At first, Charles was not disposed to disturb Alexander in his occupation of “Nova Scotia.” In fact he encouraged the Scot to further efforts in that direction. However, he needed gold at the time much more than he needed another Scotland, so he was not reluctant to do a little bargaining. When his wife’s brother, the French king, agreed to pay a long overdue and substantial dowry, Charles agreed to return Port Royal to the French. Sir William’s dream was thereupon finished. The Scots demolished their fort, and young Alexander surrendered Port Royal to the Chevalier Isaac de Razilly who had been sent out by the Company of New France as governor of all Acadia.
This was a tremendous victory for Charles de la Tour and his French fur traders, who had not only stubbornly maintained themselves during the incident of the Scottish occupation of Acadia, but had managed harassments intended to hinder further encroachments up the coast of Maine by the Englishmen in those more southerly parts.
In 1631 the Frenchmen had paid a visit to the Pilgrims’ most northerly outpost at Pentagoet on the Penobscot. Taking advantage of the absence of the factor and most of his company, they were able to surprise a few “simple” servants by a ruse. First, pretending they had “newly come from the sea” and that their vessel was in need of repairs, a “false Scot” among them fell to admiring the Englishmen’s muskets. Then, talking the servants into letting them examine the guns, they gained possession of the Englishmen’s weapons and promptly made away with some four or five hundred pounds worth of Pilgrim goods, including three hundredweight of beaver.
In time, however, after the ousting of the Scots from the Bay of Fundy, the Frenchmen were able to do more than simply harass the Englishmen on the coast of Maine. The truck house at Machias in Maine, built by Isaac Allerton in 1633, was even more of a challenge than the Penobscot post had been. Allerton had no sooner settled his traders there than “La Tour, governor of the French in those parts, making claim to the place, came to displant them, and finding resistance, killed two of the men and carried away the other three and the goods.”
Allerton himself later went to Port Royal to protest. But he was told by La Tour that “he had authority from the king of France, who challenged all from Cape Sable to Cape Cod, wishing them to take notice and to certify the rest of the English, that, if they traded to the east of Pemaquid, he would make prize of them.” When Allerton asked to see Monsieur La Tour’s commission the Frenchman replied that “his sword was commission sufficient, where he had strength to overcome; where that wanted, he would show his commission.”
And the French made good on their challenge, for in 1635 Monsieur Charles d’Aunay, one of Governor Razilly’s lieutenants, came in a man-of-war to the Pilgrims’ trading post on the Penobscot. By a show of this force he took possession of the trucking house in the name of the King of France. Making an inventory of the goods he found there at prices he set himself, d’Aunay “made no payment for them, but told them in convenient time he would do it if they came for it. For the house and fortification etc. he would not allow nor account anything, saying that they which build on another man’s ground do forfeit the same.” Then he put the English traders in a shallop and sent them back to Plymouth.
The Pilgrim fathers were enough upset about the loss of their goods and trading post to do something violent about it. With the approval of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, but without much in the way of material assistance from their Puritan brethren, they hired “a fair ship of above 300 tun well fitted with ordnance” to retake Pentagoet. This ship was under the command of a Captain Girling. If the captain was successful he was to have 700 pounds of beaver; if not, nothing. Along with him went Captain Miles Standish and twenty Plymouth men in their own bark to resettle their trading post after Girling had driven out the French.
It would appear, however, that the French must have had notice of the impending attack. So firmly were they entrenched behind earthworks that Captain Girling’s gunfire could not dislodge them and all the big ship’s powder was exhausted without effect. No landing was attempted. Standish, frustrated, returned to Plymouth in his bark, and Captain Girling went his own way.
The French now remained in permanent possession of what was soon known as the “Mission of Pentagoet.” And so the line was finally drawn as a practical matter between the English and the French on the Maine coast, although England continued to maintain officially that it was more northerly, at the 45th parallel.
Mutual distrust, born of the religious differences between English Puritan and French Catholic, often erupted in charges and counter-charges that sometimes threatened security on either side of the line. In fact, fear of possible French aggression was in part responsible for the eventual formation of the New England Confederation in 1643. On the other side of the picture however, there was much guarded trade between Frenchman and Englishman as it suited their pocketbooks. As a matter of fact the Puritans actually traded with the French conquerors of Pentagoet shortly after d’Aunay captured the Pilgrim trading post.