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."[93] 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.
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.[94] 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.[95] 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 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.[96] 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 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.[97] 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 constant annoyance. One writer declares that
Acadia languishes under selfish greed and petty tyranny; that everything
was hoped from Brouillan when he first came, but that hope has changed
to despair; that he abuses the King's authority to make money, sells
wine and brandy at retail, quarrels with officers who are not
punctilious enough in saluting him, forces the inhabitants to catch seal
and cod for the King, and then cheats them of their pay, and
countenances an obnoxious churchwarden whose daughter is his mistress.
"The country groans, but dares not utter a word," concludes the accuser,
as he closes his indictment.[98]
Brouillan died in the autumn of 1705, on which M. de Goutin, a
magistrate who acted as intendant, and was therefore at once the
colleague of the late governor and a spy upon him, writes to the
minister that "the divine justice has at last taken pity on the good
people of this country," but that as it is base to accuse a dead man, he
will not say that the public could not help showing their joy at the
late governor's departure; and he adds that the deceased was charged
with a scandalous connection with the Widow de Freneuse. Nor will he
reply, he says, to the governor's complaint to the court about a
pretended cabal, of which he, De Goutin, was the head, and which was in
reality only three or four honest men, incapable of any kind of
deviation, who used to meet in a friendly way, and had given offence by
not bowing down before the beast.[99]
Then he changes the subject, and goes on to say that on a certain festal
occasion he was invited by Bonaventure, who acted as governor after the
death of Brouillan, to share with him the honor of touching off a
bonfire before the fort gate; and that this excited such envy, jealousy,
and discord that he begs the minister, once for all, to settle the
question whether a first magistrate has not the right to the honor of
touching off a bonfire jointly with a governor.
De Goutin sometimes discourses of more serious matters. He tells the
minister that the inhabitants have plenty of cattle, and more hemp than
they can use, but neither pots, scythes, sickles, knives, hatchets,
kettles for the Indians, nor salt for themselves. "We should be
fortunate if our enemies would continue to supply our necessities and
take the beaver-skins with which the colony is gorged;" adding, however,
that the Acadians hate the English, and will not trade with them if they
can help it.[100]
In the next year the "Bastonnais" were again bringing supplies, and the
Acadians again receiving them. The new governor, Subercase, far from
being pleased at this, was much annoyed, or professed to be so, and
wrote to Ponchartrain, "Nobody could suffer more than I do at seeing the
English so coolly carry on their trade under our very noses." Then he
proceeds to the inevitable personalities. "You wish me to write without
reserve of the officers here; I have little good to tell you;" and he
names two who to the best of his belief have lost their wits, a third
who is incorrigibly lazy, and a fourth who is eccentric; adding that he
is tolerably well satisfied with the rest, except M. de la Ronde. "You
see, Monseigneur, that I am as much in need of a madhouse as of
barracks; and what is worse, I am afraid that the _mauvais esprit_ of
this country will drive me crazy too."[101] "You write to me," he
continues, "that you are informed that M. Labat has killed some cattle
belonging to the inhabitants. If so, he has expiated his fault by
blowing off his thumb by the bursting of his gun while he was firing at
a sheep. I am sure that the moon has a good deal to do with his
behavior; he always acts very strangely when she is on the wane."
The charge brought against Brouillan in regard to Madame de Freneuse was
brought also against Bonaventure in connection with the same lady. "The
story," says Subercase, "was pushed as far as hell could desire;"[102]
and he partially defends the accused, declaring that at least his
fidelity to the King is beyond question.
De Goutin had a quarrel with Subercase, and writes: "I do all that is
possible to live on good terms with him, and to that end I walk as if in
the chamber of a sick prince whose sleep is of the lightest." As
Subercase defends Bonaventure, De Goutin attacks him, and gives
particulars concerning him and Madame de Freneuse which need not be
recounted here. Then comes a story about a quarrel caused by some cows
belonging to Madame de Freneuse which got into the garden of Madame de
Saint-Vincent, and were driven out by a soldier who presumed to strike
one of them with a long stick. "The facts," gravely adds De Goutin,
"have been certified to me as I have the honor to relate them to your
Grandeur."[103] Then the minister is treated to a story of one Allein.
