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2. The Acadian Saga
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The First Colony
On April 7, 1604, fur merchant Pierre du Gua de Monts departed from Le Havre, France for the east coast of the New World. King Henri IV had granted him a trade monopoly with the aboriginals in the region. In exchange, he had to look for minerals, map safe harbours, colonize sixty settlers and convert the native population to Christianity by aiding the work of Catholic missionaries.
With Governor de Monts was an able mapmaker, Samuel de Champlain, who eventually played a far more prominent role than his leader. Champlain's duty was to make a faithful report of "all I saw and discussed" and present it to the King.
The expedition arrived off the coast of Nova Scotia in mid-May. They put into La Have and St Mary's bays, and mapped the shore of the Bay of Fundy. Champlain marveled at the bay's tides, the highest in the world. On June 24 they arrived at the mouth of the Saint John River, where Champlain was the first European to illustrate the reversing falls. Further down the coast they sailed into Passamaquoddy Bay, where de Monts decided to build a settlement on an island he called Sainte-Croix. (Today, the St. Croix River marks the boundary between New Brunswick and Maine.) The site had a decent harbour and could be easily defended in the event of attack, and the company was facing the onset of winter and thus had to make their decision quickly.
The men started building winter quarters, while Champlain explored down the coast of Maine for a few weeks. By late September the weather had turned bad. The first snows fell on October 6th and the snow was still in high drifts late into April. "The cold was severe,' Champlain wrote in his journal, "and more extreme than in France."
Despite Champlain's design of the habitation, the colonists faced brutal difficulties. They could not hunt fresh game because of the ice floes in the river, and had to live on salt meat. They failed to cut enough firewood, and all their provisions froze. Their diet was poor and many developed scurvy from a lack of vitamin C from fresh vegetables and fruit. That in turn led to exhaustion, illness and eventually death. Almost half of the colonists did not survive that first winter. Of 79 men, 35 died and 20 more fell seriously ill. In the spring of 1605, a flood almost drowned the island.
Champlain and de Monts decided to sail down the Atlantic coast to look for other potential sites for settlement. They reached as far as Cape Cod, mapping the coast and several suitable harbours. They found several aboriginal settlements of “active people,” who grew corn, beans, pumpkins and squash. After their men fought with the natives on July 23, they returned to St-Croix on August 8.
During their absence, de Monts' agent Pont Gravé had arrived from France with additional men and provisions for the colony. They decided to move across the Bay of Fundy to the Annapolis Basin. The buildings at St. Croix, with the exception of the store-house, were taken down and put on ships.
Sidelight: Mathieu Da Costa
Mathieu Da Costa was the first recorded Black man to come to Canada. A freed former slave of the Portuguese, he likely worked with Pierre Dugua de Monts on his expeditions to Nova Scotia and Québec before 1605, and helped found the Port Royal Habitation on the north shore of the Annapolis basin.
In February 1607 Da Costa travelled to The Hague with Dugua’s secretary to get compensation for cargo that had been seized by Dutch traders on the St. Lawrence River the previous summer. He may have been kidnapped by the Dutch because of his skills as an interpretor - Portuguese was the first trading language in Canada. In April 1608 he contracted to work as an interpreter for Dugua with the Micmac peoples, signing a well-paying three-year contract for "voyages to Canada, Acadia and elsewhere".
Resource: Mathieu Da Costa and Early Canada, by A. J. B. Johnston
Port Royal
On August 18, Champlain and Pont Gravé selected a place for the new settlement on the north side of the basin, directly opposite Goat Island, near the present village of Lower Granville. The site was well protected from Fundy fogs and northwest gales by a high range of hills. There, Champlain wrote, “We began to clear the ground, which was full of trees, and to erect the houses as quickly as possible. Everybody was busy at work.” A “habitation” was completed in short order. It was built in the form of a quadrangle with an open court in the centre, as at St. Croix.
De Monts deemed Port Royal a fairly good spot. The French had learned from their errors of the previous year. The new location was close to a forest that could be used for building supplies and firewood. There were meadows where they planted wheat and vegetables, marshes where they shot game birds, and small river where they built a mill. Champlain himself dug a trout pond, and built a summer house "in order that I might enjoy the fresh air."
