The rest of their description  of the French is mostly matter-of-fact: the families were large; the inhabitants were "very industrious, civil, and hospitable people, and well deserving of the fostering care of government." Their agriculture was flourishing, and they grew the best potatoes the two men had ever seen, despite the fact that their farming skills were not up to the visitors' standards. They were not, noted Coffin, " what we should call good husbandmen." He was also at a loss at finding a frame of reference which could have allowed him to understand the community he was visiting.  For lack of anythning better, he equated the French with a tribe of white Indians;  when his party met Simonet Hebert, a prominent local citizen, he referred to him as the "grand Sachem of this French settlement." Like Fisher, he may have thought the French were a "race apart."
                     Coffin was followed three years later by Charles S. Davies, who was appointed by the state to investigate British "aggressions." Davies seems to have been the first to articulate the theory that the St.John Valley French were refugees from the British colonies. Davies described them as "French Neutrals" (the term that the American colonies had used to refer to the Acadian deportees in 1755), "who had been expelled from ther farms and improvements on the establishment of the privince of New Brunswick; and who have been joined from time to time by their countrymen from Canada, who have not chosen to continue under the government established on its conquest."
                     Davies's account flies in the face of existing evidence. It ignores the fact that a non-negligible number of Fredericton Acadians had received grants on the lower St. John from the New Brunswick government, that the rights of all occupants - including Adadian occupants - to sell their improvements  to whoever took over their land for whatever reason had been reasserted by the governor in council, and that  many of the Madawaska settlers had sold a grant or some improvements before - or even after - taking land at Madawaska. The lower St. John Acadians may have been particularly dissatisfied with the massive arrival of the loyalists in the area, but as a group, they had not been treated worse than anyone else.
                    Three years later, the Maine government sent another two agents, John G. Deane and Edward Kavanagh, to the St. John Valley, to ascertain the claims of the settlers to the land they occupied. The governor was very careful in the choice of his envoys.  Edward kavanagh was a Catholic; he had attended school in Quebec, and could speak French fluently, and, perhaps for this reason, there is no suggestion in the writings of the two men that the Madawaska French belonged to a different branch of humanity altogether. Kavanagh kept a journal of the expedition. Later, the two men presented the governor with a formal report of their findings.
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