PENTAGÖET (CASTINE)
[The site of the old fort was on the shore, at a point just below the letter i in the name Castine on the peninsula. Harrisse (no. 198) cites a plan of 1670 in the French Archives.—Ed.]
In 1654, in accordance with secret instructions from Cromwell, the whole of Acadia was subjugated by an English force from Boston under the command of Major Robert Sedgwick, of Charlestown, and Captain John Leverett, of Boston. To the latter the temporary government of the country was intrusted. Ineffectual complaints of this aggression were made to the British Government; but by the treaty of Westminster in the following year England was left in possession, and the question of title was referred to commissioners. In 1656 it was made a province by Cromwell, who appointed Sir Thomas Temple governor, and granted the whole territory to Temple and to one William Crown and Stephen de la Tour, son of the late governor. The rights of the latter were purchased by the other two proprietors, and Acadia remained in possession of the English until the treaty of Breda, in 1667, when it was ceded to France with undefined limits.[417]
Very little was done by the French to settle and improve the country; and on the breaking out of war between France and England after the accession of William III., it was again conquered by an expedition fitted out at Boston under Sir William Phips. He sailed from Boston on the 28th of April, 1690, with a frigate of forty guns, two sloops, one of sixteen guns and the other of eight guns, and with four smaller vessels; and after reducing St. John, Port Royal, and other French settlements, and appointing an English governor, he returned, with a booty sufficient, it was thought, to defray the whole cost of the expedition.[418]
SIR WILLIAM PHIPS.
[This likeness is accepted, but lacks undoubted verification; cf. Mem. Hist. of Boston, ii. 36.—Ed.]
This result was a signal triumph for the New England colonies, and when Phips became, in 1692, the first royal governor of Massachusetts under the provincial charter, Acadia was made a part of the domain included in it. At a later day it was with no little indignation and mortification that New England saw the conquered territory relinquished to the French by the Treaty of Ryswick, in 1697; but the story of the later period belongs to a subsequent volume.