This site is designed to show some historical sites found in Eastern Canada and the coinage that was used in these areas during the late 16th c. until confederation. Here is a little history.
   Beginning in the late 15th century, French and British expeditions explored, and later settled, along the Atlantic coast. France ceded nearly all of its colonies in North America in 1763 after the Seven Years' War. In 1867, with the union of three British North American colonies through Confederation, Canada was formed as a federal dominion of four provinces. This began an accretion of provinces and territories and a process of increasing autonomy from the Great Britain, which became effective with the Statute of Westminster of 1931 and finalized in the Canada Act of 1982, that severed the vestiges of legal dependence on the British parliament.
   Over centuries, elements of Aboriginal, French, British and more recent immigrant customs have combined to form a Canadian culture. Canada has also been strongly influenced by that of its linguistic, geographic and economic neighbour, the United States. Since the conclusion of the Second World War, Canada has been committed to multilateralism abroad and socioeconomic development domestically. Canada currently consists of ten provinces and three territories, and is governed as a parliamentary democracy and a constitutional monarchy with Queen Elizabeth II as its head of state.
   In 1534, Jacques Cartier planted a cross in the Gaspé Peninsula and claimed the land in the name of Francis I of France. It was the first province of New France. However, initial French attempts at settling the region met with failure. French fishing fleets continued to sail to the Atlantic coast and into the Saint Lawrence River, making alliances with First Nations that would become important once France began to occupy the land. In 1604, a North American fur trade monopoly was granted to Pierre Dugua Sieur de Monts. Dugua led his first colonization expedition to an island located near to the mouth of the St. Croix River. Among his lieutenants was a geographer named Samuel de Champlain, who promptly carried out a major exploration of the northeastern coastline of what is now the United States. In the spring of 1605, under Samuel de Champlain, the new St. Croix settlement was moved to Port Royal (today's Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia). It would be one of France's most successful New World colonies and came to be known as Acadia. The colony of Acadia grew slowly, reaching a population of about 5,000 by 1713.
   After Champlain's founding of Quebec City in 1608, it became the capital of New France. Champlain took personal administration over the city and its affairs and sent out expeditions to explore the interior land. Champlain himself discovered Lake Champlain in 1609; and by 1615 he had traveled by canoe up the Ottawa River, through Lake Nipissing and through Georgian Bay to the center of Huron country, near Lake Simcoe. During these voyages Champlain aided the Wendat (aka 'Hurons') in their battles against the Iroquois Confederacy. As a result, the Iroquois would become enemies of the French and were involved in multiple conflicts (known as the French and Iroquois Wars) until the singing of the Great Peace of Montreal in 1701.
   On the 29 of September 1621, a charter for the foundation of a New World Scottish colony was granted by James VI of Scotland to Sir William Alexander. In 1622 the first settlers left Scotland; however, they initially failed and permanent Nova Scotian settlements were not established until 1629, during the end of the Anglo-French War. This colonies did not last long: in 1631, under Charles I, the Treaty of Suza was signed, that ended the war and returned Nova Scotia to the French. New France was not fully restored to French rule until the 1632 Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye.
   The Catholic Church and the Jesuit establishment; which after Champlain’s death was the most dominant force in New France, wanted to establish a utopian European and Aboriginal Christian community in the colony. In 1642, the Jesuit (Society of Jesus) sponsored a group of settlers, led by Paul Chomedey de Maisonneuve, who founded Ville-Marie, precursor to present-day Montreal. The 1666 census of New France was conducted by France's intendant, Jean Talon, in the winter of 1665-1666. It showed a population of 3,215 habitants in New France. The census uncovers a great difference in the number of men at 2,034 versus 1,181 women.
   While French colonizers were well established in large parts of eastern Canada, British colonizers had control over the Thirteen Colonies to the south; and laid claim (from 1670, via the Hudson's Bay Company) to Hudson Bay, and its drainage basin (known as Rupert's Land), as well as settlements in Newfoundland. The British colonies were rapidly expanding, while the French fur traders and explorers were extended thinly. La Salle's exploration of the Mississippi to its mouth in 1682 gave France a claim to a vast area bordering the American Colonies from the Great Lakes and the Ohio River valley southward to the Gulf of Mexico. French expansion soon began to threaten Hudson's Bay Company clams, and, in 1686, Pierre Troyes led an overland expedition from Montreal to the shore of the bay where they managed to capture some areas.
