eighboring seas; and when the governor sent Lieutenant Neuvillette
in an armed vessel to seize the interloping stranger, a fight ensued, in
which the lieutenant was killed, and his vessel captured. New England is
said to have had no less than three hundred vessels every year in these
waters.[94] Before the war a French officer proposed that New England
sailors should be hired to teach the Acadians how to fish, and the King
seems to have approved the plan.[95] Whether it was adopted or not, New
England in peace or war had a lion's share of the Acadian fisheries. "It
grieves me to the heart," writes Subercase, Brouillan's successor, "to
see Messieurs les Bastonnais enrich themselves in our domain; for the
base of their commerce is the fish which they catch off our coasts, and
send to all parts of the world."

When the war broke out, Brouillan's fighting resources were so small
that he was forced to depend largely for help on sea-rovers of more than
doubtful character. They came chiefly from the West Indies,--the old
haunt of buccaneers,--and were sometimes mere pirates, and sometimes
semi-piratical privateers commissioned by French West Indian governors.
Brouillan's successor writes that their opportunities are good, since at
least a thousand vessels enter Boston every year.[96] Besides these
irregular allies, the governor usually had at his disposal two French
frigates of thirty and sixty guns, to which was opposed the
Massachusetts navy, consisting of a ship of fifty-six guns, and the
"province galley," of twenty-two. In 1710 one of these Massachusetts
vessels appeared off the coast escorting a fishing-fleet of no less than
two hundred and fifty sail, some of which were afterwards captured by
French corsairs. A good number of these last, however, were taken from
time to time by Boston sea-rovers, who, like their enemies, sometimes
bore a close likeness to pirates. They seized French fishing and trading
vessels, attacked French corsairs, sometimes traded with the Acadians,
and sometimes plundered them. What with West India rum brought by the
French freebooters, and New England rum brought by the English, it is
reported that one could get drunk in Acadia for two sous.

Port Royal, now Annapolis, was the seat of government, and the only
place of any strength in the colony. The fort, a sodded earthwork,
lately put into tolerable repair by the joint labor of the soldiers and
inhabitants, stood on the point of land between th