "Capturing New France was more difficult than the Protestant preachers had imagined, and they soon turned to conducting witch trials back home in Salem."  See also Taylor, A., American Colonies, 184-85. 

164.  Webster, Acadia, 13.  In light of Pritchard's picture of him, one wonders why Villebon was so tolerant of this illicit trading.  Was it to confiscate the goods from the Chignecto Acadians after the New Englanders went on their way? 

165.  Webster, Acadia, 13-14; Drake, Border Wars, 93-95, a very anti-French view of this phase of the war, so his assertions here should be approached with caution; Crouse, LeMoyne d'Iberville, 88-89; Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 344-45, a balanced view of the Abenaki settlement.  He says:  "The combination of Villebon's trading, including his inability to supply sufficient trade goods to meet Abenaki demand, Iberville's failure to carry out an assault from the sea in conjunction with the Abenaki, and renewed Massachusetts diplomacy weakened French influence among the natives, who agreed to make peace with Massachusetts in August of 1693."    

King William III had granted Massachusetts a new charter in 1691, which superseded the old corporate charter that James II's Dominion of New England had essentially abolished, and created a single royal colony under Phips that included Massachusetts, Plymouth, Maine, and Nova Scotia, which the English still claimed.  

166.  See <acadian-cajun.com> for the 1686 and 1693 censuses; Webster, Acadia, for the 1686 census.  Figures for Canada and the English colonies are from Brebner, Canada, 62.

167.  Drake, Border Wars, 94-109; Crouse, LeMoyne d'Iberville, chap. 5.  Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 345, calls the Jul 1674 raid on Oyster River (today's Durham), New Hampshire, "the bloodiest raid of the war."  It was motivated by the efforts of Abbé Louis-Pierre Thury from his mission among the Abenaki at Pentagouët.  Thury's Abenaki were accompanied by French Lieutenant Claude-Sébastien Villeu & his troupes de la marine, or colonial regulars.  The Saint-Castin's no doubt had a hand in it, too.  About 100 English settlers died, & 60 were captured, compared to about 60 killed at Schenectady, New York, early in the war. 

168.  Drake, Border Wars, 109-12; Crouse, LeMoyne d'Iberville, chap. 5, is especially detailed; Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 345-46.  Arsenault, History, 64, says that the fort fell on August 14, but Drake says the afternoon of the 15th.

169.  Drake, Border Wars, 112-13; Crouse, LeMoyne d'Iberville, 115-16; Webster, Acadia, 17; Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 346.  Church's numbers come from Arsenault, History, 64.

170.  First quote from Webster, Acadia, 17; second quote from Drake, Border Wars, 113.  See Faragher, A Great & Noble Scheme, 100-01, for details of Bourgeois's encounter with Church and his men.

Again, Pritchard, In Search of Empire, cuts to the chase.  On p. 343, he concludes about Church's attack on Chignecto:  "The French returned [to Port-Royal in 1691], and little was heard from New England until 1696 when Benjamin Church led a force of Christian Indians from southern Massachusetts and militiamen on a revenge attack against the Acadian settlement of Chignecto.  Raised to scalp Abenaki for bounties of 100 pounds per adult male and 50 pounds for each woman and child, it had no strategic purpose.  Moreover, no Indians lived at Chignecto.  Murder and plunder were its raison d'etre." 

171.  Drake, Border Wars, 114; Webster, Acadia, 17-18; Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 346.  Hathorne is sometimes spelled Hawthorne.

172.  Drake, Border Wars, 114-15, quote from p. 115; Crouse, LeMoyne d'Iberville, chap. 6, is very detailed; Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 346-51, is equally detailed & includes a summary of Newfoundland's & Plaisance's part in the war up to & thru Iberville's 1696 expedition.

173.  Drake, Border Wars, 115-16.

174.  Drake, Border Wars, 117-21, 129-34; Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 351-55, has much detail from the French perspective, including a summary of Iberville's exploits in Hudson Bay, & calls Nesmond's fleet "the largest [French] force yet destined for the Americas."  Although Nesmond's part of the 1797 grand offensive was an utter failure, Iberville succeeded grandly in Hudson Bay.  Two years later, he was in the Gulf of Mexico founding the colony of Louisiana. 

The raid on Haverhill is what led to the remarkable savagery of an English captive, Mrs. Hannah Dunstan, who proved more than a match for her Indian captors.  See Drake, 121-28.

175.  Drake, Border Wars, 134, 137, estimates that between 500 and 700 New Englanders died in the war and that hundreds more were taken into captivity.  The loss of life in the Acadian settlements was negligible.  The Acadians' greatest loss was in property and peace of mind.  The worst loss, of course, was among the Indians, especially the "victorious" Abenakis of Maine.  See Drake, Border Wars, 137-38, for a poignant summation of their loss.  Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 346, offers this balanced conclusion:  "Far from seeing the capture of Port Royal in 1690 as one more conquest of Acadia, it may be argued that during the Nine Years' War fewer than 1,000 Indians and a handful of Frenchmen strongly supported from seaward defeated Massachusetts.  Entering the war on a wave of self-confident aggression, the commonwealth ended it with its economy in disarray, with hundreds killed or taken captive, frontier settlements pushed back, and pleading with King William for support from the metropolis." 

