A Half-Century of Conflict (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER VI. 1700-1710. THE OLD REGIME IN ACAD1A. The Fishery Question. Privateers And Pirates. Port Boyal. Official Gossip. Abuse Of Brouillan.Com- Plaints OF De GOUTIN.SUBERCASE AND HIS OFFICERS. Church Amd 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 Francis 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 vras, appeared on the whole duly submissive. 1 Brouillan au Ministre, 6 Octobre, 1702. 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.1 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 appro...