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Updated: June 22, 2025
Preparation was nearly complete, and the men raised for the expedition, before the Council at Alexandria, recognized it as a part of a plan of the summer campaign. The French fort of Beauséjour, mounted on its hill between the marshes of Missaguash and Tantemar, was a regular work, pentagonal in form, with solid earthern ramparts, bomb-proofs, and an armament of twenty-four cannon and one mortar.
But Le Loutre made this forever impossible by an outrage so fiendish as to call forth the execration of even his unscrupulous employers. One morning the sentries on Fort Lawrence were somewhat surprised to see one who was apparently an officer from the garrison of Beausejour, with several followers, approaching the banks of the Missaguash with a flag of truce.
Several thousands of its inhabitants, wrought upon by intriguing agents of the French Government, taught by their priests that fidelity to King Louis was inseparable from fidelity to God, and that to swear allegiance to the British Crown was eternal perdition; threatened with plunder and death at the hands of the savages whom the ferocious missionary, Le Loutre, held over them in terror, had abandoned, sometimes willingly, but oftener under constraint, the fields which they and their fathers had tilled, and crossing the boundary line of the Missaguash, had placed themselves under the French flag planted on the hill of Beauséjour.
Along its crest there was a brief struggle, hand to hand, and then the braves of Le Loutre were seen fleeing through the smoke. The Missaguash is a stream with as many windings as the storied Meander, and about half a mile beyond the lines which the English had just carried the contortions of the channel brought another and almost parallel ridge of dike.
Soon the English were provoked into retaliations; whereupon the regulars of Beausejour found an excuse for taking part, and the turbid Missaguash became the scene of such perpetual skirmishes that its waters ran redder than ever. Even then there might have been erelong an attempt at reconciliation, to which end the efforts of Captain Howe were ceaselessly directed.
Relieved of his dreaded presence the Acadians set bravely to work building cabins on the new lands which were allotted them back of Beausejour, and along the Missaguash, Au Lac, and Tantramar streams. A few were rash enough to return to their former holdings in Beaubassin, rebuilding among the ashes; but not so Antoine Lecorbeau.
Across the tawny Missaguash and the stretches of bright green marsh the red flag and the white flapped each other a ceaseless defiance. Elated at the completion of the fort, Le Loutre concluded the times were ripe for a raid upon the English settlements.
The French, however, said that Acadia meant only the peninsula of Nova Scotia ending at the isthmus between Baie Verte and the Bay of Chignecto; and for years a Canadian force stood there on guard, daring the British to put a foot on the north side of the little river Missaguash, which the French said was the international boundary.
The Missaguash being the dividing line between the two powers, he caused his Acadian and Indian followers to enrage the English by petty depredations, by violations of the frontier, by attacks and ambuscades.
Either he or Pierre was continually to be found upon the spot, working diligently and, without complaint which was a disappointment to Le Loutre. The abbe had not forgotten the remark of Antoine which he had caught the day of the battle on the Missaguash. He was seeking his opportunity to punish him for the rash utterance.
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