Acadia Divided
As of 1635, French Acadia was divided roughly into two halves. Razilly had control over Sable Island, La Have, Port Royal and the St. Croix River area. La Tour controlled Cape Sable on the South Shore of Nova Scotia and Fort La Tour on the Saint John River. Both held titles as lieutenant-governors and were supposed to report to the One Hundred Associates. There was no great conflict here because Razilly’s business interests were in lumber, fishing and farming, while La Tour was concentrating on the fur trade.
When Razilly died, his authority went to his cousin, Charles d’Aulnay, who decided to move the La Have settlers to Port Royal and to bring new blood from France. He built a new improved fort on the other side of the Annapolis Basin on what is now the site of Annapolis Royal. With the English and Scots temporarily out of the picture, rivalry flared between Charles de La Tour and d’Aulnay. La Tour, after all, had been given a grant from the king and so had d’Aulnay. There was supposed to be a clear division of lands, but each was jealous of the other. D’Aulnay had also become more interested in the fur trade. It seems that he wanted it all. In 1638, th*e king elevated d’Aulnay to La Tour’s rank and declared that the potentially lucrative fur trade should be divided equally. The king failed to have a good grasp of the geography of Acadia and ended up creating an overlap of ownership between the two men, escalating the problem.
Across the Bay of Fundy from Port Royal, La Tour had built a trading post and fort. On a visit to Port Royal in 1639, there was a quarrel over the rights to trading furs. It led to one of La Tour’s men being killed. Back at his own fort, La Tour then imprisoned some of d’Aulnay’s men. La Tour also personally went to Port Royal and attacked d’Aulnay. De’Aulnay wanted to get rid of La Tour and sailed to France to air his grievances, stating that La Tour had become an enemy of France. D’Aulnay was persuasive and he had been instructed by the king to seize La Tour and then take over all of Acadia. La Tour refused to submit and left with his family for Fort La Tour. Out of spite, d’Aulnay attacked the Cape Sable settlement that had been under La Tour’s control and burned La Tour’s family home to the ground.
La Tour had been having friendly trade relations with New England and this obviously complicated things. He too sought help from his friends in France who were among the One Hundred Associates. His wife, Françoise Marie Jacquelin, personally went to France and brought back ammunition and supplies. La Tour had also sought help from New England. The Puritans there did not want to become embroiled in the struggle, but they were nonetheless willing to look for some profit from it, so they leased some ships to La Tour.
D’Aulnay had the upper hand, however, receiving from France five ships and about 500 men. They arrived at the Saint John River fort, ready to attack. It was obvious to La Tour that his men wouldn’t stand a chance. I guess he figured he had nowhere else to turn for help except his trading buddies in New England, so along with his wife, he quickly sailed off in search of assistance.
La Tour and his wife glided into Boston Harbour looking for help and one might wonder why on earth the New Englanders would want to get involved in this feud between Frenchmen. Well, the Bostonian merchants knew of d’Aulnay and felt that if he became too powerful he might be a threat to them. Also, Charles de La Tour’s father, Claude, had actually become a Knight Baronet of Nova Scotia back when William Alexander was carving up Nova Scotia. Are you confused yet? Perhaps most logical was the fact that La Tour owed a lot of money to the Boston merchants from whom he had previously purchased supplies. Bostonians knew that if La Tour lost out against the well-armed d’Aulnay, they’d never see a cent for their goods. So they graciously contributed 140 men willing to fight and four ships to float them back to Saint John.
It’s not clear why d’Aulnay had not already simply trashed and destroyed Fort La Tour. Maybe he wanted a good fight as well as the spoils and he was waiting for the despised “enemy of France,” La Tour, to return. If so, he miscalculated his opponent’s advantage. La Tour and his Yanks were able to send d’Aulnay scuttling back across the big bay. y
Threats from d’Aulnay continued, however, and La Tour sent his wife on a ship to France with a load of goods to help firm up relations there. The captain of the ship, unfortunately, didn’t seem to like taking orders from a woman and, instead of sailing straight to France, he went fishing near Newfoundland and then, tiring of La Tour’s wife’s complaints, dropped her off in Boston. Undaunted and indignant, Françoise Marie Jacquelin took her complaint to the primitive American legal system, sued the pants off the disrespectful captain, and won. She used the money to buy supplies and, after two years, returned to her husband at eFort La Tour.
