Charles de la Tour built Fort Sainte-Marie in 1631 on Portland Point, where the Saint John River meets the Bay of Fundy. The location was strategic for the fur trade: the river was the main highway into the interior, and whoever controlled its mouth controlled commerce with the region's Indigenous peoples. La Tour held the title of Governor of Acadia, but Acadia in the 1630s was less a governed colony than a collection of competing interests. La Tour and d'Aulnay, both claiming authority from the French crown, spent years in an escalating feud over territory, trade routes, and royal favor. The fort itself was a modest affair -- more fortified trading post than military installation -- but its position at the river's mouth gave it outsized importance. From here, la Tour could monitor traffic, levy duties on the fur trade, and project power up the Saint John River valley.

The siege of 1645 was the culmination of years of rivalry between la Tour and d'Aulnay. With la Tour absent in Boston, d'Aulnay saw his opportunity. Jacquelin -- often called Madame de la Tour in the historical record -- rallied the small garrison and mounted a defense that held for four days against a larger force. The specifics of the fighting are sparse in the surviving records, but the outcome is clear: d'Aulnay eventually took the fort. What followed was a betrayal. Despite having agreed to terms of surrender, d'Aulnay executed the garrison. Jacquelin herself died while in d'Aulnay's custody, the circumstances of her death debated by historians but her courage not in question. She has since been recognized as one of the most remarkable figures of early Canadian history -- a woman who commanded a military defense in an era that rarely permitted women to hold authority of any kind.

The fort was destroyed at some unknown point in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century. The French continued to trade along the Saint John River until 1758, but the specific structure Jacquelin had defended did not survive. In August 1775, during the American Revolutionary War, rebels from Machias, Maine, landed on the Carleton side of the harbour and burned an old French barracks at the site then known as Fort Neck -- one more act of destruction in a place that seemed to attract fire. Beneath the present surface lies an archaeological record spanning centuries of occupation. Fort La Tour was designated a National Historic Site of Canada on May 25, 1923, and the province of New Brunswick has also designated it a Provincial Historic Site. The site carries both names -- Place Fort La Tour and Menaquesk, the latter acknowledging the Indigenous presence that preceded and outlasted the European forts.

The grassy knoll at Portland Point does not immediately announce its significance. There are no standing walls, no reconstructed palisades, no cannon pointing across the water. The archaeological remains lie beneath the surface, and the site has been developed in the twenty-first century as Place Fort La Tour. What the spot does offer is the view that made it valuable in the first place. The Saint John River stretches inland from here, the Bay of Fundy opens to the south, and you can understand in a glance why la Tour planted his flag on this particular piece of ground nearly four centuries ago. The trading post he built would eventually give way to the Simmonds, Hazen and White Company, whose flourishing trade on this same site grew into the city of Saint John itself. Everything that followed -- Fort Menagoueche, Fort Frederick, Fort Howe, the Loyalist settlement, the city -- begins here, at the mouth of the river, where a fur trader built a fort and a woman defended it.