In 1643, La Tour and d'Aunay[1] fought an engagement near Poutrincourt's mill which resulted in its destruction by La Tour. The same year d'Aunay de Charnisay built a fort on the cape, probably the first to be erected there.
The first vessel built in North America is said to have been launched by Samuel Champlain from the ways at Port Royal. In 1710 the first Church of England service held in Canada was celebrated in the chapel next to Fort Anne to give thanks for Nicholson's victory over Subercase.
The ancient burying-ground of the English dates from this period. A gate admits one to it from the fort. Pathways through the grass lead to the sunken graves of garrison officers and their wives, to the resting-place of antecedents of General Sir Fenwick Williams, to the mounds in the Haliburton plot where lie three children of Judge Thomas Haliburton and his wife, the romantic Miss Neville whom he married in England as a youth of twenty. A few years ago a Celtic cross was unveiled in memory of the Reverend Thomas Wood who came to Annapolis as a missionary in 1753. He was born in New Jersey and had charges at Elizabeth-
- ↑ D'Aunay, with the influence of Cardinal Richelieu, attempted to deprive Charles La Tour of his proprietary rights in Acadia. La Tour was a Huguenot and the victim of intrigue at the court of France. By a confusion of grants the domains of the rivals were subject to claim and counter-claim which ended only with the surrender of La Tour's fort at the mouth of the River St. John. Charnisay was drowned from a canoe in the Annapolis River, 1650. La Tour married his widow and became Lord of Acadie.
