Lafayette (LA) Daily Advertiser, February 23, 1999

Codfish on the beaches bring trade tensions

by Jim Bradshaw

In 1678, Jacques de Chambly was replaced as governor by Michel Leneuf de La Vallière de Beaubassin, a native of Acadie. 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 betting a bit crowded.

Besides that, according to Charles Mahaffie Jr., author of "A Land of Discord Always, "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 Pré, 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 Charles Mahaffie Jr., author of "A Land of Discord Always." "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 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.. Gov. La Vallière and Gov. Frontenac of Québec 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 Vallière'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 Vallière 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 Acadie, 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 British 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 Acadie belonged to them.