"He insulted Madame de Belleisle at the church door after high mass, and
when her son, a boy of fourteen, interposed, Allein gave him such a box
on the ear that it drew blood; and I am assured that M. Petit, the
priest, ran to the rescue in his sacerdotal robes." Subercase, on his
side, after complaining that the price of a certain canoe had been
unjustly deducted from his pay, though he never had the said canoe at
all, protests to Ponchartrain, "there is no country on earth where I
would not rather live than in this, by reason of the ill-disposed
persons who inhabit it."[104]
There was the usual friction between the temporal and the spiritual
powers. "The Church," writes Subercase, "has long claimed the right of
commanding here, or at least of sharing authority with the civil
rulers."[105] The Church had formerly been represented by the Capuchin
friars, and afterwards by the Récollets. Every complaint was of course
carried to the minister. In 1700 we find M. de Villieu, who then held a
provisional command in the colony, accusing the ecclesiastics of illicit
trade with the English.[106] Bonaventure reports to Ponchartrain that
Père Félix, chaplain of the fort, asked that the gate might be opened,
in order that he might carry the sacraments to a sick man, his real
object being to marry Captain Duvivier to a young woman named Marie Muis
de Poubomcoup,--contrary, as the governor thought, to the good of the
service. He therefore forbade the match; on which the priests told him
that when they had made up their minds to do anything, nobody had power
to turn them from it; and the chaplain presently added that he cared no
more for the governor than for the mud on his shoes.[107] He carried his
point, and married Duvivier in spite of the commander.
Every king's ship from Acadia brought to Ponchartrain letters full of
matters like these. In one year, 1703, he got at least fourteen such.
If half of what Saint-Simon tells us of him is true, it is not to be
supposed that he gave himself much trouble concerning them. This does
not make it the less astonishing that in the midst of a great and
disastrous war a minister of State should be expected to waste time on
matters worthy of a knot of old gossips babbling round a tea-table. That
pompous spectre which calls itself the Dignity of History would scorn to
take note of them; yet they are highly instructive, for the morbid
anatomy of this little colony has a scientific value as exhibiting, all
the more vividly for the narrowness of the field, the workings of an
unmitigated paternalism acting from across the Atlantic. The King's
servants in Acadia pestered his minister at Versailles with their
pettiest squabbles, while Marlborough and Eugene were threatening his
throne with destruction.[108] The same system prevailed in Canada; but
as there the field was broader and the men often larger, the effects are
less whimsically vivid than they appear under the Acadian microscope.
The two provinces, however, were ruled alike; and about this time the
Canadian Intendant Raudot was writing to Ponchartrain in a strain worthy
of De Goutin, Subercase, or Bonaventure.[109]
FOOTNOTES:
[93] _Brouillan au Ministre, 6 Octobre, 1702._
[94] _Mémoire de Subercase._
[95] _Mémoire du Roy au Sieur de Brouillan, 23 Mars, 1700_; _Le Ministre
à Villebon, 9 Avril, 1700_.
[96] _Subercase au Ministre, 3 Janvier, 1710._
[97] Pioneers of France in the New World, 253.
[98] La Touche, _Mémoire sur l'Acadie_, 1702 (adressé à Ponchartrain).
[99] "Que trois ou quatre amis, honnêtes gens, incapables de gauchir en
quoique ce soit, pour n'avoir pas fléché devant la bête, aient été
qualifiés de cabalistes."--_De Goutin au Ministre, 4 Décembre, 1705._
[100] _De Goutin au Ministre, 22 Décembre, 1707._ In 1705 Bonaventure,
in a time of scarcity, sent a vessel to Boston to buy provisions, on
pretence of exchanging prisoners. _Bonaventure au Ministre, 30 Novembre,
1705._
[101] "Ne me fasse à mon tour tourner la cervelle."--_Subercase au
Ministre, 20 Décembre, 1708._
[102] "On a poussé la chose aussi loin que l'enfer le pouvait
désirer."--_Subercase au Ministre, 20 Décembre, 1708._
[103] _De Goutin au Ministre, 29 Décembre, 1708._
[104] _Subercase au Ministre, 20 Décembre, 1708._
[105] _Ibid._
[106] _Villieu au Ministre, 20 Octobre, 1700._
[107] "Il répondit qu'il se soucioit de moi comme de la boue de ses
souliers."--_Bonaventure au Ministre, 30 Novembre, 1705._
[108] These letters of Acadian officials are in the Archives du
Ministère de la Marine et des Colonies at Paris. Copies of some of them
will be found in the 3d series of the _Correspondance Officielle_ at
Ottawa.
[109] _Raudot au Ministre, 20 Septembre, 1709._ The copy before me
covers 108 folio pages, filled with gossiping personalities.