[kaymondI THE FIRST GOVERNOR OF NEW BRUNSWICK 421 



settlement sprang into existence a few miles below at Saint Anne's 

 Point. This village was pillaged and burned in the month of February, 

 1759. 



According to the statement of a British officer, Captain John 

 Knox, who was at the time in the garrison of Annapolis Royal, a 

 party of New England Rangers marched from Fort Frederick eighty 

 miles up the river on snow shoes and burned one hundred and forty- 

 seven dwellings houses, two mass houses, and all the barns, stables 

 and granaries. Cattle, horses and hogs were destroyed, six Acadians 

 were killed and scalped and others taken prisoners. The remnant 

 fled to the woods, where they maintained a precarious existence after 

 the Indian fashion. Some of them went to Quebec but others clung 

 to the locality. The barbarity attending this mid-winter foray was 

 strongly condemned by Lord Amherst, the commander of the forces 

 in America. Those who participated in it were not British regulars 

 but the provincial troops of Massachusetts. 



In the summer of 1763 Studholme, the commanding officer at 

 Fort Frederick, was instructed to order the Acadians lingering about 

 Saint Anne to remove. They appealed to the Governor of Nova 

 Scotia, expressing a hope that in pity for their past miseries they might 

 be spared further suffering. They stated that they were just beginning 

 to emerge from the condition of wretchedness to which they had been 

 reduced by the late war. The prospect of an abundant harvest 

 promised to provide for their wants during the coming year. "If 

 you insist upon our removal before the harvest," they say, "most 

 of us, being without money or supplies or any means of conveyance, 

 will be driven to live like the savages, wandering from place to place. 

 But if you allow us to stay the winter, in order to secure our crops, 

 we shall then be able to cultivate the lands wherever you may bid 

 us go. We need not tell you that a farmer who takes up new land 

 without having supplies for a year must inevitably be ruined, and 

 of no use to the government he belongs to. We hope, sir, that you 

 will be good enough to grant us a priest of our faith. Such a conces- 

 sion would enable us to bear with fortitude the troubles inseparable 

 from such a migration." 



Studholme seems not to have taken any active measures to dis- 

 possess them, and during the next twenty years their numbers grad- 

 ually increased. 



About the same period another Acadian settlement was establish- 

 ed near the Kennebecasis at the place still called the French Village. 

 Some of these people were employed in the construction of a dyke 

 and aboideau by Hazen, Simonds and White, who were the proprietors 

 of the great marsh east of the city of St. John. When the work was 



