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In 1678,
Jacques de Chambly was replaced as governor by Michel Leneuf de
La Valliere de Beaubassin, a native of Acadia. During his
administration, new Acadian settlements began to grow, partly
because of new arrivals from France, but mostly because the
Acadians had big families and the old settlements were getting a
bit crowded.
Besides that, according to Charles
Mahaffie, "A pioneer spirit moved them, though never very far.
They were careful to limit their migrations to places washed by
the familiar tides of the Bay of Fundy, and they began at the
Isthmus of Chignecto, which ties the Nova Scotia Peninsula to
the mainland at the top of the bay."
The first to move to that area was
Jacques Bourgeois, a surgeon and farmer. In 1672, he led his own
and five other families to the place that he called Beaubassin.
In 1686, the census showed 127 Acadians living there.
In 1682,
Pierre Melanson and Pierre Terriot moved to Grand Pr
which means "big meadow." In later years, their settlement would
be made famous by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow as the place from
which Evangeline began her wanderings.
From
Grand Pré,
Acadians spread up the nearby Avon River to a place they called
Pisiquid, now Windsor, and then to Cobequid, now Truro, at the
end of the Minas Basin. This rich and lush area would eventually
become the center of the Acadian population.
"It was not just the ample marshland
that lured Acadians to Chignecto and Minas," according to
Mahaffie. "In those relatively obscure places, they were less
likely to attract attention. They preferred shadows to the glare
of official light on their trade with the New Englanders who
sailed their sloops and ketches every year to the far nooks and
crannies of the Bay of Fundy. They probably hoped, too, that
isolation would spare them the curse of war."
That was not to be. At first, there
were simple trade squabbles. Just as at the very beginning,
codfish were a big part of the problem.
"Newfoundland's Grand Bank is
bigger," Mahaffie reports, "but for New England's 17th century
fishermen, the Acadian banks were where money could be made
quickly and conveniently. Codfish ran there 10 months of the
year, and the ice-free coves and harbors of the Maine and Nova
Scotia coasts are close by Boston, Salem, Marblehead, and
Gloucester. Year after year, men of those and other ports made
the short voyage and dried their catches on French territory
treating Acadia as an extension of New England."
The French government wanted a piece
of the action. Governor La Valliere and Governor Frontenac of
Quebec negotiated a compromise: The French would allow the New
Englanders to use Acadia's beaches, but they had to buy a
license to do it. Officials in France didn't like the deal. A
new company was formed there to claim and develop French fishing
rights off Acadia's shores. Company men built a base at
Chedabucto Bay in 1683.
Trouble started almost immediately.
Under La Valliere's deal, New Englanders had been licensed to
fish the waters and dry their cod ashore. The new company men
did not recognize the licenses and La Valliere tried to
intervene. The company men had him replaced by a new governor,
Francois Marie Perrot, who took office in 1685, and in
Mahaffie's estimation, "demonstrated that if the fortunes of
France were to be saved, he was not the man to do it."
He had been governor of Montreal and
was demoted to the Acadia post because of his illegal trading
with New England. When he got to Acadia, he continued to
do business with his old trading partners in New England, rather
than the company formed in France.
Perrot's affinity for trade with New
England lessened tensions between the English and French
colonies, but also continued a dangerous trend. New Englanders
began to think even more seriously about how much simpler things
would be if only Acadia belonged to them.
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