xes, and had the country to themselves as completely as if there had
been no British conquest. They rarely saw a British official. If they
asked the British Governor at Annapolis to settle for them some vexed
question of rights or ownership he did so and they did not even pay a
fee.

This is not, however, the whole story. England's neglect of the colony
was France's opportunity. Perhaps the French court did not follow
closely what was going on in Acadia. The successive French Governors of
Canada at Quebec were, however, alert; and their policy was to incite
the Abenaki Indians on the New England frontier to harass the English
settlements, and to keep the Acadians an active factor in the support of
French plans. The nature of French intrigue is best seen in the career
of Sebastien Rale. He was a highly educated Jesuit priest. It was long
a tradition among the Jesuits to send some of their best men as
missionaries among the Indians. Rale spent nearly the whole of his life
with the Abenakis at the mission station of Norridgewock on the Kennebec
River. He knew the language and the customs of the Indians, attended
their councils, and dominated them by his influence. He was a model
missionary, earnest and scholarly. But the Jesuit of that age was prone
to be half spiritual zealot, half political intriguer. There is no doubt
that the Indians had a genuine fear that the English, with danger from
France apparently removed by the Treaty of Utrecht, would press claims
to lands about the Kennebec River in what is now the State of Maine, and
that they would ignore the claims of the Indians and drive them out.
The Governor at Quebec helped to arouse the savages against the arrogant
intruders. English border ruffians stirred the Indians by their drunken
outrages and gave them real cause for anger. The savages knew only
one way of expressing political unrest. They began murdering women and
children in raids on lonely log cabins on the frontier. The inevitable
result was that in 1721 Massachusetts began a war on them which dragged
on for years. Rale, inspired from Quebec, was believed to control the
Indians and, indeed, boasted that he did so. At last the English struck
at the heart of the trouble. In 1724 some two hundred determined men
made a silent advance through the forest to the mission village of
Norridgewock where Rale lived, and Rale died fighting the assailants. In
Europe a French Jesuit such as he would have worked among diplo