defence.

From this time to the end of the war, the chief difficulties of the
governor of Acadia rose, not from the enemy, but from the British
authorities at home. For more than two years he, with his starved and
tattered garrison, were treated with absolute neglect. He received no
orders, instructions, or money.[196] Acadia seemed forgotten by the
ministry, till Vetch heard at last that Nicholson was appointed to
succeed him.

Now followed the Treaty of Utrecht, the cession of Acadia to England,
and the attempt on the part of France to induce the Acadians to remove
to Isle Royale. Some of the English officials had once been of opinion
that this French Catholic population should be transported to Martinique
or some other distant French colony, and its place supplied by
Protestant families sent from England or Ireland.[197] Since the English
Revolution, Protestantism was bound up with the new political order, and
Catholicism with the old. No Catholic could favor the Protestant
succession, and hence politics were inseparable from creed. Vetch, who
came of a race of hot and stubborn Covenanters, had been one of the most
earnest for replacing the Catholic Acadians by Protestants; but after
the peace he and others changed their minds. No Protestant colonists
appeared, nor was there the smallest sign that the government would give
itself the trouble to attract any. It was certain that if the Acadians
removed at all, they would go, not to Martinique or any other distant
colony, but to the new military establishment of Isle Royale, which
would thus become a strong and dangerous neighbor to the feeble British
post of Annapolis. Moreover, the labor of the French inhabitants was
useful and sometimes necessary to the English garrison, which depended
mainly on them for provisions; and if they left the province, they would
leave it a desert, with the prospect of long remaining so.

Hence it happened that the English were for a time almost as anxious to
keep the Acadians in Acadia as they were forty years later to get them
out of it; nor had the Acadians themselves any inclination to leave
their homes. But the French authorities needed them at Isle Royale, and
made every effort to draw them thither. By the fourteenth article of the
Treaty of Utrecht such of them as might choose to leave Acadia were free
to do so within the space of a year, carrying with them their personal
effects; while a letter of Queen Anne, addressed to Nichols