h qualifications can be of great
assistance.

"At a distance of eighteen leagues from Father Germain's post of duty
is another called Medoctek, which is dependent on the same mission and
served by the Jesuit father Loverga, who has been there nine months,
and who has the care of a band of Marechites; but, in addition to the
fact that Father Loverga is on the point of leaving, he would be
useless there on account of his great age and it would be better to
send there next spring Father Audren, since this mission is daily
becoming more important, especially to the savages whose chief
occupation is beaver hunting.

"The French inhabitants of the River St. John have suffered much by
different detachments of Canadians and Indians, to the number of 250
or 300 men, commanded by M. de Montesson, a Canadian officer, whom
they have been obliged to subsist, and for that purpose to sacrifice
the grain and cattle needed for the seeding and tillage of their own
fields. In the helpless position in which these inhabitants find
themselves, it is thought that in order to afford them sufficient
relief it would be advisable that the Court should send them
immediately at least 1,000 barrels of flour, and the same quantity
annually for some time, both for their own subsistence and for that of
the garrison and the Indians. It would be well also to send them each
year about 250 barrels of bacon; this last sort of provision being
limited to this quantity because it is supposed, or at least hoped,
there will be sent from Quebec some Indian corn and peas as well as
oil and fat for the savages."

The reference to the St. John river region in the document from which
this extract is taken, concludes by strongly recommending that the
supply of flour and bacon should be sent, not to the store houses at
Quebec and Louisbourg, but directly to St. John, where it would arrive
as safely as at any other port and with less expense to the king and
much more expedition to the inhabitants.

It may be well now to pause in the narration of events to look a
little more closely into the situation on the River St. John at the
time of the negotiations between the rival powers with regard to the
limits of Acadia.

The statement has been made in some of our school histories, "Acadia
was ceded to the English by the treaty of Utrecht, in 1713, and has
remained a British possession ever since." The statement is, to say
the least, very misleading, so far as the St. J