175a.  Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 342, notes:  "Acadians, who did not live along the disputed coast or fish along Nova Scotia's southeast coast or at Chedabouctou, were largely isolated from the growing conflict [of the Nine Years' War], becoming caught in its entanglements only twice, in 1690 and again in 1696."  He is referring to the great majority of the Acadian families who lived in the Port-Royal valley & in the Fundy communities at Minas, Cobeguit, & Chignecto.  But a few Acadian families lived at Cap-Sable, which faced the Atlantic, at other Atlantic-side communities such as La Hève & Mirliguèche, & on Rivière St.-Jean near Villebon's fort, all closer to the fighting.  Pentagouët also was a part of greater Acadia.  Another factor in the war's limited impact on the Acadians was their relatively small population.  There were less than a thousand settlers in greater Acadia at war's end.  Compare this to the much larger numbers in Canada & the exponentially larger numbers in the English Atlantic colonies, especially New England.  See note 166, above, which references the Acadian censuses of 1686 & 1693 & compares the results with Canada & the English provinces. 

Pritchard notes on p. 342 that "Acadian settlements were indefensible ...."  Sadly true, with only Port-Royal & Nashouat perhaps the exception. 

Pritchard, p. 255, remind us:  "Acadians [during French control of the colony] learned to coexist with both English and French so well that they referred to their New England neighbours as 'our friends, the enemy.'" 

176.  For continued Indian raids in New England, see Drake, Border Wars, 134-36.  In January 1699, the Abenakis signed a peace treaty with the New Englanders at Casco, and the raids in the region ended ... for now. 

177.  Drake, Border Wars, 153n.

178.  Drake, Border Wars, 141-42. 

179.  Drake, Border Wars, 142; Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition.  Leckie, Wars of America, 24-25, adds:  "... when Louis followed up his justifiable claim [to the Spanish throne] by a series of unwarranted aggressions, and then excluded English merchants from the Spanish colonial trade, the war began.  It was a commercial war to the death."  Mathé Allain, "In Search of a Policy, 1701-1731," in Conrad, ed., The French Experience in Louisiana, 86-87, emphasizes the role of the Caribbean slave trade, or asiento, as a cause of the war.  Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 358-59, agrees that these were important causal factors & adds on p. 359 that "The War of the Spanish Succession differed from all previous French wars in the New World chiefly because Spain was an ally rather than an enemy."  Portugal started the war as a French ally but became an enemy in 1703. 

180.  Drake, Border Wars, 142, 149-50, 153-54.  Frontenac had died in 1698, at the end of King William's War.  Brouillan was the contentious governor at Plaisance, Newfoundland, who had given Iberville such grief in the final months of King William's War.  See Crouse, LeMoyne d'Iberville, chap. 6.  

For the chronic failure of the French navy to protest France's colonies, see Pritchard, In Search of Empire, chaps. 6 & 7.

181.  Drake, Border Wars, 150-52.  Quote from p. 152n. See Arsenault, History, 66.

182.  Drake, Border Wars, 154-70; Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 394.

183.  Drake, Border Wars, 172-86; Arsenault, History, 65; Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 394.

184.  Quote from Drake, Border Wars, 193; Leckie, Wars of America, 25.

185.  Drake, Border Wars, 194.  Arsenault, History, 65, claims that Church's force numbered 1,300.

186.  First quote from Drake, Border Wars, 195-96; second quote from Arsenault, History, 65.  See also Drake, Border Wars, 201, for a critique of Governor Dudley's orders to Church..

187.  Drake, Border Wars, 196-200; Arsenault, History, 65.  Ganong, Champlain's Island, 24, says that Church burned the residence of the Sieur de Chartier near the mouth of the Ste. Croixe, now the site of Calais, Maine/St. Stephen, New Brunswick.   

188.  Drake, Border Wars, 201; Arsenault, History, 65.  Drake's and Arsenault's chronologies, as well as some details, are different; for instance, Arsenault has Church attacking Port-Royal before he descended on Minas, and he claims that the Acadians themselves destroyed the dykes.  Drake is followed here.  Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 209, points out how quickly the Minas Acadians repaired their broken dykes & restored the fertility of their reclaimed fields & pastures.