The Order of Good Cheer
When Jean de Poutrincourt arrived at Port Royal on his trading vessel Jonas to serve as governor of the colony, De Monts decided to return to France. Those who stayed behind tried to be self-reliant. That winter, Champlain organized the Order of Good Cheer, a kind of social and gastronomic club to raise the spirits of the men over the long winter months. This is how Champlain explained the Order of Good Cheer in his diary:
- We spent this winter very pleasantly, and had good food because of the Order of Good Cheer which I established. Everyone found it beneficial to his health, and better than any medicine we might have used. A chain was placed around the neck of one of our men every day. It was his job that day to go hunting. The next day the chain was given to someone else, and so on in order. Everyone competed to see who could do the best, and bring back the finest game. We did not come off badly, nor did the Indians who were with us.
When the hunter came back he cooked a feast for everyone else. The men ate, sang songs, and enjoyed themselves. According to Marc Lescarbot, everyone ate well at Port Royal: stone-ground whole wheat bread, sturgeon, lobster, crabmeat, mussels, vegetables including corn, squash, beans and cabbage. He said of all their meats none was so tender as moose and none so delicate as beaver tail.
Even so, scurvy and other diseases struck again, this time killing 12 men of 45, so in the late Spring of 1607, with no sign of a provision ship, Pont Gravé and Champlain decided to abandon Port-Royal.
On July 17 the ships sailed off, leaving two men behind to care for the fort, with a reward of 100 silver coins. Near Sable Island, they luckily spotted the supply ship, Jonas, led by the new governor, Jean de Biencourt, Sieur de Poutrincourt, the writer Marc Lescarbot and farmer/apothecary Louis Hébert. Together they all returned to Port-Royal to prepare for winter.
While Champlain worked on his maps, Poutrincourt set out on an exploration down the coast, reaching the site of Gloucester, Massachusetts, visiting, where he saw crops of grapes, beans and squash. The native Algonkians were not friendly. On October 15, they attacked the expedition at at Port Fortuné, killing four French sailors. When Poutrincourt returned to Port Royal, Champlain concluded that settling the southern coast was an impossible and dangerous task.
That autumn, Lescarbot wrote "The Theatre of Neptune in New France", the first European play performed in Canada. The French extablished good relations with the local Mi'kmaq people, and Membertou, their chief. The Mi'kmaq received the Frenchmen with warmth and generosity, believing hospitality was a matter of honour. Everything seemed to be in order until the expedition received news that the French Crown had revoked de Monts' trading monopoly.
Champlain was to move north and west to found the first successful permanent French colony in Canada at Quebec in 1608. But that did not mean that France was abandoning Acadia. The land was simply too strategically and financially important to give up. The French government wanted to retain a presence in the region in order to keep alive its claims to the fur trade and fishery of the area. And Membertou, Chief of the the Mi'kmaq, was able to keep the buildings in good condition until Poutrincourt returned in 1610 to reestablish the colony.
All seemed lost in 1613, when pirate Samuel Argall sailed up the coast from Boston to attack Port Royal. He burned the forts, houses and barns, and forced most of the French settlers of the fledging colony to flee. This caused French interest in the region to flag for the next couple of decades.
New Scotland & the Kirkes
On September 10, 1621, King James I took advantage of the vacuum of power in Acadia, and granted all of Canada and Acadia to his secretary Sir William Alexander, son of the Earl of Stirling, who promised to set up a colony called Nova Scotia, or New Scotland. In 1624 Alexander founded the Knights Baronets of Nova Scotia, an order limited to 150 members; Nova Scotia baronies of 1000 acres could be had for £150, payable to Sir William Alexander.
Alexander also published a pamphlet entitled "An Encouragement to Colonies." It set forth the advantages offered to settlers in New Scotland, and "contained a map of the country, in which Scottish river and place names supplanted those given by the French, as the Tweed for the Ste. Croix, the Clyde for the St. John, and so on over the whole region."
