When these things happened, in the year 1654, De la Tour was long past his prime. After waiting a year he began to see how hopeless it was to expect that France would do anything to save Acadia. He crossed the ocean, this time to England. As Sir Charles de la Tour he obtained audience of the Lord Protector and stated his case fully and frankly. "I am the man for that country, {101} my Lord. For more than sixty years I have laboured there, and settlers and Indians know me. With me it may prosper; without me it is nothing." Cromwell was a keen judge of character. He liked De la Tour's address, and decreed that he should come into his own again. An English Company was formed, consisting of De la Tour, Thomas Temple, one of Cromwell's colonels, and a Puritan minister named William Crowne, to take over the whole of Acadia, both the peninsula of Nova Scotia and the mainland. The partners were given besides the usual trading monopoly. Great projects were planned, and so firm was Temple's belief in Acadia's future that he spent his whole fortune in developing the estate. Long before his death, in 1666, Charles de la Tour sold out his interests to his partners. He divined further trouble, for the Restoration of Charles the Second put a new aspect on the situation. His seventy years of strenuous life made him long for peace and quiet. But the worst he did not live to see. A year after De la Tour died, King Charles put his royal hand to the disgraceful Treaty of Breda, by which all Acadia, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island, was given back to France, and Temple became a ruined man. For forty-three years did Nova Scotia remain in the possession of the French. At length in 1713, by the Treaty of Utrecht, it passed to Great Britain, and in British possession it remains to this day. The New Englanders never ceased to regard French Acadia with jealousy. There were constant quarrels about the boundary-line between it and New England, {102} and many deadly raids on both sides. Among the chief characters of Acadia at this time was the Baron St. Castin. He was a French noble who flung off the mantle of civilisation when he arrived in Canada with the Carignan-Callières regiment, and, marrying a squaw, took up his residence with the Indians. St. Castin dwelt in a strong fort on the Penobscot River and made himself lord and master over hundreds of Abenakis Indians. He was greatly dreaded by the English of Maine and Massachusetts. During this long period, while Frontenac was ruling far away in Quebec, the population of Acadia slowly increased. Settlement was made at Chignecto and in the district called the Basin of Minas. It was the descendants of these settlers whose opposition to British rule caused them in the next century to be banished from the country.