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The Acadian Exiles by Arthur G. Doughty
Book, page 11 / 101


the scourge of English attacks.

Argall's expedition had been little more than a buccaneering
exploit and an earnest of what was to come. Nor did any
permanent result, other than the substitution of the name
Nova Scotia for Acadia, flow from Sir William Alexander's
enterprise. Alexander, afterwards Lord Stirling, was a
Scottish courtier in the entourage of James I, from whom
he obtained in 1621 a grant of the province of New Scotland
or Nova Scotia. A year later he sent out a small body of
farm hands and one artisan, a blacksmith, to establish
a colony. The expedition miscarried; and another in the
next year shared a similar fate. A larger company of
Scots, however, as already mentioned, settled at Port
Royal in 1627 and erected a fort, known as Scots Fort,
on the site of the original settlement of De Monts. This
colony, with some reinforcements from Scotland, stood
its ground until the country was ceded to France in 1632.
On the arrival of Razilly in that year most of the Scottish
settlers went home, and the few who remained were soon
merged in the French population.

For twenty-two years after this Acadia remained French,
under the feudal sway of its overlords, Razilly, Charnisay,
La Tour, and Nicolas Denys, the historian of Acadia.
[Footnote: He wrote The Description and Natural History
of the Coasts of North America. An edition, translated
and edited, with a memoir of the author, by W. F. Ganong,
will be found in the publications of the Champlain Society
(Toronto, 1908).] But in 1654 the fleet of Robert Sedgwick
suddenly appeared off Port Royal and compelled its
surrender in the name of Oliver Cromwell. Then for thirteen
years Acadia was nominally English. Sir Thomas Temple,
the governor during this period, tried to induce
English-speaking people to settle in the province, but
with small success. England's hold of Acadia was, in
fact, not very firm. The son of Emmanuel Le Borgne, who
claimed the whole country by right of a judgment he had
obtained in the French courts against Charnisay, apparently
found little difficulty in turning the English garrison

 
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