During this war the St. John river was much used as a means of communication between Quebec and the French settlements of Acadia, smart young Indians with light birch canoes being employed to carry express messages, and on various occasions large parties of French and Indians travelled by this route from the St. Lawrence to the Bay of Fundy. The Indian villages of Medoctec and Aukpaque afforded convenient stopping places.
In the year 1746 a great war party, including the Abenakis of Quebec as well as their kinsmen of the upper St. John, arrived at Aukpaque. Thence they took their way in company with the missionary Germain to Chignecto. They had choice of two routes of travel, one by way of the Kennebecasis and Anagance to the Petitcodiac, the other by way of the Washademoak lake and the Canaan to the same river. As the war proceeded the Maliseets actively supported their old allies the French. Some of them took part in the midwinter night attack, under Coulon de Villiers, on Colonel Noble’s post at Grand Pre. The English on this occasion were taken utterly by surprise; Noble himself fell fighting in his shirt, and his entire party were killed, wounded or made prisoners. From the military point of view this was one of the most brilliant exploits in the annals of Acadia, and, what is better, the victors behaved with great humanity to the vanquished.
The missionaries le Loutre and Germain were naturally very desirous of seeing French supremacy restored in Acadia and the latter proposed an expedition against Annapolis. With that end in view he proceeded to Quebec and returned with a supply of powder, lead and ball for his Maliseet warriors. However, in October, 1748, the peace of Aix la Chapelle put a stop to open hostilities.
Immediately after the declaration of peace, Captain Gorham, with his rangers and a detachment of auxiliaries, proceeded in two ships to the River St. John and ordered the French inhabitants to send deputies to Annapolis to give an account of their conduct during the war.
Count de la Galissonniere strongly protested against Gorham’s interference with the Acadians on the St. John, which he described as “a river situated on the Continent of Canada, and much on this side of the Kennebec, where by common consent the bounds of New England have been placed.” This utterance of the French governor marks another stage in the controversy concerning the limits of Acadia. He stoutly contended that Gorham and all other British officers must be forbidden to interfere with the French on the St. John river, or to engage them to make submissions contrary to the allegiance due to the King of France “who,” he says, “is their master as well as mine, and has not ceded this territory by any treaty.”
The governors of Massachusetts and of Nova Scotia replied at some length to the communication of Count de la Galissonniere, claiming the territory in dispute for the king of Great Britain, and showing that the French living on the St. John had some years before taken the oath of allegiance to the English monarch.
The Acadians on the St. John, whose allegiance was in dispute, were a mere handful of settlers. The Abbe le Loutre wrote in 1748: “There are fifteen or twenty French families on this river, the rest of the inhabitants are savages called Marichites (Maliseets) who have for their missionary the Jesuit father Germain.” His statement as to the number of Acadian settlers is corroborated by Mascarene, who notified the British authorities that thirty leagues up the river were seated twenty families of French inhabitants, sprung originally from the Nova Scotia side of the bay, most of them since his memory, who, many years ago, came to Annapolis and took the oath of fidelity. He adds, “the whole river up to its head, with all the northern coast of the Bay of Fundy, was always reckoned dependent on this government.”
Both Mascarene and Shirley strongly urged upon the British ministry the necessity of settling the limits of Acadia, and a little later commissioners were appointed, two on each side, to determine the matter. They spent four fruitless years over the question, and it remained undecided until settled by the arbitrament of the sword. Shirley was one of the commissioners, as was also the Marquis de la Galissonniere, and it is not to be wondered at that with two such determined men on opposite sides and differing so widely in their views, there should have been no solution of the difficulty.
The period now under consideration is really a very extraordinary one. Ostensibly it was a time of peace. By the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748 England gave back Cape Breton (or Isle Royale) to France and France restored Madras to England, but there remained no clear understanding as to the boundaries between the possessions of the rival powers in America.