The confrontation was a product of King William's War, the North American theater of the Nine Years' War between England and France. In 1690, Sir William Phips had conquered Port Royal, the French capital of Acadia, and England needed to install a governor to hold the territory. Phips dispatched Tyng aboard a ketch belonging to Andrew Belcher, under the command of the Boston merchant John Nelson. It was not a warship -- it was a commercial vessel pressed into diplomatic service. The French Governor of Acadia, Joseph Robineau de Villebon, had other plans. Villebon sailed in the Soleil d'Afrique, a proper frigate commanded by the experienced Simon-Pierre Denys de Bonaventure. When the two vessels met on September 22, the outcome was never in doubt. The English surrendered, and Villebon held what amounted to the entire British colonial administration of Acadia in his custody.

Among the captured was John Nelson, a Boston merchant with deep ties to the Acadian frontier. Sent to Quebec as a prisoner, Nelson did something that would cost him dearly: he smuggled intelligence back to Boston about French plans for raids against the Massachusetts colonies. When the French discovered his espionage, they did not simply execute him. They transported him across the Atlantic to France, where he was imprisoned first in a dungeon at the castle of Angouleme and then in the Bastille. Nelson spent roughly ten years in French captivity, though he was briefly released on parole in 1694 to carry a French neutrality proposal to London. He was not fully freed until 1702, when his relative Sir Purbeck Temple secured his release. He returned to Boston and then to Nelson's Island -- Long Island -- where he was received as a local hero. A decade of his life had been consumed by a war that had started with a brief encounter in the fog off Saint John.

The immediate aftermath centered on a prisoner exchange that went badly wrong. The English captive John Alden was sent to Boston with instructions to retrieve sixty French soldiers captured by Phips at Port Royal the previous year. Villebon held Alden's son and Colonel Tyng as hostages to ensure compliance. Alden returned to Villebon at the Saint John River in May 1692 -- but he brought only six French soldiers, not sixty. The shortfall was devastating for the hostages. Villebon, furious at what he saw as English bad faith, sent Alden's son and Tyng to France. Tyng never came home. He died in captivity at La Rochelle, a governor who never reached his seat of power, undone by a mismatch of ships in a distant bay.

The waters off Saint John where this brief engagement occurred are deceptively calm on most days. The Bay of Fundy's extreme tides churn twice daily through the harbour mouth, and the rocky coastline that the Soleil d'Afrique patrolled still looks much as it did in 1691. King William's War would grind on for another six years, and these same waters would see another naval battle in 1696. But the 1691 engagement set a pattern that defined the Acadian frontier for a generation: small forces, outsized consequences, and lives broken by the slow machinery of colonial negotiation. Tyng died waiting. Nelson rotted in the Bastille. Alden's son grew up a hostage. The Bay of Fundy kept its tides.