Colonel Arbuthnot's anxieties were not confined to tidal waves and the discontents of his garrison. About the end of October a party of some two hundred Acadians came down the river to Fort Frederick and presented to him a certificate of their having taken the oath of allegiance to the English sovereign before Judge Cramahe, at Quebec; also an order signed by General Monckton giving them permission to return to their former habitations. Whether these Acadians were old inhabitants of the river, or fugitives who had taken refuge there at the time of the Expulsion is not very clear. Lawrence surmised that the certificates had been obtained from Judge Cramahe on the supposition that the people belonged to some river or place in Canada known as St. Johns, and not to the River St. John in Nova Scotia, and that they never could have had any sort of permission from Monckton to settle in Acadia. The Abbe Casgrain comments severely on the course pursued by Governor Lawrence on this occasion: "Not being able," he says, "to dispute the genuineness of the letters of Monckton and Cramahe, Lawrence claimed that the Acadians could only have obtained them by fraud, and he decided with his council, always ready to do his bidding, that they should be regarded as prisoners of war and transported as soon as possible to England. He took care not to disclose this resolution in order to keep them securely at the fort, and to have them ready to his hand when ships should arrive to transport them. This precaution was almost superfluous for the Acadians, having exhausted their last resources, were no longer in a state to return to the woods where they would have died of hunger." Evidently it was part of the settled policy of Lawrence and his advisers to keep the Acadians out of the province and to people it with English speaking inhabitants, and with this policy General Amherst seems to have been in accord, for he wrote the Governor of Nova Scotia, "The pass you mention the two hundred Inhabitants of St. John's River to have from Mr. Monckton, was by no means meant or understood to give the French any right to those lands; and you have done perfectly right not to suffer them to continue there, and you will be equally right in sending them, when an opportunity offers, to Europe as Prisoners of War." And yet it was very natural that, after the surrender of Quebec, the Acadians should believe that upon accepting the new regime and taking the oath of allegiance to the king of Great Britain they would be treated in the same way as the French Canadians. The Abbe Casgrain says, not without reason, that the Acadians had an even greater right than the Canadians to clemency at the hands of their conquerors as their sufferings were greater: ["Ils y avaient d'autant plus de droit qu'ils avaient plus souffert."]