The Acadian Exiles | Page 2

explorer Champlain.
The vessels reached Cape La Heve on the south coast of Nova Scotia in
May. They rounded Cape Sable, sailed up the Bay of Fundy, and

entered the Annapolis Basin, which Champlain named Port Royal. The
scene here so stirred the admiration of the Baron de Poutrincourt that
he coveted the place as an estate for his family, and begged De Monts,
who by his patent was lord of the entire country, to grant him the
adjoining lands. De Monts consented; the estate was conveyed; and
Poutrincourt became the seigneur of Port Royal.
The adventurers crossed to the New Brunswick shore, turned their
vessel westward, passed the mouth of the river St John, which they
named, and finally dropped anchor in Passamaquoddy Bay. Here, on a
small island near the mouth of the river St Croix, now on the
boundary-line between New Brunswick and Maine, De Monts landed
his colonists. They cleared the ground; and, within an enclosure known
as the Habitation de l'Isle Saincte-Croix, erected a few buildings--'one
made with very fair and artificial carpentry work' for De Monts, while
others, less ornamental, were for 'Monsieur d'Orville, Monsieur
Champlein, Monsieur Champdore, and other men of high standing.'
Then as the season waned the vessels, which linked them to the world
they had left, unfurled their sails and set out for France. Seventy-nine
men remained at St Croix, among them De Monts and Champlain. In
the vast solitude of forest they settled down for the winter, which was
destined to be full of horrors. By spring thirty-five of the company had
died of scurvy and twenty more were at the point of death. Evidently St
Croix was not a good place for a colony. The soil was sandy and there
was no fresh water. So, in June, after the arrival of a vessel bringing
supplies from France, De Monts and Champlain set out to explore the
coasts in search of a better site. But, finding none which they deemed
suitable, they decided to tempt fortune at Poutrincourt's domain of Port
Royal. Thither, then, in August the colonists moved, carrying their
implements and stores across the Bay of Fundy, and landing on the
north side of the Annapolis Basin, opposite Goat Island, where the
village of Lower Granville now stands.
The colony thus formed at Port Royal in the summer of 1605--the first
agricultural settlement of Europeans on soil which is now
Canadian--had a broken existence of eight years. Owing to intrigues at

the French court, De Monts lost his charter in 1607 and the colony was
temporarily abandoned; but it was re-established in 1610 by
Poutrincourt and his son Charles de Biencourt. The episode of Port
Royal, one of the most lively in Canadian history, introduces to us
some striking characters. Besides the leaders in the enterprise, already
mentioned --De Monts, Champlain, Poutrincourt, and Biencourt--we
meet here Lescarbot, [Footnote: Lescarbot was the historian of the
colony. His History of New France, reprinted by the Champlain Society
(Toronto, 1911), with an English translation, notes, and appendices by
W. L. Grant, is a delightful and instructive work.] lawyer, merry
philosopher, historian, and farmer; likewise, Louis Hebert, planting
vines and sowing wheat--the same Louis Hebert who afterwards
became the first tiller of the soil at Quebec. Here, also, is Membertou,
sagamore of the Micmacs, 'a man of a hundred summers' and 'the most
formidable savage within the memory of man.' Hither, too, in 1611,
came the Jesuits Biard and Masse, the first of the black-robed followers
of Loyola to set foot in New France. But the colony was to perish in an
event which foreshadowed the struggle in America between France and
England. In 1613 the English Captain Argall from new-founded
Virginia sailed up the coasts of Acadia looking for Frenchmen. The
Jesuits had just begun on Mount Desert Island the mission of St
Sauveur. This Argall raided and destroyed. He then went on and
ravaged Port Royal. And its occupants, young Biencourt and a handful
of companions, were forced to take to a wandering life among the
Indians.
Twenty years passed before the French made another organized effort
to colonize Acadia. The interval, however, was not without events
which had a bearing on the later fortunes of the colony. Missionaries
from Quebec, both Recollets and Jesuits, took up their abode among
the Indians, on the river St John and at Nipisiguit on Chaleur Bay.
Trading companies exploited the fur fields and the fisheries, and French
vessels visited the coasts every summer. It was during this period that
the English Puritans landed at Plymouth (1620), at Salem (1628), and
at Boston (1630), and made a lodgment there on the south-west flank of
Acadia. The period, too, saw Sir William Alexander's Scots in Nova
Scotia and saw the English Kirkes raiding the settlements of