Battle of Bloody Creek (1711) - Background

Background

Port Royal, the capital of the French colony of Acadia, was settled in 1604, one year after Acadia's founding, and served as the colonial capital for much of the next hundred years. It consequently became a focal point for conflict between the English colonists of New England and the Acadian inhabitants. It was destroyed in 1613 by English raiders led by Samuel Argall, but eventually rebuilt. In 1690 it was captured by forces from the Province of Massachusetts Bay, although it was restored to France on 20 September 1697 by the Treaty of Ryswick.

In the 1710 Siege of Port Royal an expedition of New England militia and British marines under Francis Nicholson again captured Port Royal. The town was renamed Annapolis Royal, with Samuel Vetch as the British Governor of Nova Scotia, and the fort was renamed Fort Anne. This expedition left a garrison numbering about 450 men, that was composed of a combination of British marines and New England provincial militia. The garrison was reinforced with regular troops in the following months, however the British only had effective control of the fort and the nearby town. The terms of capitulation had included a provision in which the French residents within 3 miles (4.8 km) of the fort were to be protected, provided they took an appropriate oath to the British crown. A total of 481 Acadians were covered by this provision, but by mid-January 1711 only 57 had actually taken an oath.

When word of Port Royal's fall reached France, the marine minister Pontchartrain ordered Antoine Gaulin, the French Catholic missionary priest to the loosely allied Indian tribes of present-day Maine and New Brunswick, to harass the British at Annapolis Royal so that they could not establish a firm foothold in the territory. Bernard-Anselme d'Abbadie de Saint-Castin, the mixed-blood son of a French father and a Penobscot mother, was given military command of Acadia, and received similar orders.