   Britain and France repeatedly went to war in the 17th and 18th centuries and made their colonial empires into battlefields. The first areas won by the British were the Maritime provinces. After Queen Anne's War, Nova Scotia, other than Cape Breton, was ceded to the British by the Treaty of Utrecht as well as the Hudson Bay territory conquered by France in the late 17th century. As an immediate result of this setback, France founded the powerful Fortress of Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island. Louisbourg was intended to serve as a year-round military and naval base for France's remaining North American empire and also to protect the entrance to the Saint Lawrence River. During King George's War, an army of New Englanders led by William Pepperrell mounted an expedition of 90 vessels and 4,000 men against Louisbourg in 1745. Within three months the New Englanders succeeded in forcing Louisbourg to surrender. The fall of Louisbourg to French control prompted the founding of Halifax in 1749 by the British under Edward Cornwallis.
   The British ordered the Acadians expelled from their lands in 1755, an event called the Expulsion of the Acadians or le Grand Dérangement, causing some 12,000 Acadians to be shipped to destinations throughout Britain's North American holdings and later even to France, Quebec and the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue. Many of the Acadians settled in southern Louisiana, creating the Cajun culture there. Some Acadians managed to hide and others eventually returned to Nova Scotia, but they were far outnumbered by a new migration of planters from New England who were settled on the former lands of the Acadians and transformed Nova Scotia from a colony of occupation to a settled colony with strong ties to New England.
   During this time the French colony along the shores of the Saint Lawrence River continued to flourish, although French explorations and territorial claims to the Ohio Valley brought increasing conflict with the interests of Britain's American colonies. Inevitably the interests of the British and French in North America ran towards conflict resulting in the outbreak of war in both in Europe and North America again. Canada was also an important battlefield in the Seven Years' War, during which Great Britain gained control of Quebec City and Montreal after the Battle of the Plains of Abraham in 1759, and the Battle of the Thousand Islands in 1760. The British victory was overseen by Jeffrey Amherst.
   With the end of the Seven Years' War and the signing of the Treaty of Paris (1763), France ceded almost all of its territory in mainland North America. The new British rulers left alone much of the religious, political, and social culture of the French-speaking habitants, guaranteeing the right of the Canadiens to practice the Catholic faith and to the use of French civil law (now Quebec law) through the Quebec Act of 1774. The Royal Proclamation of 1763 had been issued in October, by King George III following Great Britain's acquisition of French territory. The purpose of the proclamation was to organize Great Britain's new North American empire and to stabilize relations between the British Crown and Aboriginal peoples through regulation of trade, settlement, and land purchases on the western frontier.
   Though during the American Revolution there was some sympathy for the American cause among the Canadiens and the New Englanders in Nova Scotia, neither parties joined the rebels, although several hundred individuals joined the revolutionary cause. An invasion of Canada; by the Continental Army in 1775, to take Quebec from British control was halted at the Battle of Quebec, by Guy Carleton, with the assistance of local militias. The defeat of the British army during the Siege of Yorktown in October 1781, signaled the end of Britain's struggle to suppress the American Revolution. When the British evacuated New York City in 1783, they took many Loyalist refugees to Nova Scotia, while other Loyalists went to southwestern Quebec. So many Loyalists arrived on the shores of the St. John River that a separate colony—New Brunswick—was created in 1784; followed in 1791 by the division of Quebec into the largely French-speaking Lower Canada along the Saint Lawrence River and Gaspé Peninsula and an anglophone Loyalist Upper Canada, with its capital settled by 1796 in York, in present-day Toronto. After 1790 most of the new settlers were American farmers searching for new lands; although generally favorable to republicanism, they were relatively non-political and stayed neutral in the War of 1812.
   The signing of the Treaty of Paris 1783, formally ended the war. Britain made several concessions at the expense of the North American colonies. Notably, the borders between Canada and the United States were officially declared. Land south of the Great Lakes, which was formerly a part of the Province of Quebec and included large parts of modern day Michigan, Illinois and Ohio, was ceded to the Americans. Fishing rights were also granted to the United States in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence and on the coast of Newfoundland and the Grand Banks.
