With some trading of this kind and with a good deal of privateering, the years passed by. Perrot, who had been Governor of Montreal and had distinguished himself even among French officials of the time for corrupt practices, succeeded La Vallière in 1684, with a commission as Governor of Acadia. Still intent on enriching himself by illicit trade, he was recalled in 1687, and his place was taken by Meneval. The latter, like Perrot, was subordinate to the Governor-General of Canada, and the number of colonists whom he ruled was, according to a census held in 1686, 858, 600 of whom lived at or near Port Royal, and the remainder chiefly at Beaubassin at the head of Chignecto Bay, and on the Basin of Mines.
| Acadia ceded to England by the Peace of Utrecht. |
In 1688, Andros, then Governor of the New England colonies, plundered St. Castin's station at Pentegoet; the French and Indians retaliated, taking the fort of Pemaquid in the following year; and there followed a long series of butcheries and reprisals, of which an account has already been given in a preceding chapter, the taking of Fort Royal by Phipps in 1690, and, in 1710, its final surrender to Nicholson. In the end, the Treaty of Utrecht provided in its twelfth article that 'all Nova Scotia or Accadie with its ancient boundaries' should be 'yielded and made over to the Queen of Great Britain and to her Crown for ever.'
| Henry Hudson sails to the Arctic regions and is lost. The search for the North-West Passage. Button. |
We have seen12 that, in 1609, Henry Hudson led Dutchmen into the present State of New York, and left his name to the river on which the city of New York stands. In the following year, he took service under an English syndicate, to make a further attempt to find a North-West Passage to the Indies. In April, 1610, he started in a small ship, the Discovery, found his way through Hudson Straits into Hudson Bay, wintered at the extreme south-eastern end of James' Bay, and, cast adrift by his mutinous followers in the following summer, never saw home again, 'dearly purchasing the honour of having this large Strait and Bay called after his name.'13 The Arctic seas, where he met his death, and where his name has lived through the centuries, were visited again and again by English explorers, still seeking for the North-West Passage. One voyager after another went out, hoping to return by China and the East. In April, 1612, Captain Button set forth with two ships, one of which was Hudson's old vessel, the Discovery, reached the western coast of Hudson Bay—which was long called after him, Button's Bay—wintered at Port Nelson, at the mouth of the Nelson river, and returned in the autumn of 1613.
12 See [above].
13 Oldmixon's British Empire in America (1741 ed.), vol. i, p. 543.
| Royal charter granted to the Merchants Discoverers of the North-West Passage. |
His instructions had been drawn up by the young Prince of Wales, Prince Henry, who died not long afterwards; and three months after Button started, the merchants at whose expense both his expedition and Hudson's had been fitted out, were incorporated under royal charter as the 'Company of the Merchants of London Discoverers of the North-West Passage,' having the Prince of Wales as governor or 'Supreme Protector,' and including among many well-known names that of Richard Hakluyt.
| Gibbons. Bylot and Baffin. |