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His mantle fell upon Pierre du Guast, Sieur de Monts, gentleman in ordinary of the King's chamber, and Governor of Polls. Undaunted by the fate of La Roche, this nobleman petitioned the king for leave to colonize La Cadie, or Acadie, a region defined as extending from the fortieth to the forty-Sixth degree of north latitude, or from Philadelphia to beyond Montreal.
Here they had built a stronghold at Louisbourg, which they were enlarging and strengthening every year, to the great disgust and alarm of the New England colonies. But though Acadie had been given up to the English, it could hardly be said to be held by them. Only two posts were occupied, the one at Canso, in the strait that separated Cape Breton from Acadie, and the other at Annapolis Royal.
By their argument the grant to the Duke of York is blotted wholly from the map, or, rather, becomes a mathematical line which is absurd. No name which has ever been applied to any part of North America is as vague as that of Acadie.
But the French at Louisbourg never forgot their fellow-countrymen, and never relinquished their designs on Acadie. The French inhabitants of that province amounted to several thousands, who occupied the best portions of the country, while the English consisted of only a few individuals in one or two posts.
The battle of Almanza, in Spain, having induced the British cabinet to direct an armament intended for New England to European objects, Dudley determined to make an attempt on Acadié, though no aid should arrive from England.
England became the mistress of all the domain stretching along the coast of the Atlantic Ocean from Florida to Acadie, and westward across the entire continent; but in New Netherland, in that brief space of half a century, the Dutch had stamped the impress of their institutions, their social and religious habits, their modes of thought and peculiarities of character, so that they remained unconquered in the loftier aspect of the case.
On that dreadful day, more than a century ago, when the British in far-off Acadie shut into the chapel the villagers of Grand Pré, a certain widow fled with her children to the woods, and there subsisted for ten days on roots and berries, until finally, the standing crops as well as the houses being destroyed, she was compelled to accept exile, and in time found her way, with others, to these prairies.
After dinner the friend said: "I have been trying to persuade Hawthorne to write a story, based upon a legend of Acadie, and still current there; a legend of a girl who, in the dispersion of the Acadians, was separated from her lover, and passed her life in waiting and seeking for him, and only found him dying in a hospital, when both were old."
With the intelligence of this fact, information was also brought that cardinal Richelieu had ordered some companies to Acadié, and that more were expected the next year, with priests, Jesuits, and other formidable accompaniments, for a permanent settlement.
Selecting the subject of all others best calculated for his purpose, the expulsion of the French settlers of Acadie from their quiet and pleasant homes around the Basin of Minas, one of the most sadly romantic passages in the history of the Colonies of the North, the author has succeeded in presenting a series of exquisite pictures of the striking and peculiar features of life and nature in the New World.
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