   The War of 1812 was fought between the United States and the British with the British North American colonies being heavily involved. Greatly outgunned by the British Royal Navy, the American war plans focused on an invasion of Canada (especially what is today eastern and western Ontario). The American frontier states voted for war in order to suppress the First Nations raids that frustrated settlement of the frontier. With invasions imminent as reported by "loyalist" like Laura Secord and Isaac Brock's foresight meant that Canada was not unprepared for the battles. Brock continually kept the commanders of his posts on high alert informing them and First Nations allies of developments during the engagements.
   The war on the border with the U.S. was characterized by a series of multiple failed invasions and fiascos on both sides. American forces took control of Lake Erie in 1813, driving the British out of western Ontario, killing the Native American leader Tecumseh, and breaking the military power of his confederacy.
   The War ended with the Treaty of Ghent of 1814, and the Rush–Bagot Treaty of 1817. Neither side saw any land gains or losses; the only people who really lost were the Natives who fought for the British and lost their military power, their lands in the United States, and their access to prime fur trade areas. A demographic result was the shifting of American migration from Upper Canada to Ohio, Indiana and Michigan. After the war, supporters of Britain tried to repress the republicanism in Canada, that was common among American immigrants to Canada. The troubling memory of the war and the American invasions etched itself into the consciousness of Canadians as distrust of the intentions of the United States towards the British presence in North America.
   The rebellions of 1837 against the British colonial government took place in both Upper and Lower Canada. In Upper Canada, a band of Reformers under the leadership of William Lyon Mackenzie took up arms in a disorganized and ultimately unsuccessful series of small-scale skirmishes around Toronto, London, and Hamilton.
   In Lower Canada, a more substantial rebellion occurred against British rule. Both English- and French-Canadian rebels, sometimes using bases in the neutral United States, fought several skirmishes against the authorities. The towns of Chambly and Sorel were taken by the rebels, and Quebec City was isolated from the rest of the colony. Montreal rebel leader Robert Nelson read the "Declaration of Independence of Lower Canada" to a crowd assembled at the town of Napierville in 1838. The rebellion of the Patriote movement were defeated after battles across Quebec. Hundreds were arrested, and several villages were burnt in reprisal.
   British Government then sent Lord Durham to examine the situation, he stayed in Canada only five months before returning to Britain, and brought with him, his Durham Report which strongly recommended responsible government. A less well received recommendation was the amalgamation of Upper and Lower Canada for the deliberate assimilation of the French speaking population. The Canadas were merged into a single colony, United Province of Canada, by the 1840 Act of Union, with responsible government achieved in 1848, a few months after it was granted to Nova Scotia.
   Between the Napoleonic Wars and 1850 some 800,000 immigrants came to the colonies of British North America, mainly from the British Isles as part of the great migration of Canada. These included Gaelic-speaking Highland Scots displaced by the Highland Clearances to Nova Scotia and Scottish and English settlers to the Canadas, particularly Upper Canada. The Irish Famine of the 1840s significantly increased the pace of Irish Catholic immigration to British North America, with over 35,000 distressed Irish landing in Toronto alone in 1847 and 1848.
   The Seventy-Two Resolutions from the 1864 Quebec Conference and Charlottetown Conference laid out the framework for uniting British colonies in North America into a federation. They were adopted by the majority of the provinces of Canada and became the basis for the London Conference of 1866, which led to the formation of the Dominion of Canada on July 1, 1867. Federation emerged from multiple impulses: the British wanted Canada to defend itself; the Maritimes needed railroad connections, which were promised in 1867; British-Canadian nationalism sought to unite the lands into one country, dominated by the English language and British culture; many French-Canadians saw an opportunity to exert political control within a new largely French-speaking Quebec and fears of possible U.S. expansion northward. On a political level, there was a desire for the expansion of responsible government and elimination of the legislative deadlock between Upper and Lower Canada, and their replacement with provincial legislatures in a federation. This was especially pushed by the liberal Reform movement of Upper Canada and the French-Canadian Parti rouge in Lower Canada who favored a decentralized union in comparison to the Upper Canadian Conservative party and to some degree the French-Canadian Parti bleu which favored a centralized union.
   On July 1, 1867, with the coming into force of the British North America Act (enacted by the British Parliament), the Province of Canada, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia became a federated kingdom in its own right. The term dominion was chosen to indicate Canada's status as a self-governing colony of the British Empire, the first time it was used in reference to a country.

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Updated August 14, 2011.