189.  Drake, Border Wars, 201-02.  Arsenault, History, 65, using French accounts, insists that Church assaulted the Acadian capital and that the Port-Royal defenders offered a fierce resistance.  Drake, who follows English accounts, says otherwise.  Arsenault also claims that Church burned and pillaged many houses along the Port-Royal basin and took 30 prisoners from among the inhabitants, which is probably true.  Arsenault says that Governor Brouillan, who had succeeded Villabon three years before, commanded the Port-Royal garrison during Church's operation, but Brouillan may have already left for France, never to return to Acadia, leaving his lieutenant, Simon-Pierre Denys de Bonaventure, a grandnephew of Nicolas Denys, in charge of the colony.  See also Arsenault, History, 66.  Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 398, says that Church "destroyed the settlements of Grand Pré, Pigiquit, and Cobequid in the Minas Basin but failed to attack Port Royal though it was poorly fortified."  It's a stretch to call Cobeguit a Minas Basin settlement, but the Basin des Mines offered a water-born access to Cobeguit if one was determined to get there. 

190.  Drake, Border Wars, 202-03; Arsenault, History, 65-66, which insists that the Chignecto Acadians drove Church's force away.  Miller, "Chignecto," insists that Church's raid against the Acadian settlement was in retaliation for the atrocities committed in New England  the year before by Sébastien de La Vallière de Beaubassin and his Indians.  Beaubassin, as Miller calls Sébastien, was a son of the original seigneur of Beaubassin, Michel de La Vallière, whose home was on present-day Tonge's Island near Beaubassin.  However, anyone who studies Church's expedition carefully will see that the old soldier had many French fish to fry other than the ones at Chignecto.  

Church boasted that he left only 5 houses standing in all of Acadia.  He took 45 hostages from Acadia to Boston, among them Noël Doiron and his soon-to-wife Marie Henry. 

191.  Drake, Border Wars, 205-08.

192.  Drake, Border Wars, 208-15.

193.  Drake, Border Wars, 216-23.

194.  Drake, Border Wars, 224-28; Arsenault, History, 66, which calls him Colonel Marsh.

195.  Drake, Border Wars, 228; Arsenault, History, 66, which says the New Englanders arrived in front of Port-Royal on June 6, which is the New Style date.  One must remember that this was the time of the transition between the Old Style and New Style English calendars.  Drake uses the Old Style for consistency, which is used here.  Drake claims, citing French sources, that the sudden appearance of the New Englanders in such force unnerved the Port-Royal garrison but that Subercase was able to restore morale before the New Englanders attacked in earnest.  Jean-Vincent de Saint-Castin died sometime in 1707, and his son took over his fiefdom in Maine and became the fourth Baron de Saint-Castin.  See White, DGFA-1, 6. 

Pritchard, Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 397, says that the ship La Biche, commanded by Louis-Denis, Sieur de La Ronde, with a crew of 60 Canadians, assisted in the defense of Port-Royal, where the ship had been recently built. 

196.  Drake, Border Wars, 228-29; Arsenault, History, 66.

197.  Drake, Border Wars, 229-33; Arsenault, History, 66, which claims that March left behind at Port-Royal "about 100 dead and as many wounded."  The number of dead seems high considering the limited action during the siege.  One assumes that March took his wounded with him when he retreated to Casco.

198.  Drake, Border Wars, 233-34, says that March still commanded this second expedition.  Arsenault, History, 66, claims that March was replaced by Colonel Wainwright, one of his subordinates in the first venture, on the eve of the second expedition and that Wainwright took 2,000 men and 20 ships to Port-Royal in August.  Arsenault also claims that a "coastal buccaneer" warned Subercase of Wainwright's approach and that Subercase had time to ask for help from Jemseg and other far-flung Acadian settlements, including La Hève.  

199.  Drake, Border Wars, 234-35; Arsenault, History, 66-67, which says the siege was lifted on September 4 (New Style calendar).  Drake says that while Wainwright's force fell back to their boats, Subercase sent out reinforcements to help Saint-Castin, and that the Frenchmen were roughly handled.  Leckie, Wars of America, 25, dismisses the 1707 ventures at Port-Royal as "a brief exchange of shots that can best be described as a token fight."

Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 397, concludes that the "bravery and gallant service" of the garrison at Port-Royal in the summer of 1707 "could not hide the fact that the northern colonies had been abandoned [by France] in their hour of need.  Port Royal had been rescued in June by Canadians and in August by buccaneers from Saint-Domingue."  Pritchard offers no details on how the Saint-Domingue buccaneers helped drive March & Wainwright away other than, "One week before the second New England attack, Pierre Morpain, captain of L'Intrépide, sailed into Port Royal with several prizes and carrying more than 600 barrels of flour, which he delivered to Governor Subercase."  We must assume that Morpain's crew helped man Port-Royal's guns, & that their flour helped sustain the garrison.   