In the spring of 1645, it was Charles who was away in Boston when the dogged d’Aulnay attacked again. Françoise Marie Jacquelin was not a woman to give up easily. Bolstered by her success in an American legal battle, she was ready and willing to deal with whatever adversity lay in her path. With only forty-five men she kept up a defence against a large battalion of d’Aulnay’s men for three days and three nights. One of her sentries, a Swiss soldier, allowed a breach in the perimeter and d’Aulnay’s men began to scale the walls as she bravely stood at the forefront of her men to fight back.
D’Aulnay now knew that he was fighting against a woman and the thought of being defeated by her was a humiliation that he could not bear. He got a message to her that if she were to surrender, he would not kill her men. La Tour’s wife saw some glimmer of hope for the survival of her people and she surrendered.
While it is not exactly fair to pick out the good guys from the bad in this one, one can certainly admire the courage and stamina of this brave woman. D’Aulnay on the other hand, comes off as a bastard. Realizing at the end of the battle that he had been up against only a small band of hard-nosed fighters led by a woman, he felt dishonoured. So he went against his oath and hanged a good portion of her men, while Marie watched with a rope fitted around her own neck. She was spared the death sentence on that day, but died three weeks later while imprisoned.
To the winner goes the spoils and so King Louis of France named d’Aulnay master of all of Acadia, while Charles de La Tour, his wife dead and his fort lost, went to hide in the governor’s chateau at Quebec. He may have fallen out of favour with the king, but he was not without friends and had not given up hope.
Drowning in Debt
D’Aulnay’s Acadia now stretched beyond the old boundaries to include everything to the mouth of the St. Lawrence River. For good measure he seized Cape Breton Island, which had been under the control of the One Hundred Associates. Nicholas Denys, who also held land grants from the French king, had settled into fishing and trading from Miscou Island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. He too was forced out by the greedy d’Aulnay, who wanted a true monopoly of the region. In one of history’s gentle ironies, it appears that d’Aulnay, having eliminated all of his allies who might have helped him truly develop Acadia, found himself unable to replace those men he had driven away. His ambitions were thwarted. In 1650 he fell out of a canoe and drowned. Some say he was “allowed to drown” by disgruntled Mi’kmaq men who were with him at the time.
La Tour must have been elated to hear of d’Aulnay’s watery demise, and he was bold enough to sail back to France to reassert his rights in America. Unfortunately, La Tour’s debts, which had once proven to be an asset in getting help from the Bostonians, came back to haunt him. He was thrown into prison for not being able to repay his loans in his own country. He was, however, later absolved of all debts and accusations by Louis XIV an*d even declared lieutenant-governor over all of d’Aulnay’s Acadia.
Ironically, d’Aulnay had drowned with his own set of debts, and a man named Emmanuel Le Borgne claimed he should be the rightful heir to Acadia. Jeanne Motin, d’Aulnay’s widow, who had been fortunate enough to have kept her power-hungry husband at some distance through much of their marriage, claimed the right to half of what her husband had “owned” but was willing to give the other half to som
eone who would support her claim. Undoubtedly, these claims kept many scribes and legal professionals hard at work until in 1653 a compromise was worked out. Jeanne Motin, with eight children, agreed to marry La Tour – a very bizarre twist, indeed. Twenty years of bad blood would be forgotten and the dowry was the fort on the Saint John River, which had been snatched from La Tour by Jeanne’s husband at the expense of many men and La Tour’s own wife.
A Very British French Colony
Around this time, the English were getting nervous again about the growth of non-English settlements in the Americas. The king commissioned Major Robert Sedgwick to attack New Holland, but when peace was arranged between the English and the Dutch, he turned his animosity toward Acadia. The English had many potential enemies and if one was lost, another could always be found. New England was prospering – especially the fishing industry. E*ngland wanted to protect her interests there and Acadia was just too close for comfort.
