Among these more recent writers the highest place belongs to Francis Parkman. In his _Pioneers of France in the New World_[436] he has given an account of the first settlement of the French in Acadia which is not less accurate in its minutest details than it is picturesque in style and comprehensive in its grasp of the subject. Mr. Parkman needed only a story of wider relations and more continuous influence to secure for his book a foremost place among American histories. In his _Frontenac_[437] he has told with equal vividness the story of the marauding warfare which devastated the coast of Acadia and the contiguous English settlements from 1689 to 1697. No one of our historians has been more unwearied in research, as no one has been more skilful in handling his materials. Based in great part on original manuscripts from the French archives and on contemporaneous narratives, his volumes leave nothing to be desired for the period which they cover.
=A.= A Commissioner of Public Records of Nova Scotia was appointed in 1857, and by his list, printed in 1864, it appears that but one of the two hundred and four volumes in which the archives were arranged had papers of a date earlier than 1700, and that this volume contained copies of copies from the archives in Paris made for the Canadian Government, and covered the years 1632-1699. The Library of Parliament _Catalogue_, p. 1538, shows that vol. i. of the third series of manuscripts (1654-1699) is devoted to Acadia. A Nova Scotia Historical Society, instituted a few years ago, has as yet published but one volume of Reports and Collections for 1878, but it contains contributions to a later period in the history of Acadia than that now under consideration.
=B.= THE WAR IN MAINE AND ACADIA.—The revolution which deposed Andros in Boston was also the occasion of withdrawing the garrisons from the English posts toward Acadia; and this invited in turn the onsets of the enemy. It was calculated in 1690 that there were between Boston and Canso four thousand two hundred and ten Indians,—a census destined to be diminished, indeed, so that in 1726 the savages were only rated for the same territory at five hundred and six (_N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg._, 1866, p. 9). But this diminution meant a process of appalling war. In the spring of 1689 came the catastrophe at Choceco (now Dover). Belknap, in his _New Hampshire_, gives a sufficient narrative; and Dr. Quint, in his notes to Pike’s Journal (_Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc._, xiv. 124), indicates the manuscript sources. For the capture of the stockade at Pemaquid, which quickly followed, we have the French side in the _Relation_ of Father Thury, the priest of the mission to the Penobscot Indians, who was in the action, and La Motte-Cadillac’s _Mémoire sur l’Acadie_, 1692. Cf. the references in Shea’s _Charlevoix_, iv. 42. The English side can be gathered from Mather’s _Magnalia; Andros Tracts_, vol. iii.; 3 _Mass. Hist. Coll._ vol. i.; Hough’s “Pemaquid Papers,” in _Maine Hist. Soc. Coll._, vol. v.; Hubbard’s _Indian Wars_, and John Gyles’s _Memoirs_, Boston, 1736 (see _Mem. Hist. Boston_, ii. 336). The story, more or less colored, under new lights or local associations, is told in Hutchinson’s _Massachusetts_, Thornton’s _Ancient Pemaquid_, Johnston’s _Bristol, Bremen, and Pemaquid_ (p. 170), and of course in Williamson and Parkman.