The trip was a great disappointment to Finlay. He had no intention of having it made at this time; but Sir John Johnston, superintendent general of Indian affairs, had informed him that he was about to make a trip to Halifax, and would be prepared to take a mail with him. Finlay lost no time in advertising the fact throughout the colony, and had gathered a large number of letters when Johnston changed his plans and did not go to Halifax.
There was nothing for Finlay to do but to send a special courier. Durand whom he engaged could not tell him what the cost would be, but from the figures furnished by another courier who had frequently carried despatches, he thought that £120 would be about the expense. Imagine his dismay when the account was shown to be £191, and he had collected less than £75 as postage on the letters contained in the mail.
There was no choice open to the colony. At whatever cost, an easy road must be made between Quebec and Halifax. Dependence on a foreign, and, at the time, hostile nation, for communication with the mother country was not to be thought of, still less endured.
Indeed, in January 1783, before the peace was signed, Haldimand had taken steps to establish a road between Canada and Nova Scotia. He sent a surveyor with two hundred men down to work on the Temiscouata portage, and at the same time urged governor Parr of Nova Scotia to do what was necessary to facilitate travel in his province.
Haldimand had observed that a considerable part of the expense of a mail service by this route arose from the extortionate charges for guides and forwarding, which were made by the Acadians settled at Aupaque, a few miles above Fredericton.[131] His plan, therefore, was to gather into his own hands all the agencies for transportation on the route; and with that end in view, he proposed to establish some experienced men at the head of lake Temiscouata, with canoes and other facilities for travel, whose business it should be to convey passengers and mail couriers across the lake, down the Madawaska river, and on down the St. John river as far as Grand Falls, where he intended to settle another post.
From an Acadian courier, named Mercure, whom Haldimand frequently employed to convey despatches to Halifax, he learned that a number of Acadians desired to take up land on the upper St. John, in order that they might be nearer ministers of religion, in the parishes on the St. Lawrence. The plan was to place these Acadians on the lands along the river from Grand Falls up to lake Temiscouata, and it was hoped that the settlement thus formed would extend eventually to the St. Lawrence.
The governor of Nova Scotia responded heartily to Haldimand's proposals, and the settlement, once begun under their united efforts, made rapid progress. When Finlay travelled by this route to Halifax in July 1787, he found no settlers at all on the Madawaska, and only some twenty Acadians huddled together on the south bank of the St. John, opposite the mouth of the Madawaska.[132]
From this point downwards to the Grand Falls, a distance of forty miles, the country was entirely unoccupied. In 1791, a gentleman from Scotland, who was making a tour through Canada remarked with satisfaction on the regularity of the settlement over an extent of fifty miles of very rich country, and on the evidences of material well-being observable on every side.[133] The people carried the modes of life of a self-dependent community with them, as the traveller says that the settlement was entirely isolated and self-contained, electing its own magistrates, and that a high degree of comfort prevailed.
Governor Carleton, of New Brunswick, who had assisted materially in the formation of the settlement, obtained a troop of soldiers from Lord Dorchester, and by manning the posts at Presqu' Isle, Fredericton and St. John, he provided the means for keeping the road in good order.
The section of the long route between Quebec and Halifax, which commenced at the northern end of the Temiscouata portage, and ended at the mouth of the St. John river, was the one presenting most difficulties. But the other parts of the route, that is, the section between Quebec and the Temiscouata portage, which was entirely within the jurisdiction of the governor of Quebec, and the section from St. John to Halifax, which was partly in New Brunswick, and partly in Nova Scotia, remain to be mentioned.