In 1670, during Jean Talon's second tenure as Intendant of New France, a French officer annexed the islands after he discovered a dozen fishermen from France encamped there, naming them Saint Pierre and Miquelon. During King William's War and Queen Anne's War, English forces launched multiple attacks against French colonial settlements on the islands, and by the early 18th century the colonists had abandoned Saint Pierre and Miquelon altogether. In the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht which ended the War of the Spanish Succession, France ceded the islands to Britain. The British renamed the island of Saint Pierre to Saint Peter, and small numbers of colonists from Great Britain and Britain's American colonies began to settle on the islands.
