X
A Border Fixed on the Coast of Maine
THE planting of trading posts farther and farther up the coast of Maine by the New Englanders did not go unchallenged by the French. Although in English eyes it had been well established ever since Captain Argall’s raids in the Bay of Fundy that English claims to the coast now extended well above the 45th parallel, even to the St. Lawrence valley, no such admission had ever been made by the French. There were always French traders in Acadia (Nova Scotia) who envisaged their preserves as extending well down the coast of Maine and who intended to resist further encroachments in those parts.
In fact, as it came about, these fur traders protected and maintained the French claim to much of this coastal region during an incident of the Thirty Years’ War which put most of New France under the English flag for three years, from 1629 to 1632.
Prior to this episode the affairs of New France had reached a turning point. In 1627 Samuel de Champlain’s difficulties became acute. That year the Iroquois, his irreconcilable enemies, renewed their bloody savagery in the interior, while along the coast the English were closing off the very entrance to the valley of the St. Lawrence with their plantations and trading posts and their increased shipping.
Although Champlain’s company had a good season in furs, collecting 22,000 that summer which could be sold in France at ten francs each, the expense of operation had made the outlook none too bright relatively for the shareholders who expected huge returns. Besides the salaries of the Viceroy in France and of Champlain as his lieutenant governing the colony, interpreters now cost as much as a thousand francs a season and sailors six hundred, while factors and other servants came correspondingly high. And there were other increased expenses that bid fair to cut deep into profits.
As a result the directors of the company made things difficult for their governor on the St. Lawrence. They particularly balked at his urgent request for extra funds to strengthen the fortifications of Quebec, even though only a wooden palisade and a few small cannon protected the French trading post.
Champlain, with characteristic fortitude, made the best of his difficulties. But he was most uneasy about the English at his doorway. And well he might be!
As early as 1620 Sir George Calvert, English Baron of Baltimore, had adventured a plantation in Newfoundland. Three years later King James granted him quasi-regal proprietorship of the southeastern peninsula of that island between Trinity and Placentia Bays. In 1627 he came out with his family, built a fine house at Ferryland, and showed every intention of establishing a great fur trading and fishing colony in the form of a British dominion at this strategic gateway to New France.
Still more alarming were the activities of a Scotsman, Sir William Alexander, who had been stirred by accounts of the founding of New Spain, New France, New Netherland and New England to attempt the founding of a New Scotland. In 1621, with complete disregard for French claims, the English king had granted to him all the vast peninsula between the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of St. Lawrence! Today that would be Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and part of Quebec Province. This princely domain was to be divided into feudal-type Scotch baronies complete with a hierarchy of hereditary titles.
Alexander’s attempts to establish permanent trading posts in New Scotland, or Nova Scotia, were failures until 1628. That year seventy-two of his colonists managed to set up for business at Poutrincourt’s old quarters at Port Royal in the Bay of Fundy. There they found themselves to be the near neighbors of a young French fur trader at Cape Sable named Charles de la Tour who was under the impression that the country belonged to him.
Monsieur La Tour had inherited his rights from Saint Just after that pioneer finally returned to France in 1623. Since then he had been living the independent life of a wilderness lord with French retainers and aboriginal subjects, and he had no intention of yielding his estate or fur-trading privileges to anyone, much less foreigners.
La Tour did not immediately attempt to oust Alexander’s Scots from Port Royal as he was on much the weaker side at the time, but he did stand firm and unsubmissive at Cape Sable and he resisted all efforts of the English to bring him over to their side. This was not easy, for nearly all of New France was soon in the hands of the enemy.
In 1628 a French colonizing fleet sent out by the Company of New France under the aegis of Cardinal de Richelieu was captured by privateers boldly operating in the Gulf of St. Lawrence with English letters of marque. In another year Champlain’s worst fears were realized when this same fleet of privateers, under the leadership of the Kirke brothers, appeared before Quebec in force enough to insure its capitulation.
Champlain himself was taken prisoner at Quebec. But under the terms of the surrender he marched out of the fort with his arms and all of his own furs, as did other head men. The factors, servants and workmen were allowed to take but one beaver skin each before the English took over the factory. Then, after running up the English flag, the Kirkes were said to have driven an immediate trade with Indians and others remaining about the fort for some 2,000 skins in addition to those they found in the storehouse. They even ended up with the pelts they had allowed the starving garrison under the terms of surrender, taking them in trade for food.
Sir William Alexander, uniting his interests with the Kirkes to form the Scottish and English Company for the peltry trade of New France, sent out a second fleet to Port Royal in 1629 under the command of his son. When the fleet arrived nearly half the people who had been left at Port Royal the year before were found to have died from one cause or another. But young Alexander relieved the survivors, strengthened the fort, and put new life into the colony. His vessels managed to acquire a satisfactory number of pelts in the Bay of Fundy during that summer. He also captured a French ship. And as further proof of the substance of New Scotland he took back on his return voyage an Indian chief of the region who wanted to conclude an alliance with the English king.
In the meantime it developed that shortly before Champlain’s capitulation a treaty of peace had been signed between England and France. But, although King Charles agreed very soon to restore Quebec to the French under the terms of the treaty, the negotiations dragged on for three years. During that time the Scottish Company continued to drive a great trade for pelts on the St. Lawrence and elsewhere, while the French pressed not only their claims to furs appropriated from stores at Quebec after the actual signing of the peace treaty but insisted also upon the return of all of New France. That included Acadia of course and the evacuation of the fort at Port Royal.