200.  Drake, Border Wars, 236-49.

201.  Drake, Border Wars, 251; Arsenault, History, 67-68.

202.  Drake, Border Wars, 250-51; Leckie, Wars of America, 25.  Drake promotes Vetch to the rank of colonel; Leckie calls him a captain.  Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 230, says that Vetch received his promotion from captain to colonel in London in Feb 1709, 2 months before he returned to Boston.  When the expedition against Port-Royal finally got underway in the fall of 1710, Nicholson had been promoted from colonel to "General and Commander-in-Chief."  See Griffiths, p. 233.

203.  See Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Ed. for biographies of Vetch & Nicholson.  See also Bruce T. McCully, "NICHOLSON, Francis," DCB, 2:496-99; G. M. Waller, "VETCH, Samuel," DCB, 650-52; Drake, Border Wars, 250-51.  

204.  Drake, Border Wars, 251-52.  Leckie, Wars of America, 25-26, says that Vetch's plan also included an English offensive against Spanish Florida.  Leckie's numbers are slightly different from Drake's:  200 from New Jersey instead of 300.  Leckie provides the figures for the regulars and includes New Hampshire militiamen in the sea borne operation.  Drake states that Vetch went to New York with Nicholson.  Leckie's version of events keeps Vetch in Boston.

205.  Drake, Border Wars, 252-53; Leckie, Wars of America, 26.  New Jersey and Pennsylvania provided money instead.  Anderson, Crucible of War, 20, says that the Iroquois "cooperated minimally" with the venture "and delayed a planned invasion of Canada until it had to be aborted."

206.  Drake, Border Wars, 253; Leckie, Wars of America, 26.

207.  Quote from Drake, Border Wars, 254.  See also Leckie, Wars of America, 26-27.  The Moody whom Drake mentions probably was William Moody, a New Englander from Exeter who later fell into the hands of the Abenakis and was burnt alive at the stake.  See Drake, pp. 256-59. 

208.  Quote from Leckie, Wars of America, 26-27.  Drake, Border Wars, 254, says that after the debacle of 1709, Nicholson went back to England to solicit help for the 1710 venture against Port-Royal.  Also going to England to elicit support for the venture was Peter Schuyler, a prominent New Yorker, who took several Mohawk chiefs along.  The Indians proved to be a sensation in London.  They even received an audience with the queen.  See Drake, pp. 254-56.  For the specifics of the New England force, see Drake, p. 259.  Leckie, Wars of America, 27, puts it at 400 British marines and 1,500 militia.  Arsenault, History, 69, 70, insists that the English fleet arrived at the Port-Royal basin on September 18 and did not land in front of the fort until October 6.  Drake and Leckie are followed here.  

209.  Quotes from Drake, Border Wars, 260.  See also Leckie, Wars of America, 27.  Arsenault, History, 67, dates Subercase's letter to Count Pontchartrain, as October 1, 1709, a year before Nicholson's attack.  

Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 398, offers the usual grand perspective for the plight of Subercase as well as his Acadian charges:  "Military defeats in Europe--Blenheim (1704), Ramillies (1706), and Oudenarde (1708)--shattered the prestige of French arms, and the collapse of the navy increasingly left the northern colonies on their own.  Pontchartrain [the minister of marine and chief minister for colonial affairs] had never considered them very valuable and had no resources to succor them even had he thought otherwise.  In 1708, the thoroughly beaten New Englanders, on the other hand, appealed to England for aid.  It finally arrived off Port Royal two years later in the form of a fleet of 34 vessels including seven warships and a landing force of 1,500 troops."  In other words, France was defeated, & French Acadia was doomed. 

210.  Quote from Leckie, Wars of America, 27, whose dates follow Drake, Border Wars, 260-61.  Arsenault, History, 69-71, says that the fort held out for 19 days and surrendered on October 12.

211.  Arsenault, History, 71; Drake, Border Wars, 261; Leckie, Wars of America, 27.  The name "Nova Scotia" was used by the English as far back as the 1620s, when King James I had awarded French Acadia to his good Scots friend, Sir William Alexander, the Count of Sterling.  

212.  Quotes from Drake, Border Wars, 261, 262.  See also Arsenault, History, 71, 73.  Vaudreuil's reply to Nicholson's threat was a threat of his own, to retaliate in kind if the English mistreated the Acadians.  Milling, Exile Without End, 5, says that the agreement between the British & the French after the fall of Port-Royal in 1710 gave the inhabitants of the Port-Royal area 2 years to remove themselves beyond the 3-mile limit of British control.  

213.  Arsenault, History, 73.

214.  Arsenault, History, 73-74, says there were 80 Brits at Bloody Creek; Drake Border Wars, 284-85, does not mention the fight at Bloody Creek, only that the garrison at "Annapolis" was much reduced and that the Acadians were ripe for open rebellion once reinforcements arrived from Canada.  Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 246, argues that it cannot be proved if there were any Acadians in the fight at Bloody Creek because Saint-Castin had arrived in the area only days before the skirmish & had no time to recruit any of the locals before he fell upon the British force.  She says that "at least" 15 Brits were killed in the fight, including the detachment's commander, a Captain Pidgeon, who commanded 70 men, not 80.  Griffiths, p. 247, says that immediately after the fight at Bloody Creek, the Abenaki & Mi'kmaq with Saint-Castin as well as the Acadians in & around Annapolis Royal imposed a "semi-siege" on the British garrison & even killed some of the soldiers who went amongst them for supplies.

