When Charles
Menou de Charnisay, Sieur d'Aulnay, succeeded Isaac de Razilly
as leader of the Acadian colony, one of his first actions was to
begin to undermine Razilly's friends Charles de La Tour and
Nicholas Denys.
According to
Charles Mahaffie, "He began his campaign by getting rid of Denys
- an easy task. Unlike La Tour, who had forts and armed men,
Denys had only (a) fishery and his mill. D'Aulnay merely cut off
his ocean transport, forcing him out of business and out of
Acadia."
La Tour would
be more difficult. For one thing, d'Aulnay envisioned an
agricultural settlement, which was a good thing for the Acadians
on the land, but not so good for the Company of New France.
France had all of the farm goods it needed. Official France
still wanted furs and began once again to lose interest in
Acadian affairs. Quebec was the center of the Canadian fur trade
at the time, and thus became the center of attention for the
French crown - when the government's attention wasn't diverted
again by wars in Europe or its own internal problems.
In 1636,
d'Aulnay moved his headquarters to Port Royal, where he could
more readily deal with La Tour. He built a fort and settled his
farmers around it.
"Half a day's
sail away," Mahaffie writes, "in Saint John Harbor on a piece of
land now called Portland Point... stood (La Tour's fort). La
Tour still had his commission (granting him fur trading rights
over much of the area), and his own soldiers, and to match the
Capuchins at Port Royal there were Recollect friars (with La
Tour). As the contest for Acadia began, La Tour seemed to hold
most of the cards.
"D'Aulnay
gained equal status in 1638," Mahaffie continues, "when he was
sent a commission of his own, but his backers in Paris could not
win him the absolute power he sought. He was told to cooperate
with La Tour, and La Tour was alloted the same share of the fur
trade he had enjoyed under Razilly. The king's ministers also
tried to reconcile La Tour's and d'Aulnay's overlapping
jurisdictions, but knowing little about Acadia's geography, they
got it backward...(and) put each warlord in the other's back
yard. The fighting started two years later."
In 1640, La
Tour sailed to Port Royal with his new wife, Francoise Marie
Jacqueline, but they were not allowed ashore. D'Aulnay had taken
two ships to Penobscot Bay, but left instructions that La Tour
was not to land at Port Royal while he was gone. Shortly after
they had been told they could not come ashore, d'Aulnay sailed
into Annapolis Bay. La Tour, upset at the insult of not being
allowed ashore, opened fire on d'Aulnay's ships. He was
outnumbered and outgunned, and it didn't take long for d'Aulnay
to make the La Tours, husband and wife, his prisoners.
They
were released when the priests at Port Royal suggested that the
two men put their differences aside for the moment and let
official France try again to solve the dispute.
This time,
partially because La Tour had been the first to open fire, the
king's ministers sided with d'Aulnay. In February 1641, they
canceled La Tour's fur trading commission and told him to report
to the king to explain his conduct. D'Aulnay was ordered to
arrest La Tour if he refused to go to France.
La Tour
barricaded himself in his fort at Jemseg and sent some of his
men to Massachusetts to try to find English allies to supply
money and manpower to fight d'Aulnay. The Boston merchants
turned him down at first, but left room for more talks later.
On
March 6, 1644, the French government declared La Tour an outlaw
but he still refused to give in. He sent his wife to France to
plead his case to the officials there and to bring back badly
needed supplies. She was an effective missionary.
As
Mahaffie reports, "The era of Richelieu was over. He had died in
December, and was succeeded as the king's chief minister by
another political cardinal, Jules Mazarin. (Another office held
by Richelieu, head of commerce and navigation) had become a
sinecure held by (Mazarin's) nephew, the duc de Fronsac...(who)
issued an order restoring La Tour's old title. At the same time
(Fronsac) directed the Company of New France to send a warship
to help (La Tour). Francoise Marie...sailed home aboard the 120
ton Saint-Clement with soldiers and sailors and official
papers...proclaiming her husband's ascendancy."
When she
returned to Acadia, she found that d'Aulnay's ships were
blockading La Tour's fort. She got her news ashore, but could
not land. Instead her husband and one of his chief lieutenants,
Jacques de Murat, made their way to the ship. Once aboard, they
set sail for Boston where a chance meeting with Governor John
Winthrop turned very profitable indeed.
After a
meeting with other leaders in the Massachusetts colony, Winthrop
decided to side with La Tour. He said that Massachusetts would
not give any direct military assistance in his battle with
d'Aulnay, but that La Tour could hire men and ships from
Massachusetts to take his side in the war.
According
to Mahaffie's analysis, there were two reasons for
Massachusetts' involvement in this civil dispute in Acadia.
"The
first was religious and political. The men La Tour brought with
him included Protestants, and La Tour and Francoise Marie
Jacqueline probably implied and may have promised that they
themselves were ready to see the light. Moreover, they might be
able to bring to the Protestant fold and to the bosom of the Bay
Colony the rest of the Catholics of the Bay of Fundy. The
Puritans were intrigued by the idea of converting papists -
particularly such interesting ones as La Tour and his glamorous
wife - and they must have found even more appealing the prospect
of others abandoning not only their faith but with it their
loyalty, and adding their territory to Massachusetts. It was not
the last time that New England ambitions would run to annexation
of Acadia.
"Two,"
Mahaffie continues, "there was an economic motive. Britain's
Civil War had just begun, and the old country's Puritans
expected to win it. They no longer needed to seek freedom of
conscience in America; they would have it at home. The Great
Migration had ended, and the merchants of Boston were suffering
from a recession. Opportunities for trade to the south were
blocked by the Dutch and the New Netherlands they had built on
the Hudson. If a friendly and indebted La Tour could be
established as lord of the northeast, it seemed that gratifying
profits might follow."
La Tour hired
70 soldiers and five ships, and sailed to Port Royal at the end
of July. Mahaffie says the battle that was fought was "not in
the end a decisive or even a particularly destructive" one. A
more contemporary account makes it sound pretty bad.
According
to an account sent to the French court on October 20, 1643, and
attested to by several priests in Acadia "After harassing
d'Aulnay for seven years, the English of Grande Baie (Plymouth),
accompanying La Tour, mounted an assault on Port Royal with four
ships and two armed frigates on August 6, 1643, wounded seven
men, killed three others, and took one captive. They killed a
quantity of livestock and took a ship loaded with furs, powder,
and food."
The priests
told the authorities in France that "of the 18,000 livres worth
of furs stolen in Port Royal, the Bostonians kept two thirds and
La Tour one third." The priests wanted France to help d'Aulnay
"so that he may carry out his generous plan against the enemies
of the true religion and in particular against the Sieur de la
Tour, a very evil Frenchman who attends Protestant services when
he is in Grande Baie."
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