At first, Charles was not disposed to disturb Alexander in his occupation of “Nova Scotia.” In fact he encouraged the Scot to further efforts in that direction. However, he needed gold at the time much more than he needed another Scotland, so he was not reluctant to do a little bargaining. When his wife’s brother, the French king, agreed to pay a long overdue and substantial dowry, Charles agreed to return Port Royal to the French. Sir William’s dream was thereupon finished. The Scots demolished their fort, and young Alexander surrendered Port Royal to the Chevalier Isaac de Razilly who had been sent out by the Company of New France as governor of all Acadia.
This was a tremendous victory for Charles de la Tour and his French fur traders, who had not only stubbornly maintained themselves during the incident of the Scottish occupation of Acadia, but had managed harassments intended to hinder further encroachments up the coast of Maine by the Englishmen in those more southerly parts.
In 1631 the Frenchmen had paid a visit to the Pilgrims’ most northerly outpost at Pentagoet on the Penobscot. Taking advantage of the absence of the factor and most of his company, they were able to surprise a few “simple” servants by a ruse. First, pretending they had “newly come from the sea” and that their vessel was in need of repairs, a “false Scot” among them fell to admiring the Englishmen’s muskets. Then, talking the servants into letting them examine the guns, they gained possession of the Englishmen’s weapons and promptly made away with some four or five hundred pounds worth of Pilgrim goods, including three hundredweight of beaver.
In time, however, after the ousting of the Scots from the Bay of Fundy, the Frenchmen were able to do more than simply harass the Englishmen on the coast of Maine. The truck house at Machias in Maine, built by Isaac Allerton in 1633, was even more of a challenge than the Penobscot post had been. Allerton had no sooner settled his traders there than “La Tour, governor of the French in those parts, making claim to the place, came to displant them, and finding resistance, killed two of the men and carried away the other three and the goods.”
Allerton himself later went to Port Royal to protest. But he was told by La Tour that “he had authority from the king of France, who challenged all from Cape Sable to Cape Cod, wishing them to take notice and to certify the rest of the English, that, if they traded to the east of Pemaquid, he would make prize of them.” When Allerton asked to see Monsieur La Tour’s commission the Frenchman replied that “his sword was commission sufficient, where he had strength to overcome; where that wanted, he would show his commission.”
And the French made good on their challenge, for in 1635 Monsieur Charles d’Aunay, one of Governor Razilly’s lieutenants, came in a man-of-war to the Pilgrims’ trading post on the Penobscot. By a show of this force he took possession of the trucking house in the name of the King of France. Making an inventory of the goods he found there at prices he set himself, d’Aunay “made no payment for them, but told them in convenient time he would do it if they came for it. For the house and fortification etc. he would not allow nor account anything, saying that they which build on another man’s ground do forfeit the same.” Then he put the English traders in a shallop and sent them back to Plymouth.
The Pilgrim fathers were enough upset about the loss of their goods and trading post to do something violent about it. With the approval of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, but without much in the way of material assistance from their Puritan brethren, they hired “a fair ship of above 300 tun well fitted with ordnance” to retake Pentagoet. This ship was under the command of a Captain Girling. If the captain was successful he was to have 700 pounds of beaver; if not, nothing. Along with him went Captain Miles Standish and twenty Plymouth men in their own bark to resettle their trading post after Girling had driven out the French.
It would appear, however, that the French must have had notice of the impending attack. So firmly were they entrenched behind earthworks that Captain Girling’s gunfire could not dislodge them and all the big ship’s powder was exhausted without effect. No landing was attempted. Standish, frustrated, returned to Plymouth in his bark, and Captain Girling went his own way.
The French now remained in permanent possession of what was soon known as the “Mission of Pentagoet.” And so the line was finally drawn as a practical matter between the English and the French on the Maine coast, although England continued to maintain officially that it was more northerly, at the 45th parallel.
Mutual distrust, born of the religious differences between English Puritan and French Catholic, often erupted in charges and counter-charges that sometimes threatened security on either side of the line. In fact, fear of possible French aggression was in part responsible for the eventual formation of the New England Confederation in 1643. On the other side of the picture however, there was much guarded trade between Frenchman and Englishman as it suited their pocketbooks. As a matter of fact the Puritans actually traded with the French conquerors of Pentagoet shortly after d’Aunay captured the Pilgrim trading post.
But, even so, this coastal border created by the rival fur traders of these two nations was maintained with only minor variations for years, even after competition for the beaver trade was no longer the reason for its existence.
Acadian fur traders and the rivers of Maine and Massachusetts that ran in the wrong direction had effectively contained the English on the northern coasts. The St. Lawrence River route to the interior, to the great lake country that teemed with fur-bearers, remained safe to the French traders, who resumed their profitable westward penetration of the hinterland.
It remained to be seen, however, if the French could prevent the Dutch of New Netherland and the English of Virginia from draining off this hinterland trade. The Connecticut, Hudson, Delaware, and Susquehanna Rivers all ran in the right direction to tap it.