If anyone doubts that the Acadians of this time were capable of an armed insurrection against the British ... or against any abusive authority ... one has only to consult the Acadian censuses of 1686, 1693, 1698, 1700, 1701, and 1703, which detail the number of "guns" in each household and reveal that these peaceful farmers were a well-armed population.  The Census of 1703, taken by the French at the beginning of Queen Anne's War, is especially revealing as it details how many "arms bearers" each Acadian household could provide.  See <acadian-cajun.com/acadia4.htm>; Griffiths, p. 531, note 141.  

215.  Quote from Leckie, Wars of America, 28, who uses the phrase "armchair admiral."  Drake, Border Wars, 267-83, devotes an entire chapter to the details of the 1711 (misad)venture.  See also Arsenault, History, 72; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 248.  Anderson, Crucible of War, 20, assigns a prominent role to the Iroquois in aborting Nicholson's expedition:  "In 1711 they [the Iroquois] showed ostensible enthusiasm for another expedition [against Canada], while quietly sending word of what was afoot to the French; thus they thwarted the second invasion [of Canada] as effectively as the first."  In English the Île-aux-Oeufs would be translated as Egg Island or the Isle of Eggs.  See the map in Drake, Border Wars, 278, for the location of the disaster.  See also Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 399-400, offers the usual wide perspective. 

216.  See Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition, for the details of the Peace of Utrecht, which actually was a series of treaties negotiated between the war's many belligerents and signed from April 11, 1713, to November 5, 1715.  See also Arsenault, History, 74-75; Hébert, T., Acadian-Cajun Genealogy & History. 

One of the rewards Britain received from the Peace of Utrecht was a monopoly on transporting slaves from West Africa to the Spanish colonies in the New World--the asiento de negros.  See Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 400. 

Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 400, makes the sobering observation that, on the eve of the Peace of Utrecht, "Though Port Royal was lost, Acadia was not...," implying that France was not compelled by military circumstances to give up the Acadian peninsula.  After pointing out that the successful defense of the northern colonies was due not to French arms but to the colonists themselves, Pritchard goes on:  "From a colonial viewpoint nothing accounted for the huge surrenders of French territory in the Americas that arose from the Treaty of Utrecht that France signed with her European enemies on 12 April 1713.  French colonists would learn that the Americas were to be won or lost on the battlefields of Europe rather than at sea or in the New World."  See p. 421 for a summation of France's obsession with "continentalism" & its affect on its overseas empire, including the observation:  "Colonial possessions were not so tied to the Crown as ever to place colonialism above continentalism."  And, on p. 422:  "Colonists and their leaders were shaped by circumstances far more than might be expected in light of absolutism's image of itself and attempts to regulate and control development.  During the decades between 1670 and 1730, France was always too preoccupied with dynastic (i.e., continental) interests and conflict to expend time, manpower, and wealth on colonies." 

Mathé Allain, "In Search of a Policy, 1701-1731," in Conrad, ed., The French Experience in Louisiana, 88, notes ominously:  "The prize territorial plum England picked up at Utrecht was Acadia, the cession of which began the encirclement of New France."  She adds:  "The loss of Acadia made imperative French development of new lines of defense.  Their response, the erection of a chain of forts from Louisbourg to Mobile, produced constant friction between the French and English colonies for the next half century." And, on p. 89:  "... the changes wrought in the colonial map carried the seeds of future conflict ..." a circumstance that would prove dire to the peace-loving Acadians. 

Final quote from Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 400. 

217.  Drake, Border Wars, 285, in the conclusion of his grand study of King William's and Queen Anne's wars, hints darkly at the fate of the Acadians, which I will fully reveal in Chapter Two of this narrative. 

The transition here in terminology from "English" to "British" is deliberate.  From her accession to the throne in 1702 until 1707, Queen Anne's official title was Queen of England, Scotland, and Ireland.  In 1707, upon the Act of Union that joined Scotland to England and Wales, she was proclaimed Queen of Great Britain and Ireland, so "Britain" and "British" will be the descriptors I will use in subsequent chapters.  For an excellent summary of the circumstances that led Scotland to unite, finally, with England, see Taylor, A., American Colonies, 293-94. 

Even though after 1713 the name "Acadia" no longer applied to the peninsula east of the Bay of Fundy, & "Nova Scotia" now was its proper name, the French settlers living in British Nova Scotia still called themselves, and were called by others, Acadians.

For the boundary question, see Parkman, France & England, 2:928-29, which reminds us that the question plagued the British & the French for decades to come & that the question was, in fact, a major cause of 2 more wars between Britain & France in North America.  

Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 401, is especially good in pointing out the contrast between British & French claims over Acadian boundaries:  "Acadia's 'ancient boundaries' were never agreed upon.  British claims extended the new territory to the St. Lawrence River, while French claims successfully confined British sovereignty to peninsular Nova Scotia and conserved all the islands in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, including Cape Breton Island, and the mainland from the Chignecto isthmus as far south as the Kennebec River."  Italics mine.  He adds:  "This territory continued to be occupied by the people of the Abenaki Confederacy," a fact that would plague New Englanders for more years to come. 

218.  Quote from Parkman, France & England, 2:906.  Arsenault, History, 75, gives a detailed analysis of the treaty and its provisions.  

219.  See Arsenault, History, 75-76, 79; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 269-74; Parkman, France & England, 2:473-75, 906-07, 928-29, who, typical of devout Protestant scholars, emphasizes the role of the French priests in stirring up the Acadians against the British.  Milling, Exile Without End, 5, says "The majority of the Acadians expressed a desire to remove to Canada," but that the British authorities more or less tricked them into staying.  

The only substantive agreement on Acadian boundaries after the War of the Spanish Succession was reached in Sep 1720, when French diplomats, "with the Regent's full support, insisted that Canso Island was a part of [French-held] Île Royale [today's Cape Breton Island], and the British accepted that any islands lying north of the mainland (i.e., peninsular Nova Scotia) and in the Gulf of St. Lawrence were French possessions."  See Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 417.  This opened up the flood gates for peninsula Acadians to move to Île Royale & especially to Île St.-Jean, today's Prince Edward Island, which was considered a part of the French Maritime colony headquartered at Louisbourg on Île Royale. 

220.  See Arsenault, History, 77-78, who points out that some of the younger families without land left the Annapolis and Minas basins and moved to Chepoudy and Petitcoudiac to escape British rule.  An example of this migration would be the Beausoleil Broussard brothers of the upper Annapolis valley.  The French also tried to lure Acadians to Cape Breton Island, which the French now called Île Royale, but most of the Acadians refused to budge.  See also Parkman, France & England, 2:462-63. 

The oldest families in Acadia were, in alphabetical order, Boudrot, Bourg, Comeau, Doucet, Dugas, Gaudet, Gautrot, Girouard, Hébert, Landry, Martin, and Thériot, whose patriarchs had settled in the colony by 1640.  See Appendix.  Quote from Arceneaux, No Spark of Malice, 47.  

221.  The term "French Neutrals" dates from 1730, when the Acadians took a conditional oath administered by Governor Phillips.

222.  Cable, Creoles & Cajuns, 248, 249.

223.  Mouton family genealogy is from Arsenault, Généalogie, 403, 702, 1013, 1026-27, 2560-64; Arsenault, History, 165-66; Hébert, D., Southwest LA Records, CD, 1-A:585-86 & passim; West, Atlas of LA Surnames, 112-13, 182-83n; White, DGFA-1, 1238-40.  Three of the Mouton brothers were married to Bastarache girls, at least two of whom were sisters.  Note discrepancies in dates between Arsenault & White.  Arsenault, Généalogie, 2561, 2562, gives Jean's birth year as 1755.  Jean is buried in St. John Catholic Cemetery, Lafayette; his grave stone says that he died on 22 Nov 1834 at age 80 & gives his birth year as 1754.  See [photo].  The grave stone date is followed here.  Jean had an interesting nickname or dit--chapeau, or hat.  One wonders why.  See Hébert, D., 1-A:511.  Family tradition says that Jean was called Chapeau to distinguish him from older brother Marin, who was called Capuchon, another kind of head gear.  As a result, there are Chapeau Moutons and Capuchon Moutons of South LA. 

224.  Jean's gravestone holds a plague that calls him a patriot of the American Revolution.  See [photo]. 

Attakapas Post, or Poste des Attakapas, was first settled in the 1750s, a decade before the Acadians arrived, by a hand full of French Creole families, most of whom raised cattle; the church records for the settlement date back to 1756.  The site of the old French/Spanish post was renamed St. Martinville in 1817.  See Hébert, D., Southwest LA Records, 1-A: 728.  The Indian name is pronounced uh-TACK-uh-paw & is "officially" spelled Atakapas, but the name of the district is almost invariably spelled Attakapas.  

To illustrate the point that "all" Acadians are related, Marguerite Martin, Alexandre Mouton's maternal grandmother, is one of the author's ancestors as well!  Her first husband was Rene Robichaux, & one of their daughters, Genevieve, married Amand Dugas, father of Rosalie Dugas, who married Pierre Cormier, pere, called Pierre of Opelousas, one of my paternal great-grandfathers.  Who knows how many other Cajuns today share blood with Governor Mouton.

