asperau, on the shores of the Canard, beside the Strait of
Frontenac, at Le Have, and Rossignol, at Port Royal and Pisiquid. During
all these years no attempt had been made by the captors of this province,
to colonize the places baptized with the waters of Puritan progress.
Lunenburgh was settled with King William's Dutchmen; the walls of
Louisburgh were rising in one of the harbors of a neighboring island; but
in no instance had the filibusters projected a _colony_ on the soil which
had been wrested from its rightful owners. The only result of all their
bloody visitations upon a non-resisting people, had been to make
defenceless Acadia a neutral province. From this time until the close of
the drama, in all the wars between the Georges and the Louises, in both
hemispheres, the people of Acadia went by the name of "The Neutral
French."

Meantime the walls of Louisburgh were rising on the island of Cape Breton,
which, with Canada, still remained under the sovereign rule of the French.
The Acadians were invited to remove within the protection of this
formidable fortress, but they preferred remaining intrenched behind their
dykes, firmly believing that the only invader they had now to dread was
the sea, inasmuch as they had accepted the oath of fidelity, in which, and
in their inoffensive pursuits, they imagined themselves secure from
farther molestation. Some of their Indian neighbors, however, accepted the
invitation of the Cape Breton French, and removed thither. These simple
savages, notwithstanding the changes in the government, still regarded the
Acadians as friends, and the English as enemies. They could not comprehend
the nature of a treaty by which their own lands were ceded to a hostile
force; a treaty in which they were neither consulted nor considered.[E]
They had their own injuries to remember, which in no wise had been
balanced in the compact of the strangers. The rulers in New France (so
says the chronicler) "affected to consider the Indians as an independent
people." At Canseau, at Cape Sable, at Annapolis, and Passamaquoddy,
English forts, fishing stations, and vessels were attacked and destroyed
by the savages with all the circumstances that make up the hideous
features of barbaric reprisal. Unhappy Acadia came in for her share of
condemnation. Although her innocent people had no part in these
transactions, yet her missionaries had converted the Abenaqui to faith in
the symbol of the crucifixion, and it was