Having the right to fortify, under the treaty, it only remained for the French court to determine which of the island ports would be best adapted to the purpose, St. Anne, on the north, or English Harbor on the south-east coast. St. Anne was a safe and excellent haven, easily made impregnable, with all the materials requisite for building and fortifying to be found near the spot. Behind it lay the fertile côtes of the beautiful Bras d’Or, with open water stretching nearly to the Straits of Canso. On the other hand, besides being surrounded by a sterile country, materials of every kind, except timber, must be transported to English Harbor at a great increase of labor and cost. More could be done at St. Anne with two thousand francs, it was said, than with two hundred thousand at the rival port. But the difficulty of taking ships of large tonnage into St. Anne through an entrance so narrow that only one could pass in or out at the same time, finally gave the preference to English Harbor, which had a ship channel of something less than two hundred fathoms in breadth, a good anchorage, and plenty of beach room for erecting stages and drying fish. It was, moreover, sooner clear of ice in spring.
Name changed to Louisburg.
The first thing done at Cape Breton was to change the old, time-honored name of the island—the very first, it is believed, which signalled the presence of Europeans in these waters—to the unmeaning one of Ile Royale. English Harbor also took the name of Louisburg, in honor of the reigning monarch. Royalty having thus received its dues, the work of construction now began in earnest.
IV
RÉSUMÉ OF EVENTS TO THE DECLARATION OF WAR
We will now rapidly sketch the course of events which led to war on both sides of the Atlantic.
Colonists provided for.
Having been obliged to surrender Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, the French court determined to make use of their colonists in those places for building up Louisburg.
Acadians will not emigrate.
In the first place, M. de Costebello, who had just lost his government of the French colony of Placentia, in Newfoundland, under the terms of the treaty, was ordered to take charge of the proposed new colony on Cape Breton, and in accord also with the provisions of that treaty, the French inhabitants of Newfoundland were presently removed from that island to Cape Breton. But the Acadians of Nova Scotia who had been invited, and were fully counted upon to join the other colonists, now showed no sort of disposition to do so. In their case the French authorities had reckoned without their host. These always shrewd Acadians were unwilling to abandon the fertile and well-tilled Acadian valleys, which years of toil had converted into a garden, to begin a new struggle with the wilderness in order to carry out certain political schemes of the French court. Though patriots, they were not simpletons. So they sensibly refused to stir, although their country had been turned over to the English. In this way the French authorities were unexpectedly checked in their first efforts to secure colonists of a superior class for their new establishment in Cape Breton.
How strange are the freaks of destiny! Could these simple Acadian peasants have foreseen what was in store for them at no distant day, at the hands of their new masters, who can doubt that, like the Israelites of old, driving their flocks before them, they too would have departed for the Promised Land with all possible speed?