225.  The principal source used here for the details of Alexandre's life is DAB, 7:295.  A word about the spelling of Alexandre Mouton's name:  his grave stone and the article in the DAB spell his first name "Alexander," the anglicized spelling of the name.  All other sources spell his first name using the French version, "Alexandre," which is used here.  See [photo] for his likeness and his gravesite, as well as a portrait of five of his children.  Edward Simon was a native of Belgium who served as an associate justice on the Louisiana Supreme Court from 1841-49.  Simon died at St. Martinville in 1867.  His son, Arthur, served as a major in the Confederate army under Alexandre's son Alfred.  See Perrin, SW LA, pt. 2:78.

226.  The c1800 town house built by Jean, later called the Sunday House, is still standing in Lafayette as part of the Alexandre Mouton House Museum on Lafayette Street, near downtown.  See [photo].  Jean Mouton is celebrated as the founder of Vermilionville/Lafayette.  Alexandre Mouton's slave count is from 1860 U.S. Federal Census, Slave Schedules, Lafayette Parish, pp. 53-54.  His slaves in 1860, 51 females & 70 males, ranged in age from 2 to 70 years old.  For the origin of the term "genteel Acadian," see Dormon, Cajuns, 30, who attributes it to folklorist Patricia K. Rickels.  See her essay, "The Folklore of the Acadians," in Conrad, ed., The Cajuns, 223, 229-30, in which she categorizes Cajuns as "Genteel Acadians" and "Just Plain Coonasses."  (This author confesses that he is one of the latter.)

227.  Hébert, D., Southwest LA Records, 2-A:822, her birth/baptismal record, spells her name Céleste Zilia, so there is also confusion in the spelling of Zelia Rousseau Mouton's name.  Her tombstone, like her birth record, spells her name "Zilia," but genealogical and family records spell it "Zelia," which is used here.  See [photo]

228.  See <sec.state.la.us/33.htm>.

229.  Bragg, LA in the Confederacy, 8-10, 12, 14-15.

230.  The Louisiana Convention remained in session a little over two months, first in Baton Rouge, convening on January 23 in the state capitol and meeting there until the state legislature convened a few days later.  The convention then moved to New Orleans, where it reconvened on January 29, went into recess on February 12, reconvened on March 4, and adjourned on March 26.  One of the convention's most significant actions during its session in New Orleans was the ratification of the Constitution of the Confederate States by a vote of 101 to 7 on March 21, 5 days before it adjourned.  When the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter on April 12 and the War Between the States commenced 3 days later with Lincoln's call for volunteers to suppress the Southern rebellion, the Louisiana Convention had been done with its work for two and a half weeks.  See Bragg, LA in the Confederacy, 27-46.

231.  See Bragg, LA in the Confederacy., 180-81.  As in the United States at the time, the Confederate States constitution provided that the state legislators, not the voters, would choose national senators, two per state.  The Louisiana state legislature cast ballots for the office on November 28, 1861.  Mouton came out sixth of 10 on the first ballot and was not even considered for the second ballot, which elected men from Concordia & Orleans parishes to the national senate, now meeting in Richmond.  So one could claim that Alexandre Mouton never lost a popular election.

232.  See Conrad, Attakapas Domesday Book, 35, 47-48; Faragher, A Great & Noble Scheme, 430; Eric R. Krause, DCB, "GOUTIN, François-Marie," 3:264-65, source of quote; Bernard Pothier, "GOUTIN, Mathieu de," DCB, 2: 257-58, source of quotes; NOAR, vols. 1, 2, 4; White, DGFA-1, 756-59, 1508-09; White, DGFA-1 English, 155-56, source of quote; Stephen A. White, "The First Acadian in Louisiana: Joseph DE GOUTIN de Ville," in <acadian-cajun.com/degoutin.htm>.

Marie, Pierre THIBODEAU's oldest child & Olivier LANDRY's paternal grandmother, was born in c1661, & Jeanne, Pierre THIBODEAU's 7th child & 6th daughter & Joseph DE GOUTIN de Ville's mother, was born in c1672.  Joseph BROUSSARD dit Beausoleil's wife Agnès was a daughter of Michel THIBODEAU, younger brother of Marie & Jeanne.  Joseph's older brother Alexandre married Marguerite, Agnès's older sister, so there was an extensive connection to the THIBODEAUs among the first Acadians to come to LA.  See White, DGFA-1, 1508-09, 1517. 

233.  Although he is not on their commemorative Wall of Names with the other Acadians who emigrated to LA, the Acadian Memorial in St. Martinville, LA, recognizes Henry S. Thibodaux as the first of 4 Acadian governors of the state. 

