Note 408 — Chapter IV

According to a careful census taken in 1686, the whole population of Acadia was 915, including 30 soldiers; and there were in the whole colony 986 horned cattle, 759 sheep, and 608 swine. (Murdoch’s History of Nova Scotia, i. 166, 167.) In 1689 the census gave the whole population as 803. (Ibid., p. 177.) Commenting on the almost stationary condition of the colony for nearly a century, Murdoch justly remarks: “It is a subject of grave reflection, that after eighty-four years had elapsed from the founding of Port Royal in 1605, and notwithstanding the expense of money and all the exertions of De Monts, Poutrincourt, La Tour, Denis, and others, men highly qualified for the task of colonization, the results should be so trifling. Many of the settlements were now desolate and abandoned, and none of them prosperous. Nearly forty years before, D’Aulnay had besieged St. John with a flotilla and five hundred men, and the defenders had been probably numerous. The contests and discords of ambitious leaders contributed, doubtless, to this unfavorable state of things; but the incessant interferences and invasions which the English at Boston carried on, must be considered as the chief causes of retarding the progress of French settlement in Acadia.”