1704-1709.] DUDLEY SUSTAINED. 109 thus the country conceived the idea that the town was fattening at its expense. Vaudreuil reports to the minister that the people of New England want to avenge themselves by an attack on Canada, but that their chief men are for a policy of defence. This was far from being wholly true; but the notion that the rural population bore a grudge against Boston had taken strong hold of the French, who even believed that if the town were attacked, the country would not move hand or foot to help it. Perhaps it was well for them that they did not act on the belief, which, as afterwards appeared, was one of their many mistakes touching the character and disposition of their English neighbors. The sentences on Borland and his five companions were annulled by the Queen and Council, on the ground that the Assembly was not competent to try the case.1 The passionate charges against Dudley and a petition to the Queen for his removal were equally unavailing. The Assemblies of Massachusetts and New Hampshire, the chief merchants, the officers of militia, and many of the ministers sent addresses to the Queen in praise of the governor's administration; 2 and though his enemies declared that the votes and signatures were obtained by the arts familiar to him, his recall was prevented, and he held his office seven years longer. 1 Council Record, in Hutchinson, ii. 144. 2 These addresses are appended to A Modest Inquiry into the Grounds and Occasions of a late Pamphlet intituled a Memorial of the present Deplorable State of New England. London, 1707. CHAPTER VI. 1700-1710. THE OLD RÉGIME IN ACADIA. THE FISHERY QUESTION. PRIVATEERS AND PIRATES. · PORT ROYAL. OFFICIAL GOSSIP.- ABUSE OF BROUILLAN.-COMPLAINTS OF DE GOUTIN.-SUBERCASE AND HIS OFFICERS.CHURCH AND STATE. -PATERNAL GOVERNMENT. THE French province of Acadia, answering to the present Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, was a government separate from Canada and subordinate to it. Jacques François de Brouillan, appointed to command it, landed at Chibucto, the site of Halifax, in 1702, and crossed by hills and forests to the Basin of Mines, where he found a small but prosperous settlement. "It seems to me," he wrote to the minister, "that these people live like true republicans, acknowledging neither royal authority nor courts of law."1 It was merely that their remoteness and isolation made them independent, of necessity, so far as concerned temporal government. When Brouillan reached Port Royal he found a different state of things. The fort and garrison were in bad condition; but the adjacent settlement, primitive as it was, appeared on the whole duly submissive. 1 Brouillan au Ministre, 6 Octobre, 1702. 1700-1710.] THE FISHERY QUESTION. 111 Possibly it would have been less so if it had been more prosperous; but the inhabitants had lately been deprived of fishing, their best resource, by a New England privateer which had driven their craft from the neighboring seas; and when the governor sent Lieutenant Neuvillette in an armed vessel to seize the interloping stranger, a fight ensued, in which the lieutenant was killed, and his vessel captured. New England is said to have had no less than three hundred vessels every year in these waters. Before the war a French officer proposed that New England sailors should be hired to teach the Acadians how to fish, and the King seems to have approved the plan.2 Whether it was adopted or not, New England in peace or war had a lion's share of the Acadian fisheries. "It grieves me to the heart," writes Subercase, Brouillan's successor, "to see Messieurs les Bastonnais enrich themselves in our domain; for the base of their commerce is the fish which they catch off our coasts, and send to all parts of the world." When the war broke out, Brouillan's fighting resources were so small that he was forced to depend largely for help on sea-rovers of more than doubtful character. They came chiefly from the West Indies, the old haunt of buccaneers, and were sometimes mere pirates, and sometimes semi-piratical privateers 1 Mémoire de Subercase. 2 Mémoire du Roy au Sieur de Brouillan, 23 Mars, 1700; Le Ministre à Villebon, 9 Avril, 1700. commissioned by French West Indian governors. Brouillan's successor writes that their opportunities are good, since at least a thousand vessels enter Boston every year.1 Besides these irregular allies, the governor usually had at his disposal two French frigates of thirty and sixty guns, to which was opposed the Massachusetts navy, consisting of a ship of fifty-six guns, and the "province galley," of twenty-two. In 1710 one of these Massachusetts vessels appeared off the coast escorting a fishing-fleet of no less than two hundred and fifty sail, some of which were afterwards captured by French corsairs. A good number of these last, however, were taken from time to time by Boston sea-rovers, who, like their enemies, sometimes bore a close likeness to pirates. They seized French fishing and trading vessels, attacked French corsairs, sometimes traded with the Acadians, and sometimes plundered them. What with West India rum brought by the French freebooters, and New England rum brought by the English, it is reported that one could get drunk in Acadia for two sous. Port Royal, now Annapolis, was the seat of government, and the only place of any strength in the colony. The fort, a sodded earthwork, lately put into tolerable repair by the joint labor of the soldiers and inhabitants, stood on the point of land between the mouth of the river Annapolis and that of the small stream now called Allen's River, whence it 1 Subercase au Ministre, 3 Janvier, 1710. 1700-1710.] PORT ROYAL. 113 looked down the long basin, or land-locked bay, which, framed in hills and forests, had so won the heart of the Baron de Poutrincourt a century before.1 The garrison was small, counting in 1704 only a hundred and eighty-five soldiers and eight commissioned officers. At the right of the fort, between it and the mouth of the Annapolis, was the Acadian village, consisting of seventy or eighty small houses of one story and an attic, built of planks, boards, or logs, simple and rude, but tolerably comfortable. It had also a small, new wooden church, to the building of which the inhabitants had contributed eight hundred francs, while the King paid the rest. The inhabitants had no voice whatever in public affairs, though the colonial minister had granted them the privilege of travelling in time of peace without passports. The ruling class, civil and military, formed a group apart, living in or near the fort, in complete independence of public opinion, supposing such to have existed. They looked only to their masters at Versailles; and hence a state of things as curious as it was lamentable. The little settlement was a hot-bed of gossip, backbiting, and slander. Officials of every degree were continually trying to undermine and supplant one another, besieging the minister with mutual charges. Brouillan, the governor, was a frequent object of attack. He seems to have been of an irritable temper, aggravated perhaps by an old unhealed wound in the cheek, which gave him con1 Pioneers of France in the New World, ii. 71. VOL. I.-8 |