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The Shaping of the Borderlands: Arcane Deeds and Failed Colonies

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Unsurprisingly, jurisdictional questions continued to plague would-be land speculators and even governmental officials looking to bring White settlers into the region to bolster British control. A handful of land schemes in Passamaquoddy Bay sprang up under the jurisdiction of Nova Scotia in the late 1760s and 1770s, but they were small, and control of land was contested both by Passamaquoddy people and the itinerant New England fisherman who remained the region’s primary European population.

In Massachusetts, all efforts to have land grants east of the Penobscot River confirmed by the Crown, as the charter required, were stymied. Even Governor Francis Bernard, who received a grant of Mount Desert Island from the General Court in 1762, was unable to get his grant confirmed until he had already been run out of the colony by the Stamp Act unrest, and only then as a pointed rebuke to Massachusetts’ increasingly unruly politicians. Indeed, the same year he received his grant, Bernard received an angry letter from the Board of Trade brusquely (and inaccurately) informing him that “the River Penobscot has always been deem'd and declared to be the Western boundary of Accadia or Nova Scotia.”