Page:1898 NB Magazine.djvu/32
merce of Nova Scotia. Many of these had no proper commissions from the United States authorities and were manned by bands of brutal marauders and thieves whose conduct was so outrageous that even the rebel leader, Colonel John Allan sent a remonstrance to Congress respecting their behaviour: "Their horrid crimes," he says, "are too notorious to pass unnoticed." He particularizes some of their enormities and concludes by declaring, "such proceedings will occasion more Torys than a hundred such expeditions will make good."
The people of Machias were particularly active in plundering their neighbors to the eastward. Machias had been settled in 1763 by a colony from Scarborough, one of the oldest towns in Massachusetts, and during the war it became the asylum of disloyal spirits who fled thither from Cumberland and other parts of Nova Scotia.
The first hostile act perpetrated at St. John is thus recorded in "Sketches of New Brunswick," an anonymous work usually ascribed to Peter Fisher, father of the late Judge Fisher, printed at St. John by Chubb and Sears in 1825:—
"In May 1775, a brig was sent from Boston to procure fresh provisions for the British army then in that town, from the settlements of the river Saint John. The same vessel was laden with stock, poultry, and sundry other articles mostly brought from Maugerville in small vessels and gondolas; all of which had been put on board within about fifteen days after the brig had arrived. While she was waiting for a fair wind and clear weather, an armed sloop of four guns and full of men from Machias came into the harbor, took possession of the brig, and two days after carried her off to Machias; but the first night after their arrival the enemy made the small party in the Fort prisoners, plundered them of everything in it, and set fire to all the Barracks; but at that time they did not molest any of the inhabitants on the opposite side of the river."
The same incident is thus described by Murdoch in his history of Nova Scotia and probably his date is the more accurate:—