24 ACADIENSIS
round these islands "had been injured by ballast thrown overboard from American vessels." Yet with all his authority as magistrate and portwarden had he " warned the offenders to enforce his notice within the garrison district and to the limits usually claimed by a port, by a garrison order or otherwise," and had implored that another justice be appointed with him to enforce the law.
Again does Owen wax indignant that in subversion of provincial rights, the oaths administered on Moose Island to parties leaving it for a few days, that they should not bear arms, varied, for he argued that Moose Island was never escheated by the State of Massachusetts; that English people would not have settled on it unless sure it did not belong to the United States, and that its claim to other islands is a late affair, as in 1815 these same islands, Dudley and Frederick, paid their share of the quota of the parish of Campobello.
Neither the days of the embargo act nor the so-called capture of Eastport and its four years under martial law Drought peace to David Owen. Under the Colonists' rule he had noticed a diminution in his flock of sheep, the skin of one being found a short distance from the cooking camp. Then a party from His Majesty's ship had occupied without permission and at various times one of his empty houses. Somebody else had made a fire in the loft of his rented store and had ill-used his tenant for putting it out. Another enemy had fired musket balls in every direction, and had killed one pig and wounded, either by musket ball or cutlass, a second pig, belonging to a poor man, who had at best but two swine for his winter's use. Worse still, five tons of hay had been " forcibly cut " on his domain, divers persons thereby being cheated of their property. Then when he expected to gather forty bushels of apples he found the " pickets torn down and one solitary apple only remaining," owing to the fishermen from Moose
