He was an ardent politician and France supplied him with both money and arms to induce the Indians to attack the English.The savages haunted the outskirts of Halifax, waylaid and scalped unhappy settlers, and, in due course, were paid from Louisbourg according to the number of scalps which they produced.The deliberate intention was to make new English settlements impossible in Nova Scotia and so to discourage the English that they should abandon Halifax.All this intrigue occurred in 1749and the years following the treaty of peace.If the English suffered, so did the Acadians.Le Loutre told them that if once they became British subjects they would lose their priests and find their religion suppressed.Acadians who took the oath would, he said, be denied the sacraments of the Church.He would also turn loose on the offenders the murderous savages whom he controlled.If pressed by the English, the Acadians, rather than yield, must abandon their lands and remove into French territory.
At this point arises the question as to what were the limits of this French territory.In yielding Acadia in 1713, France had not defined its boundaries.The English claimed that it included the whole region stretching northeastward to the Gulf of St.Lawrence from the frontier of New England.The French, however, said that Acadia meant only the peninsula of Nova Scotia ending at the isthmus between Baie Verte and the Bay of Chignecto; and for years a Canadian force stood there on guard, daring the British to put a foot on the north side of the little river Missaguash, which the French said was the international boundary.
There was much excitement among the Acadians in 1750, when an English force landed on the isthmus and proceeded to throw up defenses on the south side of the river.This outpost, which in due time became Fort Lawrence, was placed on what even the French admitted to be British territory.Forthwith on a hill two or three miles away, on the other side of the supposed boundary, the French built Fort Beausejour.Le Loutre was on the spot, blustering and menacing.He told his Acadian parishioners of the little village of Beaubassin, near Fort Lawrence and within the British area, that rather than accept English rule they must now abandon their lands and seek the protection of the French at Fort Beausejour.With his own hands he set fire to the village church.
The houses of the Acadians were also burned.A whole district was laid waste by fire.Women and children suffered fearful privations--but what did such things matter in view of the high politics of the priest and of France?
During four or five years the hostile forts confronted each other.In time of peace there was war.The French made Beausejour a solid fort, for it still stands, little altered, though it has been abandoned for a century and a half.It was chiefly the Acadians, nominal British subjects, who built these thick walls.
The arrogant Micmacs demanded that the British should hand over to them the best half of Nova Scotia, and they emphasized their demand by treachery and massacre.One day a man, in the uniform of a French officer, followed by a small party, approached Fort Lawrence, waving a white flag.Captain Howe with a small force went out to meet him.As this party advanced, Indians concealed behind a dike fired and killed Howe and eight or ten others.Such ruses were well fitted to cause among the English a resolve to enforce severe measures.The fire burned slowly but in the end it flamed up in a cruel and relentless temper.French policy, too, showed no pity.The Governor of Canada and the colonial minister in France were alike insistent that the English should be given no peace and cared nothing for the sufferings of the unhappy Acadians between the upper and the nether millstone.
At last, in 1755, the English accomplished something decisive.
They sent an army to Fort Lawrence, attacked Fort Beausejour, forced its timid commander Vergor to surrender, mastered the whole surrounding country, and obliged Le Loutre himself to fly to Quebec.There he embarked for France.The English captured him on the sea, however, and the relentless and cruel priest spent many years in an English prison.His later years, when he reached France, do him some credit.By that time the Acadians had been driven from their homes.There were nearly a thousand exiles in England.Le Loutre tried to befriend these helpless people and obtained homes for some of them in the parish of Belle-Isle-en-Mer in France.