La Tour realized he was up against a formidable enemy, although one that could potentially be an ally. Sedgwick had three ships and 170 men when he arrived in Acadia. La Tour gave up without a fight and, instead of cowering as a loser in the affair, La Tour reasserted his baronial status as granted by William Alexander to the Frenchman’s dead father. Charles even travelled with Sedgwick to England, where this point was affirmed. The English were then willing to recognize La Tour’s authority over the south and east of Acadia, while the rest of Acadia would remain under separate English control. Undaunted and still very much enamoured with Acadian life, La Tour returned with his family to live at Cape Sable. After all the many years of wrangling over the territory, he simply sold his rights to almost everything and stayed out of any future politics or feuding. “Happily ever after” would probably be stretching the point, but La Tour had certainly proven himself to be a resilient survivor.
The One Hundred Associates had backed Emmanuel Le Borgne as the new man in charge of much of Acadia and granted him everything that had not been in La Tour’s possession. By 1657, Le Borgne was, for all intents, the governor of that region, but he had been obliged to capitulate to the English, since he had no claims to being a baronet as La Tour had. The terms of the deal, however, allowed the French inhabitants to stay where they were and they were allowed to keep their lands. British governors were more or less uninterested in this region. The Acadians were left alone for some time and no new English settlement was encouraged.
As France and French political interest faded, however, the Acadians grew comfortable in dealing with the English. Many became bilingual and, in general, they had more contact with the British than with the French.
Chapter 10
Chapter 10
Idyllic Rural Life
The population of early Acadia was never substantial. Like the Scots and English, few average French citizens were eager to leave the safety and relative comfort of home to seek a new life in this region. Nor was the French government overly zealous to populate Acadia. Razilly had brought more than 300 men in 1632. The first birth to a French couple took place in 1636, although there is little mention of women in the records. A passenger list to Acadia from 1636 still exists and it logs seventy-seven men and one woman on board. Many settlers soon decided they were happier in France and returned of their own free will on ships headed home. Others dispersed to tiny settlements such as Canso and no real records were kept to report on life there.
Both d’Aulnay and La Tour recruited engagés who went to Acadia under contract to maintain the outposts and help in the fur trade. In 1644 d’Aulnay claimed to have had a complement of 200 men, but he too does not mention women.
The French population of Acadia in 1641 is estimated to have been a mere 120 souls. In 1643 it had more than tripled to 400, but by 1671 the number was roughly the same. By 1666, French government policy had declared outright that it would not be a bright move to send more emigrants abroad and depopulate France merely to help develop this terrain of questionable value. In short, France was wondering if Acadia was simply more trouble thean it was worth.
New England, on the other hand, was growing by leaps and bounds and certainly the 60,000 colonists in Massachusetts had little to fear from the 400 Acadians to the north, who were of little interest even to their own French king.
Acadia was a fairly small item in the list of continuing grievances and negotiations between France and England, but it was often a bargaining chip to be tossed on the table at the various summits between the two countries. In the 1667 Treaty of Breda, England gave Acadia back to France. Grandfontaine, the new French governor, would have a tough time reasserting French authority over the nearly autonomous Acadians,h who had settled into their own unique way of life under the disinterested British. Acadians were now mostly farmers and fishermen, people who made a living but not a profit from the resources. Without profit for French businesses back on the continent, there was little of value in such a colony, one would argue, in the polished dining rooms of Paris. The new region drew a communal sigh of apathy in France. New Englanders, as a result, fished as freely off the shores of Acadia when it was French as when it was English.
Acadian life and livelihood had shifted from fur trading to agriculture. Acadians were becoming truly rooted in the place they lived. Many knew they could sustain themselves through farming and trade and they were becoming more and more independent of France. By the time Robert Sedgwick sailed from Boston to capture Port Royal as part of the French and English war, the rivalry had relatively little impact on the daily lives of the farming families. And as Charles de La Tour had once accepted the British authority, it was clear that “citizenship” issues were no big deal to most Acadians. The issue of who was in charge was almost a moot point, because there was almost no influx of British settlers. There simply weren’t many folks in England who wanted to live in Nova Scotia. Maybe that’s partly why the Treaty of Breda gave Acadia back to the French. Whatever bloodshed and violence had occurred in the name of loyalty or empire had been a waste, as much larger forces of political concerns were at work on the continent.