In the meantime, more and more French settlers were arriving in Acadia, led by the members of the La Tour family - in 1625 Charles de St-Etienne de La Tour married chief Membertou's daughter. They began to sustain themselves through farming, fur trading, and trading with the French fleets that annually came to fish in the rich waters surrounding the colony.
In 1628, with a European war raging, the whole of Canada came under attack when England authorized an expedition against Quebec. Funded by the same London merchants who backed the Newfoundland Company, it was led by the five Kirke brothers: Lewis, Thomas, John, James, and David. On Feb. 4, 1629 David & Lewis Kirke founded the Company of Adventurers to Canada with Sir William Alexander; their goal was to capture the St. Lawrence trade and remove the French from North America.
The Kirkes left Gravesend, England, in March, 1629, with a fleet of six ships and three pinnaces. Jacques Michel, a deserter from Samuel de Champlain's party, served as their pilot on the dangerous St. Lawrence River. David & Lewis Kirke easily captured Port-Royal, and then headed to Quebec. In the Gulf of St. Lawrence they came upon and captured 17 of Champlain's supply ships led by trader Émery de Caën.
Before news reached Europe, on April 24, 1629, France and England signed the Treaty of Susa; all territory captured after signing was to be returned, so Quebec was put back in French hands, but not Acadia.
English King Charles I refused to restore the captured lands in North America until his wife’s dowry was paid by his brother-in-law, King Louis XIII of France. Years of negotiations over the dowry and ownership of the furs seized at Quebec by the Kirkes were ended in 1632 by the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye. The Company of Adventurers to Canada were ordered to restore Quebec and Port-Royal to the French.
During the three years they held Quebec, the Kirkes had busily exploited the fur trade, held off trade by French and English interlopers, kept 200 men in Canada, and explored “400 leagues” into the interior. Now they had to hand everything back to Champlain, who arrive at Quebec in the Spring of 1633.
One of those captured and sent to England by the Kirkes was Claude La Tour of Acadia. La Tour made peace with the English, changed his allegiance to England and he and his son Charles were awarded a barony in Nova Scotia, 4,500 square miles, from Yarmouth to Lunenburg, by the new owner, Sir William Alexander, Earl of Stirling. On November 30, 1629, he led Alexander to Port-Royal with a fleet of four vessels containing seventy men and two women. He then helped the colonists build a fort opposite Port-Royal, on the site of Annapolis Royal, called Fort Charles, after the King.
In 1631, La Tour changed his allegiance back to the French, and King Louis XIII named him Governor and Lieutenant-General of New France and Acadia.
Changing Loyalties
One of those captured and sent to England by the Kirkes was Claude de Saint-Etienne de La Tour of Acadia. On Nov 30, 1629, he made peace with the English, changed his allegiance to England and he and his son Charles were awarded a barony in Nova Scotia, 4,500 square miles, from Yarmouth to Lunenburg, by the new owner, Sir William Alexander, Earl of Stirling.
In 1631, La Tour changed his allegiance back to the French, and King Louis XIII named him Governor and Lieutenant-General of New France and Acadia. La Tour proceeded to build Fort Ste-Marie at mouth of the Saint John River, a rich fur region, and concentrated all his efforts in what is now New Brunswick. The following year, the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye fully returned Acadia to France and ended Sir William Alexander's attempt to increase the number of Scottish colonists. David and Lewis Kirke abandoned Quebec, and Samuel de Champlain was appointed first Governor of the royal colony of New France.
On March 27, 1632 Isaac de Launoy de Razilly was appointed by Cardinal Richelieu to take over Port-Royal for the Company of New France, and to build a good working relationship with Charles de La Tour. His party reached Acadia on September 8 on three ships, with his cousin Charles de Menou d'Aulnay, his nephew, Claude de Razilly, and the Denys brothers, Nicholas and Simon
De Razilly got the Scots at Fort Charles to surrender the territory, and moved the capital from Port Royal on the Bay of Fundy to La Have [Riverport], directly across on the Atlantic Ocean. Fifteen French families built a settlement there, and the Capuchins opened the first boarding school in New France.
