George Bancroft, History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent, Vol. 4, 15th edition.

The attitude of the French justified cautious watchfulness on the part of every officer of British America. The haste or the negligence of their plenipotentiaries at Aix la Chapelle had left their boundary in America along its whole line, determined only by the vague agreement, that it should be as it had been before the war; and for a quarter of a century before the war, it had never ceased to be a subject of altercation. In this wavering condition of an accepted treaty of peace and an undetermined limit of jurisdiction, each party hurried to occupy in advance as much territory as possible, without too openly compromising their respective governments. Acadia, according to its ancient boundaries, belonged to Great Britain; but France had always, even in times of profound peace,² urgently declared that Acadia included only the peninsula; before the restoration of Cape Breton, an officer from Canada had occupied the isthmus between Baye Verte and the Bay of Fundy; a small colony kept possession of the mouth of the St. John's River;³ and the claim to the coast as far west as the Kennebeck had never been abandoned.⁴ At the West, also, France had uniformly and frankly claimed the whole basin of the Saint Lawrence