"The French inhabitants of the River St. John have suffered much by different detachments of Canadians and Indians, to the number of 250 or 300 men, commanded by M. de Montesson, a Canadian officer, whom they have been obliged to subsist, and for that purpose to sacrifice the grain and cattle needed for the seeding and tillage of their own fields. In the helpless position in which these inhabitants find themselves, it is thought that in order to afford them sufficient relief it would be advisable that the Court should send them immediately at least 1,000 barrels of flour, and the same quantity annually for some time, both for their own subsistence and for that of the garrison and the Indians. It would be well also to send them each year about 250 barrels of bacon; this last sort of provision being limited to this quantity because it is supposed, or at least hoped, there will be sent from Quebec some Indian corn and peas as well as oil and fat for the savages." The reference to the St. John river region in the document from which this extract is taken, concludes by strongly recommending that the supply of flour and bacon should be sent, not to the store houses at Quebec and Louisbourg, but directly to St. John, where it would arrive as safely as at any other port and with less expense to the king and much more expedition to the inhabitants. It may be well now to pause in the narration of events to look a little more closely into the situation on the River St. John at the time of the negotiations between the rival powers with regard to the limits of Acadia. The statement has been made in some of our school histories, "Acadia was ceded to the English by the treaty of Utrecht, in 1713, and has remained a British possession ever since." The statement is, to say the least, very misleading, so far as the St. John river country is concerned, for the French clung tenaciously to this territory as a part of the dominions of their monarch until New France passed finally into the hands of their rivals by the treaty of Paris in 1763.