In the late winter of 1613, Baron de Poutrincourt was trying to raise money in France to supply his struggling fur trading post in Port Royal, now Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia. The Jesuits wanted to establish a mission in America with a base on Poutrincourt’s post. The Jesuits’ “angel,” Mme de Guercheville, agreed to finance the expedition and the supplies for the post if the Jesuits were given land in America. Accordingly, Louis XIII, then ten years old, gave the Jesuits the whole continent of North America from Florida to the St. Lawrence except for Poutrincourt’s base at Fort Royal.
In May, 1613, after touching at Port Royal, two Jesuit priests, 28 colonists and a supply of cattle and goats landed on Mt. Desert Island. They asked the Indians to guide them to the Penobscot, but the Indians told them that Chief Asticou was sick and wanted to be baptized before he died. They found the Chief suffering the horrors of only a bad cold. He guided them to the mouth of Somes Sound, where they found clear, level ground protected from winter gales by Flying Mountain, an anchorage protected by numerous islands, and a bubbling spring of fresh water on the beach just below high water mark. Here they set up a cross and established St. Sauveur mission.
Governor Dale of Virginia, whose company had been granted the whole east coast of America from the Chesapeake to just short of Passamaquoddy Bay, by King James of England, who didn’t own it any more than King Louis did, sent Captain Samuel Argall to oust the interlopers. Argall, a rough-and-tough privateer-cum-pirate, sailed up the Western Way under British colors, rounded-to alongside the French ship, JONAS, and poured in a broadside, which killed one of the priests. The leader of the French expedition, La Saussaye, ran for the woods. JONAS’s pilot fled in a small boat. JONAS’s captain shouted “fire!” and slammed a match into the touch hole of a gun to no effect. He had not aimed it.
Argall seized the French ship, raided the Jesuit camp, and stole the commission from La Saussaye’s chest. When the leader emerged from the woods the next day, Argall demanded his commission. Of course La Saussaye could not produce the commission so Argall declared him a pirate and an interloper, looted the colony, set 14 of the colonists adrift in an open boat and took La Saussaye and the officers back to Virginia to face Dale. Dale was about to hang them as pirates when Argall produced the commission and Dale sent them back to France. The boat crew crossed the Bay of Fundy and went home to France with fishermen from St. Malo.
Then Dale sent Argall back to Maine to wipe out all trace of the French. He burned St. Sauveur and replaced the French cross with an English one. Then he crossed to the French base at Port Royal. He burned and looted that, butchered or carried off the horses, cattle and goats, and destroyed the growing crops, leaving the inhabitants in November to get through the winter as best they could on nuts, clams, small game and what they could salvage from the ashes of the buildings. Baron de Poutrincourt returned the next spring and took them home to France and so ended for the time being, French occupation in Maine and Acadia.