254 THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 
the state of Virginia that lies west of the Blue Ridge. McNutt himself 
was born probably between 1725 and 1731, and as a young man, with 
the rank of captain, in 1756, under Major Andrew Lewis, had taken part 
in an attempted raid on the Shawnee Indians.' In 1758 probably, a 
short time before he appears in New Hampshire, for what reason we do 
not know he had come north to New England, and very soon we find 
him engaged in local military service in Massachusetts. As a militia 
captain in 1759 he seems to have accompanied a small squad of soldiers 
to Halifax to do duty at Fort Cumberland, and either then or earlier 
the idea of promoting the colonization of Nova Scotia took firm hold 
of his mind. The story of his negotiations with the Nova Scotia 
Government during a series of years, in the course of which he managed 
to antagonize almost every one with whom he had dealings, has recently 
been told in print in a graphic way and is much too long to repeat here, 
but as we have seen, his attempts at colonizing the Province, at the 
outset resulted in the settlement of the township of Truro from Lon- 
donderry, New Hampshire. 
Hardly had McNutt organized his New Hampshire colony than 
armed with commendatory letters from Lieutenant Governor Jonathan 
Belcher and the Nova Scotia Council, he crossed the ocean and presented 
himself to the English Lords of Trade as desiring to take settlers from 
the North of Ireland to the Province of Nova Scotia. “The tide of 
Irish immigration to America,” says Archdeacon Raymond, “ 
was not viewed with favour by the British Government. Itspeaks much 
for the persuasive powers of McNutt that he overcame the prejudices 
of the Lords of Trade in regard to his mission and was able to make 
them his advocates with the ministry. This is the more surprising in 
view of the fact that McNutt was very outspoken in his criticism of the 
administration in Nova Scotia, and that he made proposals of so radical 
a nature as to stamp him, even at this early stage of his career, as a 
man of republican proclivities.’’? 
The Lords of Trade, however, wished to encourage the colonization 
of Nova Scotia, and McNutt was allowed to go to Ulster to pursue his 
scheme. In April, 1761, he entered into an arrangement with Messrs. 
Arthur Vance and William Caldwell, shipping merchants, to furnish 
vessels to carry passengers to Halifax, in accordance with his plans for 
the settlement of the townships the Nova Scotia Government had 
! ‘Annals of Augusta County, Virginia,” Joseph A. Waddell; and Alexander 
Scott Withers’ “Chronicles of Border Warfare,” republished in 1895. 
* Archdeacon Raymond’s first Monograph on “Col. Alexander McNutt and the 
Pre-Loyalist Settlements of Nova Scotia,” in the Transactions of the Royal Society, 
p. 67. 
