The Battle of Bloody Creek was fought on 10/21 June 1711 during Queen Anne's War. An Abenaki militia successfully ambushed British soldiers at a place that became known as Bloody Creek after the battles fought there. The creek empties into the Annapolis River at present day Carleton Corner, Nova Scotia, and was also the location of a battle in 1757.
The battle was part of an orchestrated attempt by the leaders of New France to weaken the British hold on Annapolis Royal. The British had only captured the fort the previous year and they only had a very tenuous control of the area. The battle, in which the entire British force was captured or killed, emboldened the French and their native allies to blockade Annapolis Royal. Without heavy weapons, the force was unable to effectively attack the fort, and abandoned the siege when British reinforcements arrived by sea.
Background
Port Royal, the capital of the French colony of Acadia, was settled in 1604, one year after Acadia's founding, and served as the colonial capital for much of the next hundred years. It consequently became a focal point for conflict between the English colonists of New England and the Acadian inhabitants. It was destroyed in 1613 by English raiders led by Samuel Argall, but eventually rebuilt. In 1690 it was captured by forces from the Province of Massachusetts Bay, although it was restored to France on 20 September 1697 by the Treaty of Ryswick.
In the 1710 Siege of Port Royal an expedition of New England militia and British marines under Francis Nicholson again captured Port Royal. The town was renamed Annapolis Royal, with Samuel Vetch as the British Governor of Nova Scotia, and the fort was renamed Fort Anne. This expedition left a garrison numbering about 450 men, that was composed of a combination of British marines and New England provincial militia. The garrison was reinforced with regular troops in the following months, however the British only had effective control of the fort and the nearby town. The terms of capitulation had included a provision in which the French residents within of the fort were to be protected, provided they took an appropriate oath to the British crown. A total of 481 Acadians were covered by this provision, but by mid-January 1711 only 57 had actually taken an oath.
When word of Port Royal's fall reached France, the marine minister Pontchartrain ordered Antoine Gaulin, the French Catholic missionary priest to the loosely allied First Nation tribes of present-day Maine and New Brunswick, to harass the British at Annapolis Royal so that they could not establish a firm foothold in the territory. Bernard-Anselme d'Abbadie de Saint-Castin, the Acadian (French father and a Penobscot mother), was given military command of Acadia, and received similar orders.
Prelude
The first winter was a particularly difficult one for the British garrison, which was reduced by early 1711 to about 240 "effective men Officers included" due to death, disease, and desertion. They had ongoing difficulty getting provisions and materials needed to repair the fort because of the reluctance of the Acadians to help. This reluctance was fueled in part by the activities of Saint-Castin and Gaulin — the Acadians in Annapolis Royal refused to do the necessary logging, citing the danger of Native attacks. To counter this, the British began sending out armed parties to protect the loggers. These logging parties were sent into the woodlands up the Annapolis River, and the cut wood was floated down the river. In May 1711 Governor Vetch received reports that these work crews and others who supported the British were being harassed by Mi'kmaq and Abenakis opposed to British rule. In his reports he noted that the fort was "every day more and more Infested with skulking Indians", and that villagers within the banlieu (the three-mile protection area) were being harassed. Desperate for timbers to repair the fort, Vetch organized a force of 70 New England militia under Captain David Pigeon to accompany the fort's engineer on an expedition up the river. Pigeon's instructions were to assure the loggers that they would be paid and protected if they brought the timber down to the fort, but that there would be "severity" if they did not.