In order to estimate truly the condition of the respective parties, we must remember the severe iron and gunpowder nature of the Puritan of New England, his prejudices, his dyspepsia; his high-peaked hat and ruff; his troublesome conscience and catarrh; his natural antipathies to Papists and Indians, from having been scalped by one, and roasted by both; his English insolence; and his religious bias, at once tyrannic and territorial. Then, on the other, we must call to view the simple Acadian peasant, Papist or Protestant, just as it happened; ignorant of the great events of the world; a mere offshoot of rural Normandy; without a thought of other possessions than those he might reclaim from the sea by his dykes; credulous, pure-minded, patient of injuries; that like the swallow in the spring, thrice built the nest, and when again it was destroyed, ----"found the ruin wrought, But, not cast down, forth from the place it flew, And with its mate fresh earth and grasses brought, And built the nest anew." Against such people, the expedition of Col. Church, fresh from the slaughter of Pequod wars, bent its merciless energies. Regardless of the facts that the people were non-resistants; that the expeditions of the French had been only feeble retaliations of great injuries; and always by levies from the mother country, and not from the colonists; that Villabon, at the capture of Pemaquid, had generously saved the lives of the soldiers in the garrison from the fury of the Mic-Macs, who had just grounds of retribution for the massacres which had marked the former inroads of these ruthless invaders; the wrath of the Pilgrim Fathers fell upon the unfortunate Acadians as though they had been a nation of Sepoys.[D] [D] One incident will suffice to show the character of these forays. A small island on Passamaquoddy Bay was invaded by the forces under Col. Church, at night. The inhabitants made no resistance. All gave up; "but," says Church in his dispatch to the governor, "looking over a little run, I saw something look black just by me: stopped and heard a talking; stepped over and saw a little hut, or wigwam, with a crowd of people round about it, which was contrary to my former directions. I asked them what they were doing? They replied, 'there were some of the enemy in a house, and would not come out.' I asked what house? They said, 'a bark house' I hastily bid them pull it down, _and knock them on the head, never asking whether they were French or Indians, they being all enemies alike to me_." Such was the merciless character of these early expeditions to peaceful Acadia.