214 
CAPE COD. 
further off than Port Poyal (Annapolis, Nova Scotia), 
three hundred miles distant (Prince seems to make it 
about five hundred miles) ; where, in spite of many 
vicissitudes, they had been for fifteen years. They 
built a grist-mill there as early as 1606; also made 
bricks and turpentine on a stream, Williamson says, in 
1606. De Monts, who was a Protestant, brought his 
minister with him, who came to blows with the Catholic 
priest on the subject of religion. Though these founders 
of Acadie endured no less than the Pilgrims, and about 
the same proportion of them—thirty-five out of seventy- 
nine (Williamson’s Maine says thirty-six out of sev¬ 
enty) — died the first winter at St. Croix, 1604-5, six¬ 
teen years earlier, no orator, to my knowledge, has ever 
celebrated their enterprise (Williamson’s History of 
Maine does considerably), while the trials which their 
successors and descendants endured at the hands of the 
English have furnished a theme for both the historian 
and poet. (See Bancroft’s History and Longfellow’s 
Evangeline.) The remains of their fort at St. Croix 
were discovered at the end of the last century, and 
helped decide where the true St. Croix, our boundary, 
was. 
The very gravestones of those Frenchmen are prob¬ 
ably older than the oldest English monument in New 
England north of the Elizabeth Islands, or perhaps any¬ 
where in New England, for if there are any traces 
of Gosnold’s storehouse left, his strong works are gone. 
Bancroft says, advisedly, in 1834, “It requires a believ¬ 
ing eye to discern the ruins of the fort ”; and that there 
were no ruins of a fort in 1837. Dr. Charles T. Jack- 
son tells me that, in the course of a geological survey 
in 1827, he discovered a gravestone, a slab of trap rock, 