Unfortunately, De Razilly died three years later, which led to chaos and confusion in Acadia. Three different traders, Charles de La Tour, Charles d'Aulnay, and Nicolas Denys struggled for control of the region. After mid-century, the region was bartered and swapped back and forth across the French and English negotiating tables. One peace treaty assigned it to one side; the next, to the other. After a relatively long stretch of English control, many of the colonists attempted to forge some form of reconciliation with their new masters. But that would eventually be their - and the colony's - undoing.
Acadian Life
Meanwhile, the colonists got on with their lives. They built dikes and reclaimed hundreds of acres of fertile marshland that the tides of the Bay of Fundy flooded twice a day. They used an old French device called an aboiteau, which acted as a hinged valve, letting fresh water run off the marshes through the dike at low tide, but stopping salt water from flowing back onto the farmland at high tide.
Fur trading and fishing added to a healthy and diverse economy, and the Acadians flourished, growing from 500 to 13 000 in less than a century, from 1670 to 1755, despite the uncertainty created by the never ending French-English rivalry. They cherished and celebrated their unique culture. Their language was mostly French, with some English and aboriginal words added. The Roman Catholic Church was a solidifying body that acted not only as the religious and moral guardian, but also performed important educational, social, and legal functions.
The 1713 Treaty of Utrecht once again put a temporary halt to French-English hostilities, this time ending Queen Anne's War that had begun in 1702. The Treaty ushered in thirty years of peace and stability. France paid a heavy price for its losses during the war. It handed over its claims to both Hudson's Bay and Newfoundland (other than for fishing rights off the north shore). France also relinquished "all of Acadia comprised in its ancient limits. Because contemporary maps were notoriously vague, no one really knew precisely what that meant.
Another term of the Treaty of Utrecht was that French settlers in Placentia, Newfoundland were moved to Île Royale, now renamed Cape Breton by the English. One hundred and sixty displaced Acadians traveled from Placentia and founded the settlement of Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island. France wanted to secure its claim to the area, and in 1719, engineers began to build an enormous fortress on the site. They situated the Fortress at Louisbourg on a slight elevation overlooking an ice-free harbour that faced the open sea. It was close to the fisheries of the Grand Banks as well as on the trade routes between France's Caribbean colonies and Quebec.
The Fortress of Louisbourg
Nicknamed "the Gibraltar of America," Louisbourg was constructed so as to be impregnable. Its walls were immense and massive. Building the Fortress took over twenty-five years and put a major hole in the French treasury. However, the Fortress was a symbol of a bygone era. The heavy walls had already been made obsolete by modern cannons. Also, the Fortress was not strategically placed. It did not sit astride a dominant height of land. Rather, the surrounding hills that could be used by siege cannons were dangerously close.
While the military dominance of Louisbourg was dubious, it soon became a great commercial and administrative centre, as one of the few remaining French possessions in Acadia.
French officials soon tried to convince the Acadians now living under English rule to relocate to Louisbourg. About five hundred did so, but the majority chose to remain in their villages and hamlets. They were farmers, and the barren soil and sparse grazing of Cape Breton did not attract them. So most of a activity in the town came from France, in the form of administrators, soldiers, and traders. Louisbourg prospered with the fishing industry and as it did so, greedy eyes were cast its way from English settlers in the Thirteen Colonies to the south.
The Two Sieges of Louisbourg
In 1745, Massachusetts Governor William Shirley arranged a volunteer force of 4,300 and with the support of a British naval squadron, laid siege to Louisbourg for seven weeks. Finally, the French could hold out no longer and surrendered on June 17. The French dispatched a large force to recapture its Acadian jewel, but its commander died en route and many of the crew was overcome with disease, so that the Fortress remained securely in British hands. However, by the 1748 Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle that ended King George's War, Louisbourg was returned to France, as the British wanted to retain possessions in India and the Netherlands.
The second siege of Louisbourg took place only 13 years later, in June of 1758, when British General Jeffrey Amherst, assisted by General James Wolfe, launched an attack on the Fortress. Twelve thousand British troops faced off against barely four thousand French soldiers and militia. The only hope for the French was that they might be able to hold off the attackers until winter set in. Amherst's policy of caution contrasted with Wolfe's aggressiveness. After seven weeks of continual bombardment, Wolfe led a direct attack. He waded ashore, charging into enemy fire, and established a beachhead. The formal French surrender would come a few days later on July 26, 1758.