Joseph G. Tregle, Jr., DLB, 786, calls him Henry Schuyler Thibodaux, says he was born in 1769 in Albany, NY, that his father Alexis Thibodaux was a "French Canadian" & his mother was Anna Blanchard, details his life, including wives & children, & says he died in 1847 [obviously a misprint]; BRDR, 2:104-05, 694 (SJA-2, 20), the record of his first marriage, calls him Henrrique Tibodaux, calls his wife Felicitas Bonvilen (Bonvillain), gives his & her parents' names, says his parents were Alexo Thibodeaux & Ana Blanchar "of New York in America," says her parents were "of St. Charles Parish," & that the witnesses to his marriage were Francisco Frederic, Rosalia Frederic, & Josef Frederic; BRDR, 2:69, 694 (SJO-3, 25 & 26; SJO-85, 5), the record of his second marriage, calls him Henri Thibodeaux "of Canada," calls his wife Brigita Belanger, gives his & her parents' names, says his parents were Alexi & Anna Thibodeaux, & that the witnesses to his marriage were Nicolas Belanger [probably his father-in-law], Guilermo Doiron/Dorion, & William Dawson; <www.sec.state.la.us/26.htm>, calls him Henry Schuyler Thibodaux, includes a portrait of him from the LA State Museum, labels him a National Republican, says that he was Catholic, that he was a shoemaker after his term as governor, provides his correct death date, & says that he died of an abscessed liver during his campaign for governor; Hébert, D., South LA Records, 1:503 (Houma Ct.Hse.: Succ.: #17), a succession inventory record, dated 24 Nov 1827, calls him H. S. Thibodeaux m. (2)Brigitte Belanger, m. (1)Félicité Bonvilain, dates his will 28 Jul 1817, & lists his children as, from his first marriage, Léandre Bannon, Aubin B., & Eugènie, &, from his second marriage, Henry Michel, Émilie, Elmire, Henry Claiborne, & Barron Goforth; Hébert, D., South LA Records, 1:503 (Thib.Ct.Hse.: Succ.: Year 1828), another succession inventory record, dated 5 Jan 1828, calls his Henry Schuyler Thibodeaux m. Brigitte Belanger, & lists his children as Léandre, Aubin, & Eugènie; Hébert, D., South LA Records, 1:503 (Thib.Ct.Hse.: Succ.: Year 1828), papers related to a land sale, dated 6 Nov 1828, calls him Henry S. Thibodeaux m. Brigitte Belanger, & lists his children as Léandre B., Eugènie m. Joseph Paul Bourgeois, Émilie m. Leufroy Barras, Elmire m. Evariste Porche, Henry Claiborne, & Bannon Goforth.   Hébert, D., South LA Records, 1:503-04, includes many other court documents--deeds, loans, hypotheques, mainlevees, mortgages, acquitances of mortgage, quittances, quit claims, receipts, & the like--relating to Henry Schuyler Thibodaux & his family & associates. 

West, Atlas of LA Surnames, 140, citing Reeves's study of LA governors, published in 1976, and Marguerite E. Watkins's LSU master's thesis on the history of Terrebonne Parish, dated 1939, says that Henry S. Thibodaux "was not an Acadian refugee, but was born in Albany, N.Y., in 1769 of French-Canadian parents."  To be sure, Henry S. Thibodaux came to the colony alone, not with other Acadians.  A recent study, however, Jobb, The Cajuns, 265-66, using information gathered by Dick Thibodeau of MA, says that Henry S.'s father, Alexis, was from Village Thibodeau, Pigiguit, on the Ste.-Croix River near present-day Windsor, Nova Scotia, that Alexis, his wife Anne Blanchard, & sons Simon, age 5, & Étienne, age 3, were exiled to PA in the fall of 1755, deported probably aboard the British sloop Three Friends, which left Pigiguit on 27 Oct & reached PA 21 Nov, but Gov. Morris did not let the Acadians land until early Mar 1756.  Anne died in either the late 1750s or early 1760s in PA, & Alexis remarried to Catherine LeBlanc, a widow with 4 children from her previous marriage, in 1762.  Their son Joseph was born in PA in 1763, so, according to Jobb & his source, Henry Schuyler Thibodaux's mother had to be Catherine LeBlanc, not Anne Blanchard, if Henry was born at Albany, NY, in 1769.  However, his 2 marriage records, cited above, & the birth/baptismal records of 3 of his children, that of son Cubino, dated 23 Apr 1796, in BRDR, 2:694 (SJA-3, 136), daughter Eugenia, dated 7 Jan 1798, in BRDR, 2:694 (SJA-3, 160), & son Miguel Enrique, dated 18 Jul 1801, in BRDR, 2:697 (SJO-1, 148 & 149), are clear that Henry S. Thibodaux's parents were Alexis Thibodeau & Anne Blanchard, not Alexis Thibodeau & Catherine LeBlanc.  

234.  The best source on the transition from Acadienne to Cadien to Cajun is still Brasseaux, Acadian to Cajun.  Bernard, The Cajuns takes the story into the 20th century. 

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Copyright (c) 2001-12  Steven A. Cormier