The Cabots were the first Europeans who looked upon the rugged shores of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, and England therefore claimed those regions as her own. But France actually took possession of the Acadian peninsula. Small settlements were founded here and there, and a profitable trade in furs was carried on with the Indians, who came from great distances on the mainland to acquire the attractive wares which the white men offered. During its first century Acadie had an unquiet life. England would allow the poor colonists no repose. During those periods--and they constantly recurred--when the two great European powers were at war, the roving ships of England were sure to visit the feeble Acadian settlements, bringing ruin, sudden and deep. The colonists of Massachusetts or of distant Virginia, now grown strong, did not wait for the pretext of war, but freely invaded Acadie even during the intervals of peace. The French incautiously provoked the resentment of their Indian neighbours, and the treacherous savages exacted bloody vengeance for their wrongs. And as if foreign hostility were not sufficient, civil wars raged among the Acadians. At one unhappy time there were rival governors in Acadie, with battles, sieges, massacres of Frenchmen by French hands. But even these miseries did not prevent some measure of growth. Before Acadie finally passed away from France, there were twenty thousand Frenchmen engaged in its fisheries and its fur trade. [Sidenote: 1713 A.D.] A hundred years after the first French settlement on the Acadian peninsula, there came to a close, in the reign of Queen Anne, the desolating war against Louis XIV., which King William had deemed essential to the welfare of Europe. England, as was her practice at such seasons, had possessed herself of Acadie. Hitherto she had been accustomed to restore Acadie at the close of each war. Now she determined to retain it; and exhausted France submitted, by the treaty of Utrecht, to the loss. Acadie became Nova Scotia; Port Royal became Annapolis, in honour of the English Queen. Cape Breton, an island adjoining Acadie on the north, was suffered to remain a French possession; and here France hastened, at vast expense, to build and fortify Louisburg, for the protection of her American trade. Thirty years later, the English besieged and took Louisburg. France strove hard, but vainly, to regain a fortress the loss of which shook her hold of all her American possessions. A great fleet sailed from France to achieve this conquest. But evil fortune attended it from the outset. The English captured some of the ships; tempest wrecked or scattered the others. Fresh efforts invited new disasters; the attempt to repossess Louisburg was closed by the destruction or capture of an entire French fleet. But France had fought more successfully in India, and when the terms of the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle came to be adjusted, she received back Louisburg in exchange for Madras.