Ships Take Acadians Into Exile, by Claude T. Picard
An often-overlooked chapter in the lamentable history of ethnic cleansing began 259 years ago this month when British officials ordered the deportation of thousands of French-speaking Acadians from Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island.
The exiles were dispersed to British colonies in America, as well as to France and England. Families were broken up. Many died when transports sank, or after they became ill in prison or at sea. Some eventually found their way back to Canada. Others made it to Louisiana, where their descendants are known today as Cajuns.
Le Grand Dérangement (The Great Upheaval) dragged on for years. Maine poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow immortalized it in his epic poem Evangeline, in which an Acadian girl searches for her love, Gabriel. The Acadian diaspora probably would be largely lost to history if not for Longfellow’s poem, but facts tell an even more compelling tale than fiction. My family tree holds several Acadian cousins from that period who were evicted from their homes and exiled.
Here are two of their stories.
Michel Bastarache dit Basque was separated from his wife and imprisoned with his brother Pierre. More than 80 Acadians, including Michel, escaped from the fort where they were being held through a tunnel they had dug, but Michel was soon recaptured and sent to South Carolina with his brother.
In 1756, Michel, Pierre and a dozen other Acadians fled through the woods and made their way north on foot across North Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New York. They were captured by the Iroquois, but a fur trader ransomed them and took them to Québec.
From there, Michel and Pierre went to New Brunswick, where Michel learned that his wife was on Prince Edward Island. The reunited couple returned to New Brunswick, where they and their four children later became British prisoners. In 1763, the Bastaraches tried to relocate to France, but in the ultimate irony, they were barred from doing so because they were considered British subjects.
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At 19, Etienne Hébert was separated from his family in 1755 and deported to Baltimore, where he landed a job and eventually saved quite a bit of money. He found his parents and one brother in Maryland, but he could not locate six other siblings.
Moving to Boston with his parents and brother, Etienne set out for Canada with a compass, axe, musket, tinder-box, saucepan and birchbark canoe. He found three of his sisters in Canada - Marguerite, Françoise and Marie - bought some land there and returned to Boston.
In 1767, he brought his parents and brother Jean Baptiste to Canada, where his mother died that year. Etienne eventually found his remaining siblings - sister Anne and brothers Joseph and Honoré. The entire family had been reunited by 1771, 16 years after the Héberts were separated and deported.
Source: The Dictionary of Canadian Biography
