Significant Historical Happenings: 1762.

January 2nd: Six years into the Seven Years War, the English cabinet determines that war will be declared on Spain.

February 4th: An attack on the French island of Martinique meets with success. Plans for this attack had been drawn up and put in motion prior to the resignation of Pitt.

April: News is heard at Halifax that St. John's, Newfoundland had been attacked and captured by the French. The French had sent but a small fleet with 900 troops but it was enough to take the English garrison at St. John's. In the result, at Halifax: batteries were added to those already in existence on George's Island, more erected at Point Pleasant and near the Dockyard; the walls of the eastern redoubt at Dartmouth were repaired; and a boom of "timber and iron" was established near the mouth of the Northwest Arm.

June: A British force lays siege to Havana and it eventually falls and proves to be a valuable chip in the negotiations which were soon started up to end the war.

June 7th: The legislature of Nova Scotia, sits.

On July 24th -- by a decision of Council -- Liverpool, Barrington and Yarmouth were united as one county, the County of Queens.

Dartmouth has only two families living there.

Simeon Perkins comes from Connecticut to settle in Liverpool.

Lunenburg, by 1761, had a population equal to that of Halifax, at 1,400. By 1763 it was estimated that there were 300 families in and around Lunenburg. (See table.)

Port Mouton: It is reported that Nantucket whalemen came up in 1762. Professor Brebner writes that there soon to be "ninety families (504 persons), seventy houses and seventeen schooners, but no cleared land."

Alexander McNutt brings in 170 more Ulstermen about 100 of which go down Lunenburg way to establish New Dublin.

August 12th: Abbé Maillard dies at Halifax, and, though a Roman Catholic priest, is buried in the only available graveyard, that of the Anglican church, St. Paul's.

September 18th: St. John's is retaken by the British.

November 3rd: The preliminary articles for peace between England and France are signed.

1762: Rousseau brings out two of his works: Social Contract and Émile.

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