266 INDIANS OF NOVA SCOTIA — GILPIN. 



excited to their acts by emissaries, chiefly from Quebec. M. 

 Gaulin, missionary, (letter from Placentia, 5th September, 1711, 

 Murdock), boasts, " To take away all hope of an accommodation, 

 he induced the savages to made incursions upon the English." 

 During this same year an ambuscade of Indians destroyed the 

 whole force of eighty men, killing outright thirty men, the fort- 

 major and engineer, and making the rest prisoners. This happened 

 twelve miles up river from the fort, and so encouraged Gaulin that 

 he immediately invested the fort (Port Royal) so closely that the 

 garrison could not appear upon the ramparts. This garrison is said 

 to have lost in seven months, by sickness and sorties, three hundred 

 and fifty men. Surprisals also were made by the Indians on fishing 

 vessels and fishermen on the sea coast, — at Yarmouth, at LaHave, 

 and at Canseau. Few people now imagine the terror of their name 

 at that date, or fancy that a few scattered savages could do so much 

 mischief. "Queen Anne may have the meadows, but we have the 

 forest, from which nothing can drive us," was their open boast, as 

 well as the reason of this power. 



Their inroads seem to have been made from with varying 

 frequency, from seventeen hundred and ten to seventeen hundred 

 and sixty-one. They languished for awhile ; but when it was seen 

 by the French that England, by the founding of Halifax, was in 

 earnest in settling the Province, they seem to have increased. 

 Annapolis was again invested by the Indians, and a sergeant and 

 two men killed. Another missionary, not Gaulin, but Laloutte, the 

 darkest figure of the many dark men that vexed the times, boldly 

 led the assault of his French and Indians, against the crumbling 

 walls of old Port Royal, then defended by the veteran Mascarene. 

 Unsuccessful, stained by the murder of Captain Howe, denounced 

 by the French officers, and by his superior, the Bishop of Quebec, 

 he disappeared from the scene, tradition says, to die a life-prisoner 

 in an English fortress.* 



* It must be confessed as a strange irony of the times, that the grand wars of 

 the French were fought over in the pine forests of Nova Scotia between Huguenot and 

 Catholic. Whilst Gaulin and the Jesuit Laloutte led on their petty tribe of savages, 

 the Huguenot Mascarene stayed up his ragged soldiery. This gentleman, banished by 

 the revocation of the edict of Nantz whilst yet a child, from France, found himself 



