This is not, however, the whole story.England's neglect of the colony was France's opportunity.Perhaps the French court did not follow closely what was going on in Acadia.The successive French Governors of Canada at Quebec were, however, alert; and their policy was to incite the Abenaki Indians on the New England frontier to harass the English settlements, and to keep the Acadians an active factor in the support of French plans.The nature of French intrigue is best seen in the career of Sebastien Rale.He was a highly educated Jesuit priest.It was long a tradition among the Jesuits to send some of their best men as missionaries among the Indians.Rale spent nearly the whole of his life with the Abenakis at the mission station of Norridgewock on the Kennebec River.He knew the language and the customs of the Indians, attended their councils, and dominated them by his influence.He was a model missionary, earnest and scholarly.But the Jesuit of that age was prone to be half spiritual zealot, half political intriguer.There is no doubt that the Indians had a genuine fear that the English, with danger from France apparently removed by the Treaty of Utrecht, would press claims to lands about the Kennebec River in what is now the State of Maine, and that they would ignore the claims of the Indians and drive them out.The Governor at Quebec helped to arouse the savages against the arrogant intruders.English border ruffians stirred the Indians by their drunken outrages and gave them real cause for anger.The savages knew only one way of expressing political unrest.They began murdering women and children in raids on lonely log cabins on the frontier.The inevitable result was that in 1721 Massachusetts began a war on them which dragged on for years.Rale, inspired from Quebec, was believed to control the Indians and, indeed, boasted that he did so.At last the English struck at the heart of the trouble.In 1724 some two hundred determined men made a silent advance through the forest to the mission village of Norridgewock where Rale lived, and Rale died fighting the assailants.In Europe a French Jesuit such as he would have worked among diplomats and at the luxurious courts of kings.In America he worked among savages under the hard conditions of frontier life.The methods and the aims in both cases were the same--by subtle and secret influence so to mold the actions of men that France should be exalted in power.In their high politics the French sometimes overreached themselves.
To seize points of vantage, to intrigue for influence, are not in themselves creative.They must be supported by such practical efforts as will assure an economic reserve adequate in the hour of testing.France failed partly because she did not know how to lay sound industrial foundations which should give substance to the brilliant planning of her leaders.
To French influence of this kind the English opposed forces that were the outcome of their national character and institutions.
They were keener traders than the French and had cheaper and better goods, with the exception perhaps of French gunpowder and of French brandy, which the Indians preferred to English rum.
Though the English were less alert and less brilliant than the French, the work that they did was more enduring.Their settlements encroached ever more and more upon the forest.They found and tilled the good lands, traded and saved and gradually built up populous communities.The British colonies had twenty times the population of Canada.The tide of their power crept in slowly but it moved with the relentless force that has subsequently made nearly the whole of North America English in speech and modes of thought.
When, in 1744, open war between the two nations came at last in Europe, each prepared to spring at the other in America--and France sprang first.In Nova Scotia, on the narrow strait which separates the mainland from the island of Cape Breton, the British had a weak little fishing settlement called Canseau.
Suddenly in May, 1744, when the British at Canseau had heard nothing of war, two armed vessels from Louisbourg with six or seven hundred soldiers and sailors appeared before the poor little place and demanded its surrender.To this the eighty British defenders agreed on the condition that they should be sent to Boston which, as yet, had not heard of the war.Meanwhile they were taken to Louisbourg where they kept their eyes open.
But the French continued in their offensive.The one vital place held by the British in Nova Scotia was Annapolis, at that time so neglected that the sandy ramparts had crumbled into the ditch supposed to protect them, and cows from the neighboring fields walked up the slope and looked down into the fort.It was Duvivier, the captor of Canseau, who attacked Annapolis.He had hoped much for help from the Indians and the Acadians, but, though both seemed eager, both failed him in action.Paul Mascarene, who defended Annapolis, was of Huguenot blood, which stimulated him to fight the better against the Catholic French.
Boston sent him help, for that little capital was deeply moved, and so Annapolis did not fall, though it was harassed during the whole summer of 1744; and New England; in a fever at the new perils of war, prepared a mighty stroke against the French.