The Founding of Halifax
On June 21, 1749, Edward Cornwallis on HMS Sphinx was on his way to Annapolis when fog drove the ship into Chebucto basin, the site of Halifax. Cornwallis was impressed, and immediately reported to London that "The coasts are as rich as ever they have been represented; we caught fish every day since we came ... The harbour itself is full of fish of all kinds. All the officers agree the harbour [Halifax] is the finest they have seen. The country is one continued wood; no clear spot is to be seen or heard of."
Over the next week, 2,576 settlers arrived from England, bringing building supplies, a fire engine, hospital equipment and a midwife. Surveyors started laying out the town of Chebucto, later named in honour of Secretary of War George Dunk, Earl of Halifax.
On July 25, Colonel Hopson, the retiring governor of Louisbourg, sailed into Chebucto Harbour with several transports, carrying two British regiments with provisions and military stores, after handing Louisbourg back to the French under the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle.
Just 13 years later, during the French and Indian War or Seven Years' War (1756-1763), Louisbourg's fate was sealed when James Wolfe lad his troops ashore, captured the great French fortress once more, and ordered the fortifications destroyed.
The Acadians Expelled
"We are now upon a great and noble Scheme of sending the neutral French out of this Province, who have always been our secret Enemies and have encouraged the Savages to cut our throats... By all Accounts, that part of the Country they possess, is as good Land as any in the World."
Pennsylvania Gazette, September 4, 1755
The years prior to the Seven Years' War were a golden age for the people of Acadia. While nominally under the control of Britain since the end of the War of 1812, they still prospered in the decades prior to 1755. With their dikes and channels reclaiming salt marshes from the ocean tides, they reclaimed more and more rich land, creating thousands of new acres of fertile farmland around the Minas Basin. Greater prosperity came through the rich cod fisheries and fur trade, and the British actively encouraged trade with the New England colonies.
The Acadians had long intermarried with the Mi'kmaq people, and became the first people to have a North American name and a political and cultural identity distinct from Europe. There was peace and stability. Families grew, the population increased, the economy thrived, and a distinctive sense of community and culture emerged.
The Acadians nevertheless faced one major problem - they were a defeated people. Though their fierce sense of independence made one think otherwise, they were a conquered race. The Acadians had lived as neutrals under a succession of English and French regimes as the two European superpowers jockeyed for supremacy in North America. But the British were always concerned about the fragile neutrality of the Acadians.
Earlier attempts to extract an oath of allegiance from the Acadians had met with mixed success. However, when the French and Indian War flared up in 1754, the Acadian problem took on greater urgency for Charles Lawrence, the British Governor of Nova Scotia. He was determined to tighten the screws on the Acadians, and force them to take an unconditional oath of loyalty to the British Crown, warning them that their refusal could bring dire consequences.
The Acadians were loathe to do this, since they had lived peacefully for years without swearing an allegiance that would have put them at odds with the French, were they to regain control of the region.
In fact, Lawrence and his Massachusetts allies were looking for a pretext to get rid of the Acadians entirely, and and free up their fertile lands for American colonists - an action that the Pennsylvania Gazette saw as "a great and noble scheme" to protect British interests in North America.
On June 16, 1755, Robert Monckton easily captured French Fort Beauséjour, on the Isthmus of Chignecto. He discovered that the fort held 300 armed Acadians. This discovery left Lawrence a free hand. On July 3, he and his Council met in Halifax to consider a petition from the Minas Basin Acadians, who objected to the confiscation of their boats and arms by Captain Alexander Murray of Fort Edward, near Pisiquid. Lawrence pressed the Acadians to take an unqualified oath, which they refused to do. The delegates were imprisoned and new ones summoned from Minas and Annapolis Royal.
