French colonists and the Wabanaki Confederacy sought to thwart British expansion into Acadia, whose border New France defined as the Kennebec River in what is now southern Maine.

Spanish missionaries in La Florida had established a network of missions in an effort to convert the Indigenous to Roman Catholicism and focus their labor.

[13] From there, they began to build trade routes into the interior, establishing friendly relations with the Choctaw, a large community whose enemies included the English-allied Chickasaw.

[18] These colonists numbered fewer than 2,000 English and 1,000 French permanent settlers (and many more seasonal visitors), who competed with one another for the fisheries of the Grand Banks, which were also harvested by fishermen from Acadia (then encompassing all of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick) and Massachusetts.

They had been a scene of much dispute by competing French and English companies starting in the 1680s, but the 1697 Treaty of Ryswick left France in control of all but one outpost on the bay.

A small number of colonists had training in the operation of cannon and other types of artillery, which were the only effective weapons for attacking significant stone or wooden defenses.

[28] English colonists were generally organized into militia companies, and their colonies had no regular military presence[28] beyond a small number in some of the communities of Newfoundland.

From this base and Fort Louis de la Mobile (founded in 1702),[32] he began to establish relationships with the local Choctaw, Chickasaw, Natchez people, and other communities.

[33] English colonial traders and explorers from Carolina had established a substantial trading network across the southeastern part of the continent that extended all the way to the Mississippi.

Both Carolina governor Joseph Blake and his successor James Moore articulated visions of expansion to the south and west at the expense of French and Spanish interests.

[35] Iberville had approached the Spanish in January 1702 before the war broke out in Europe, recommending that the Apalachee warriors be armed and sent against the English colonists and their allies.

The Spanish organized an expedition under Francisco Romo de Uriza; it left Pensacola, Florida in August for the trading centers of the Carolina back country.

[43][44] The Muscogee (Creek), Yamasee, and Chickasaw were armed and led by English colonists, and they dominated these conflicts at the expense of the Choctaw, Timucua, and Apalachee.

In February 1704, Jean-Baptiste Hertel de Rouville led 250 Abenaki and Caughnawaga Indians (mostly Mohawk) and 50 French Canadians in a raid on Deerfield in the Province of Massachusetts Bay.

[47] New England colonists were unable to effectively combat these raids, so they retaliated by launching an expedition against Acadia led by the famous Indigenous fighter Benjamin Church.

[48] Father Sébastien Rale was widely suspected of inciting the Norridgewock community against the New Englanders, and Massachusetts Governor Joseph Dudley put a price on his head.

[49] French and Wabanaki Confederacy continued making raids in northern Massachusetts in 1705, against which the New England colonists were unable to mount an effective defense.

[53] In 1709, New France governor Philippe de Rigaud Vaudreuil reported that two-thirds of the fields north of Boston were untended because of French and Indigenous raids.

The land expedition reached the southern end of Lake Champlain, but it was called off when the promised naval support never materialized for the attack on Quebec.

After this failure, Nicholson and Schuyler traveled to London accompanied by King Hendrick and other sachems to arouse interest in the North American frontier war.

A fleet of 15 ships of the line and transports carrying 5,000 troops led by Admiral Hovenden Walker arrived at Boston in June,[55] doubling the town's population and greatly straining the colony's ability to provide necessary provisions.

[63] The expedition sailed for Quebec at the end of July, but a number of its ships foundered on the rocky shores near the mouth of the Saint Lawrence in the fog.

In August of that year, an English fleet under the command of Commodore John Leake descended on the outlying French communities but made no attempts on Plaisance.

Under terms of the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, Britain gained Acadia (which they renamed Nova Scotia), sovereignty over Newfoundland, the Hudson Bay region, and the Caribbean island of St. Kitts.

France recognized British suzerainty over the Iroquois[75] and agreed that commerce with Indigenous peoples farther inland would be open to all nations.

[79] The Treaty of Portsmouth was ratified on July 13, 1713, by eight representatives of some of the communities of the Wabanaki Confederacy; however, it included language asserting British sovereignty over their territory.

[75] This presence plus the rights to use the Newfoundland shore resulted in continued friction between French and British fishing interests, which was not fully resolved until late in the 18th century.

[89] By the 1740s, French leaders such as Father Jean-Louis Le Loutre orchestrated a guerrilla war with their Mi'kmaq allies against British attempts to expand Protestant settlements in peninsular Nova Scotia.

Some of the costs of the war were offset by the importance of Boston as a center of shipbuilding and trade, combined with a financial windfall caused by the crown's military spending on the 1711 Quebec expedition.

Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania to a lesser extent, were hit hard by the cost of shipping their export products (primarily tobacco) to European markets, and they also suffered because of several particularly bad harvests.