Between 1671 and 1672, however, as squabbles erupted between English and French, some Acadians tried to extricate themselves from the problem by moving to the isthmus of Chignecto under the leadership of Jacques Beaubassin. Here was an area of beautiful, fertile salt marshes. Naming the area for their leader, the homesteaders would almost succeed in establishing a kind of autonomy and, with a population of about 200, the communyity might have become a happily-ever-after tale if it hadn’t been for the fact that such a level of independence would eventually rile both the French and English authorities.
Grand Pré, on Fundy’s Minas Basin, also became a prospering farming community. This idyllic, rural, family-centred village would one day become the site of one of history’s most notorious deportation exercises.
The Acadians were never very good at playing by the rules, especially when the rules were issued by distant, arrogant and ill-informed government officials. So they saw the obvious advantages of trading with whoever wanted to do business with them. This meant New England, where grain and furs could be traded for manufactured things like dishes, needles, knives, as well as rum and sugar from the Caribbean. On paper, this trade was illegal, but no one seemed to worry, since it was mutually rewarding. Slowly but surely, Acadia became integrated into the New England economy.
Because of their tiny population, they were not a threat to anyone English, French or Mi’kmaq. They blended in, they adapted and they carried out equitable trade. For a while, both the French and the English were happy to simply ignore them. Yet New Englanders, including many of the merchants who were profiting from the deals that went down, never fully trusted the Acadians. They were, after all, French and they had suspiciously good relations with the Native people. It was also feared that the French government would some day restrict fishing off the Nova Scotia coast. Business was good with the Acadian neighbours, but paranoia lurked in the shadows.
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nbsp; Easy Targets for Revenge
Compared to much of the history of Nova Scotia – a story of power struggles, greed, exploitation and even genocide – the Acadian legacy is fairly benign. An alternate time-line may have allowed for this culture of farmers, edyke builders, family men and women to have evolved into an agrarian utopia. They wanted to be out of the French/English wranglings. And if only they had been left alone, Nova Scotia would have evolved very differently. But the politics of Europe hovered like a dangerous thunderhead always above them.
In 1686 another treaty was signed, one of neutrality between the French and English. England acknowledged France’s sole right to the inshore fishing along Acadia. (“Inshore” implies fishing that is coastal as opposed to fishing on the Grand Banks, which is much further offshore.) So now the New Englanders had something tangible to hate the Acadians for. Ships from Boston and the other New England ports had been harvesting fish along Acadian shores for years and turning great profits. But by 1689, problems in Europe again intruded into their lives. Yet another war had broken out between the English and the French. In America it was known as “King William’s War” or, in Europe, the “Wars of the League of Augsburg.” In a bizarre twist of logic, Quebec attacked New Englanders and the New Englanders retaliated by attacking the Acadians – presumably because they were French, nearby and easy to whip. There was also the possibility of expanding the boundaries of New England to include these lands to the north. Whatever good trading relations had developed over the previous decades were quickly dismissed by New Englanders, whose heightened hatred of the French was driving them to retaliate against the wrong “enemy.”
The raids from New England began in 1689 and continued into 1690 as Sir William Phipps attacked Port Royal and abducted Governor de Meneval, taking him to Boston. When Joseph Villebon, a military man from France, arrived later that year, he found Port Royal had been plundered. The French soldiers there had been taken away as prisoners. Villebon took control of Acadia – or at least he decided that there was no one else available for the job, so it was up to him. Described as “domineering but dissolute,” Villebon moved the settlement to Jemseg, where the English tracked him down, plundered his small community and took his men as prisoners. Villebon went on to build good relations with the Native population in New Brunswick and may have incited them to set off on raids of New England. Although at least one peace treaty was signed between the Natives of Maine and the New Englanders, Villebon used gifts of brandy, tobacco and arms to help inspire French and Native attacks on Maine and New Hampshire.
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