On July 25, 1755, Lawrence met with the new Acadian leaders, and demanded that they swear an unconditional oath. He warned them that their refusal could bring dire consequences. Once again, the Acadians refused. They were worried that they might be forced to take up arms against their French brethren in Louisbourg and the Gulf, still under French control, and against their Micmac allies. Even as he negotiated with the Acadians, Lawrence was sending out agents to take inventories of their best stallions, cattle, and properties.
The Order to Disperse
On July 28, 1755, Lawrence got the full approval of the Council of Nova Scotia to start dispersing the Acadians among the American Colonies, and sent Colonel Robert Monckton to Chignecto and Chepody, Lieutenant Colonel John Winslow to Minas, Pisiquid, and Cobequid, and Major John Handfield to Annapolis Royal to carry out the orders.
Massachusetts Militia Colonel John Winslow arrived at Grand-Pré on August 19, 1755, and set up his headquarters in the church. He ordered all males aged 10 years and up in the area to gather in the Grand-Pré Church on September 5, 1755 for an important message from His Excellency, Charles Lawrence.
Uneasy because the Acadian prisoners greatly outnumbered his troops, Winslow rounded up 230 men and placed them on five transports anchored in Minas Basin. The embarkation began on October 8, 1755, and by November 1, 1755 over 1500 Acadians had been shipped to Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. A second group of 600 left Grande-Pré on December 13, 1755, while at Pisiquid, over 1000 were expelled in late October.
After the Acadians had boarded the ships, Windslow gave his troops orders to destroy homes and to round up livestock. In this way Acadians who had escaped, or were planning to, would not have their former homes to run to nor would they have their cattle and sheep to rely on for food.
Lawrence soon published a proclamation in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia stating that there was now a favourable Opportunity for the peopling and cultivating of the Lands vacated by the French. Over the next decade 10,000 Yankee farmers took up the "vacated" lands.
Le Grand Dérangement
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During the period of the Seven Years' War, almost three-quarters of the Acadians from Grand Pré, Annapolis and the Fundy coast were herded onto waiting ships and forcibly expelled. Most had done nothing wrong and had lived in peace for decades. They were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and were victims of a form of ethnic cleansing.
Most Acadians did get the option of choosing their destination, with the majority choosing other British colonies. But that was hardly any real solace, as they had to rebuild their ruined lives. Some settled in Massachusetts and Connecticut, but their families were dispersed. In New York, many were sold as indentured servants, the rest restricted to nearby coastal islands. In Pennsylvania, many of the 450 exiles were imprisoned for not giving up their children to English-speaking families. Some ended up in Nantes, France, some in Liverpool, England. Others made it to Canada. Those who ended up in Louisiana forged their own destiny, as the Cajuns. But almost 5,000 of the Acadians deported died of disease, deprivation or shipwreck as a result of the action.
The Acadians Return
At the end of the French and Indian War, the expulsion ban on the Acadians was lifted. They were permitted to return. About 3 000 did so only to find that the rich lands that they had cleared and farmed had been given to New England soldiers and squatters.
Reduced to marginal lands, they had to begin their lives anew, but this time only after agreeing to swear the detested oath. They had stood on principle and integrity - and it had cost them dearly. However, even though they had suffered through decades of hardship and struggle, their culture survived, migrating northward into New Brunswick. Increasingly, greater numbers forsook the land and became fishermen and lumberjacks. Theirs is a uniquely heroic - and tragic - tale.
Evangeline
Resource: Perhaps nowhere is the tragic plight of the Acadians better captured than in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem Evangeline.
In the early 1840s Horace Connolly, rector of St. Matthew's Episcopal Church in Boston, heard the story of the expulsion from his Acadian housekeeper. He shared her tale with his friend Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and in 1847 Longfellow published Evangeline, A Tale of Acadie. The epic poem helped keep the story of the Acadian expulsion alive.
| A Day of Commemoration
Acadians brought pressure on the Crown and the Canadian government to recognize Le Grand Dérangement. In December 2003, Governor General Adrienne Clarkson issued a proclamation acknowledging this dark chapter" in Canadian history, and declaring that henceforth July 28, the day on which the expulsion was ordered, be every year observed as A Day of Commemoration of the Great Upheaval," commencing on July 28, 2005." |
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