Jean Baptiste Guedry

Jean-Baptiste Guedry (died 1726, last name also Guidry or Giddery, in English John Baptist Jedre) took over a small ship off Acadia and was tried for piracy. The trial was publicized to First Nations in the region as an example of English law.

History Joseph Decoy, a ship's captain from Cape Breton Island, traded in Boston during the 1720s. On one of the trips, his son accompanied him, who was detained in Boston for reasons unknown. Decoy returned north without his son and stopped and shared his news with friends at the Acadian port town of Merliguesh (now Lunenburg, Nova Scotia). Decoy shared with Guedry and other locals that he was desperate to get his son back and pondered the seizure of a New England fishing vessel as ransom for his son's return. The meeting took place on September 4, 1726.

Tensions were already high between New Englanders and French Acadians after the recent conclusion of the Dummer's War, a 1722-1725 conflict between English colonists and the Indian nations of the Wabanaki Confederacy.

Guedry was an Acadian, but many of his relatives and his sons had been raised among the native Mi’kmaq people. Acadia was then a French colony that encompassed all of present-day Nova Scotia. Kidnappings and coercive subjugation of French settlers were common practices by English naval vessels in the region. Decoy's idea to seize a Boston fishing vessel, began to infect the group not only as a means to secure the younger Decoy's freedom but also to protest the continued practice of French colonist kidnappings by English naval vessels.

The prosecutor and others used the trial as a counter to local customs, which allowed the holding of a group (all Englishmen) responsible for an individual's crimes. They also used it as a test case for separating English law, as applied to Acadia, from the law applied to First Nations groups like the Wabanaki Confederacy. Guedry and his son were tried as Acadians, but the Mius brothers and another man were classed as $Indians" and were tried separately.

After the Guedry executions, New England colonial officials had the trial transcripts translated into French. A group was organized to travel to Acadia to read the transcripts to French Acadian and native Mi'kmaq villages. The campaign was intended to demonstrate and to caution the settlers as to the definition of English law and the potential outcomes of English prosecution. The trial and the subsequent execution of Guedry and his son was characteristic of many such incidents that marked a continued rise in tensions between New England and French settlers in the region. The tensions eventually culminated in the Great Expulsion of the Acadians from Acadia in 1755 to 1764, during and after the North American French and Indian War.