Louis Joseph Le Loutre, vicar-general of Acadia and missionary to the Micmacs, was the most conspicuous person in the province, and more than any other man was answerable for the miseries that overwhelmed it.  The sheep of which he was the shepherd dwelt, at a day’s journey from Halifax, by the banks of the River Shubenacadie, in small cabins of logs, mixed with wigwams of birch-bark.  They were not a docile flock; and to manage them needed address, energy, and money,—­with all of which the missionary was provided.  He fed their traditional dislike of the English, and fanned their fanaticism, born of the villanous counterfeit of Christianity which he and his predecessors had imposed on them.  Thus he contrived to use them on the one hand to murder the English, and on the other to terrify the Acadians; yet not without cost to the French Government; for they had learned the value of money, and, except when their blood was up, were slow to take scalps without pay.  Le Loutre was a man of boundless egotism, a violent spirit of domination, an intense hatred of the English, and a fanaticism that stopped at nothing.  Towards the Acadians he was a despot; and this simple and superstitious people, extremely susceptible to the influence of their priests, trembled before him.  He was scarcely less masterful in his dealings with the Acadian clergy; and, aided by his quality of the Bishop’s vicar-general, he dragooned even the unwilling into aiding his schemes.  Three successive governors of New France thought him invaluable, yet feared the impetuosity of his zeal, and vainly tried to restrain it within safe bounds.  The bishop, while approving his objects, thought his medicines too violent, and asked in a tone of reproof:  “Is it right for you to refuse the Acadians the sacraments, to threaten that they shall be deprived of the services of a priest, and that the savages shall treat them as enemies?"[106] “Nobody,” says a French Catholic contemporary, “was more fit than he to carry discord and desolation into a country."[107] Cornwallis called him “a good-for-nothing scoundrel,” and offered a hundred pounds for his head.[108]

[Footnote 106:  L’Eveque de Quebec a Le Loutre; translation in Public Documents of Nova Scotia, 240.]

[Footnote 107:  Memoires sur le Canada, 1749-1760.]

[Footnote 108:  On Le Loutre, compare Public Documents of Nova Scotia, 178-180, note, with authorities there cited; N.Y.  Col.  Docs., X. 11; Memoires sur le Canada, 1749-1760 (Quebec, 1838).]

The authorities at Halifax, while exasperated by the perfidy practised on them, were themselves not always models of international virtue.  They seized a French vessel in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, on the charge—­probably true—­that she was carrying arms and ammunition to the Acadians and Indians.  A less defensible act was the capture of the armed brig “St. Francois,” laden with supplies for a fort lately re-established by