The conduct of these Massachusetts rangers was a source of mortification to Lieut. Governor Hutchinson, who speaks of “the unwarrantable behaviour of the garrison at St. John’s River, all of whom have deserted their post except 40 men and the continuation of those forty seems to be precarious.” Steps were at once taken to enlist a fresh detachment for service at Fort Frederick.
The conduct of the garrison was not unnatural, although from a military point of view it was inexcusable. The men had enlisted for a great and, as the event proved, a final struggle with France for supremacy in North America. With the downfall of Louisbourg and Quebec the crisis had passed. The period of their enlistment had expired, what right had the Assembly of Massachusetts to prolong it? Why should they remain? So they reasoned. Meanwhile garrison duty at Fort Frederick was found to be extremely monotonous. The country was deserted, for the few habitations that once existed in the vicinity of the fort had been abandoned and destroyed when the French fled up the river, and no English settlers had as yet appeared. Amidst their privations and the loneliness of their situation the charms of their own firesides seemed peculiarly inviting. Most probably, too, the fort and barracks were little more than habitable in consequence of the havoc wrought by a terrible storm on the night of the 3–4 November, 1759. This storm was the most violent that had till then been known, and from all accounts must at least have rivalled the famous “Saxby” gale of 1869. The tide attained a height of six feet above the ordinary, and huge waves, driven by the storm, broke through the dykes at the head of the Bay of Fundy, flooding the marsh lands reclaimed by the Acadians. Much damage was done along the coast, thousands of trees were blown down all over the country, while near the coastline the forest was levelled as with a scythe. A considerable part of Fort Frederick was washed away by the storm and Lieutenant Winckworth Tonge, of the Engineers, was sent with a party of men to repair it and put it in the most defensible 138 state the situation would allow, taking such tools and materials from Fort Cumberland as were needed. He found the condition of the fort even worse than he had anticipated. Governor Lawrence consulted General Amherst as to what should be done, and in answer the general wrote: “By Lt. Tonge’s report to you of the state of the works at Fort Frederick, it must doubtless undergo great alterations to put it in a proper state of defence, but as this will require many more hands than you can provide at present, we must for the time being rest satisfied with the work you have ordered, especially as the line of strong Pallisadoes you mention will secure it against any insult for the present.”
Colonel Arbuthnot’s anxieties were not confined to tidal waves and the discontents of his garrison. About the end of October a party of some two hundred Acadians came down the river to Fort Frederick and presented to him a certificate of their having taken the oath of allegiance to the English sovereign before Judge Cramahe, at Quebec; also an order signed by General Monckton giving them permission to return to their former habitations. Whether these Acadians were old inhabitants of the river, or fugitives who had taken refuge there at the time of the Expulsion is not very clear. Lawrence surmised that the certificates had been obtained from Judge Cramahe on the supposition that the people belonged to some river or place in Canada known as St. Johns, and not to the River St. John in Nova Scotia, and that they never could have had any sort of permission from Monckton to settle in Acadia.
The Abbe Casgrain comments severely on the course pursued by Governor Lawrence on this occasion: “Not being able,” he says, “to dispute the genuineness of the letters of Monckton and Cramahe, Lawrence claimed that the Acadians could only have obtained them by fraud, and he decided with his council, always ready to do his bidding, that they should be regarded as prisoners of war and transported as soon as possible to England. He took care not to disclose this resolution in order to keep them securely at the fort, and to have them ready to his hand when ships should arrive to transport them. This precaution was almost superfluous for the Acadians, having exhausted their last resources, were no longer in a state to return to the woods where they would have died of hunger.”
Evidently it was part of the settled policy of Lawrence and his advisers to keep the Acadians out of the province and to people it with English speaking inhabitants, and with this policy General Amherst seems to have been in accord, for he wrote the Governor of Nova Scotia, “The pass you mention the two hundred Inhabitants of St. John’s River to have from Mr. Monckton, was by no means meant or understood to give the French any right to those lands; and you have done perfectly right not to suffer them to continue there, and you will be equally right in sending them, when an opportunity offers, to Europe as Prisoners of War.”
And yet it was very natural that, after the surrender of Quebec, the Acadians should believe that upon accepting the new regime and taking the oath of allegiance to the king of Great Britain they would be treated in the same way as the French Canadians. The Abbe Casgrain says, not without reason, that the Acadians had an even greater right than the Canadians to clemency at the hands of their conquerors as their sufferings were greater: [“Ils y avaient d’autant plus de droit qu’ils avaient plus souffert.”]
The expulsion at so late a period as this of two hundred Acadians from the Valley of the River St. John, where they had vainly hoped to remain in peace, is an incident of some importance. There is an unpublished letter of the Jesuit missionary Germain to the Marquis de Vaudreuil, written at Aukpaque on the River St. John, under date February 26, 1760, which is of some interest in this connection. “I arrived at the River St. John,” writes Father Germain, “on All Saints Day (Nov. 1, 1759), where I unfortunately found all the inhabitants had gone down to the English fort with their families, which made me resolve to go and join them, as I did eight days afterwards, with the intention of accompanying them wherever they might be sent in order to help them—some to die as Christians in the transport ships and others to be of good cheer in the calamity that has befallen them as it did their brethren who are exiles in New England. But by a stroke of Providence, Monsieur Coquart, missionary to the French, arrived, and I desired the commandant to give me leave to retire which he granted together with a passport permitting me to remain at the priests’ house in my mission where I am now.”[46]
Colonel Arbuthnot had reported to Governor Lawrence that the Acadians begged leave to remain upon their lands on their promise to be faithful and true to His Majesty’s Government. To this he made answer that they must come down to the Fort and remain there till he could apply to the Governor to know what should be done; they came down accordingly, and were to remain at the Fort until his excellency’s pleasure should be known. The poor Acadians were represented to be in a starving condition. Their case came before the Governor and Council for consideration on the 30th November, at a meeting held at the Governor’s house in Halifax, and the decision arrived at was this: “The Council are of opinion, and do advise that His Excellency do take the earliest opportunity of hiring vessels for having them immediately transported to Halifax, as Prisoners of War, until they can be sent to England; and that the two Priests be likewise removed out of the Province.” The resolve of the council seems to have been carried into effect. In the month of January, Lawrence sent to the River St. John for the French inhabitants who, to the number of 300, were brought to Halifax until he could send them to England. Colonel Arbuthnot was the agent employed in collecting these unfortunate people and sending them to Halifax, and being a gentleman of a humane disposition he doubtless found his task a most uncongenial one. Among his assistants was Joseph Winniett,[47] a member for Annapolis Royal in the Nova Scotia House of Assembly.