Nova Scotia (10 page)

   
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 someone 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.