extensive commerce. The island was indeed fabulously rich in
coals and minerals. To use these things, however, was to be the
task of a new age of industry. The colonist of the eighteenth
century--a merchant, a farmer, or a fur trader--thought that Cape
Breton was bleak and infertile and refused to settle there.
Louisbourg remained a compact fortress with a good harbor, free
from ice during most of the year, but too much haunted by fog. It
looked out on a much-traveled sea. But it remained set in the
wilderness.

Even if Louisbourg made up for the loss of Port Royal, this did
not, however, console France for the cession of Acadia. The fixed
idea of those who shaped the policy of Canada was to recover
Acadia and meanwhile to keep its French settlers loyal to France.
The Acadians were not a promising people with whom to work. In
Acadia, or Nova Scotia, as the English called it, these backward
people had slowly gathered during a hundred years and had
remained remote and neglected. They had cleared farms, built
primitive houses, planted orchards, and reared cattle. In 1713
their number did not exceed two or three thousand, but already
they were showing the amazing fertility of the French race in
America. They were prosperous but ignorant. Almost none of them
could read. After the cession of their land to Britain in 1713
they had been guaranteed by treaty the free exercise of their
religion and they were Catholics to a man. It seems as if history
need hardly mention a people so feeble and obscure.
Circumstances, however, made the role of the Acadians important.
Their position was unique. The Treaty of Utrecht gave them the
right to leave Acadia within a year, taking with them their
personal effects. To this Queen Anne added the just privilege of