Quaint and Historic Forts of North America

by John Martin Hammond

By Courtesy of The Boston Times

GUNS, PARADE AND ANCIENT OFFICERS’ QUARTERS, FORT ANNAPOLIS ROYAL, N. S.

The voyager to-day may repeat de Monts’s experience and with no design to do that, too. Fogs wrap the eastern and western coasts of Nova Scotia in an impenetrable blanket most of the time. The traveller who sails,—let us say,—from St. Johns, New Brunswick, for the Annapolis Basin, crosses sparkling waters, and then, as he enters the mountainous cleft which gives entrance to this beautiful bay, comes into the belt of mist which obscures all of the coast. He hears the fog horn on the point at the entrance,—which de Monts did not hear,—and then suddenly, like an apparition, the land looms into view; there is a lane of shrouded, uncertain water, between towering misty headlands; and, then, he is beyond the mists. Annapolis Basin, bright and blue with soft clouds overhead, like a highland lake, lies before him. At the far head of the Basin, where the delicate horizon merges into the sky, is Annapolis. It is not hard to understand Potrincourt’s enthusiasm for this beautiful spot. It is hard to understand how de Monts himself could have passed over this locality in favor of the barren Isle St. Croix for his first settlement, for this is what he did.

The winter of 1604 was passed by the little colonizing expedition at St. Croix—the sandy island which is now the boundary line between Canada and Maine. Potrincourt went back to France with de Monts to secure supplies and settlers for his own pet project, whose setting was Annapolis Basin, and returned with his chief in June, 1605, to find that the companions they had left behind them at St. Croix had had a sorry winter. The whole settlement was then moved over to Potrincourt’s Port Royal. This was the beginning of Annapolis.

The makeup of de Monts’s expedition was thoroughly typical of the colonizing bodies sent out by France in that day. There were men of the noblest blood of France, of whom our Potrincourt was a conspicuous example, and there was, also, the sweeping of the offscouring of the most dissolute cities of the Old World. The motives which inspired these different men were no doubt as mixed as the character of the men and as pleasant a theme of speculation, but with this we will have nothing to do. The second winter of de Monts’s adventurers, even at sheltered Annapolis, was severe, and it was with joy that the men saw the spring of 1606 arrive and bring with it the little ship from France which annually brought supplies and new blood from the Old World.

In this ship there was one arrival who must be given a special consideration. A poet-lawyer,—a strange combination, at that,—Marc Lescarbot eventually was to write his name in fame as the author of one of the earliest histories of New France, one of the most authentic records in existence of the early adventures of the French in the New World; but in our regard of him now we must consider the high spirit and bold emprise which he brought with him to cheer his companions and to help them through the rigors of this early settlement. A rhymester of some skill, he tuned his lyre to the most trivial events to keep his associates in good spirits, and in this last endeavor displayed an ingenuity which cannot help but endear him to all generations which like brave deeds done in blithe ways. He organized the Ordre de la Bon Temps, the only requirements for membership in which were presence in the little colony, and the duties of whose members were on successive days to provide a banquet for their brethren. There was formality attached to the office, too. Theatrical masques were gotten up and odd tasks were devised for all Knights of the Merry Time. Lescarbot infused a brave spirit into even the most dreary of the odd crew which made up this colony. We can picture the merry adventurers in their rude little fort engaged in their pranks of drollery thousands of miles away from home and with inhospitable wilderness and bleak shores for environs.

The charter of the colony was revoked in 1607, by one of those pleasing inconsistencies of royalty which inspire in the student of the past so thorough a belief in the theory of the divine right of kings, and the brave Order of the Merry Time to a man, with retainers and family vessels, embarked upon the skittish little vessels in which they entrusted themselves to the Atlantic and sailed back to France. It was not for three years that any of them returned, but in 1610 perseverance on de Potrincourt’s part had triumphed over royal pudding-headedness once more, and in that year he came back again to his colony. It is related that he found everything in Port Royal exactly as he had left it, not a lock or a bar in the little fort having been disturbed by the Indians, who displayed, in addition to their honesty, another engaging trait of fidelity to friendship by the many manifestations of joy which they made at having with them again their friends, the Frenchmen. Not again was Port Royal to be entirely deserted.

In 1613 the Jesuits of Port Royal, a class to themselves, abandoned the place and attempted the settlement of a picturesque inlet on Mount Desert Island on the coast of present-day Maine, their inlet still bearing the name of Frenchmen’s Bay. The freebooting Argall, a piratical seafarer from the new colony of Virginia far south on the Atlantic Coast, heard of this settlement and descended upon it in force. Most of the French were killed after a brave but ineffectual resistance, and fire and axe were given to their settlement. In the following year this Argall heard of the presence of Port Royal, for news travelled slowly in those days, and proceeded against that point after completing his work of pillage at Mount Desert and St. Croix. Taking the little place by surprise with a superior force, he scattered the inhabitants, burned the village, and razed the fort to the ground. Potrincourt, a survivor, returned to France and fell fighting at the siege of Mery in the following year.

From this time until the signing of the treaty of St. Germain-en-Laye in 1632, Port Royal and Acadia were held in the hands of the British, and during this time occurred that odd experiment of Sir William Mackenzie to make of Acadia a New Scotland or Caledonia. The Scottish knight obtained the concession of the Acadian peninsula from King James in 1621 and founded a colony on the site or very near the site of Port Royal, building a fort at this point. Charles I renewed the charter granted by his predecessor, and created an order of minor nobility known as the Knights Baronets of Nova Scotia. It became Mackenzie’s idea to establish in the New Caledonia the feudal institutions of the Old World. His colony was not a success even during its short life, and in 1632 Port Royal passed by treaty to the French, thus putting an end effectually to New Caledonia and its Knights Baronets of the dissolute Charles’s erection.