The Acadians in England, France, Guiana, San Domingo, Hispaniola, Louisiana. Canada—Their many transmigrations — Awful rate of mortality—General Statistics.

Sad as was tlie fate of the Acadians deported to the United States, and of those who escaped the deportation by taking refuge in the forests of the Gulf, or by making tlieir way through the wilderness to Canada, it cannot be compared to the fate of those who were deported to England or France, not so much because they were ill-treated or more wretched, but because, for most of them, the uncertainty of their sorrowful existence was much more prolonged than in the case of the exiles on this side of the Atlantic.

After the peace of 1763 all the Acadians then in England went over to France. A great number of these belonged to the fifteen hundred who had been deported to Virginia, aiid whom the Virginians would not receive. They had been much longer at sea than the others, and, as will readily be understood, the mortality in these overladen ships must have been proportionately greater. The memoir of M. de la Rochette, who was employed in taking a census of the Acadians in England and in transferring them to France, gives us an idea of the magnitude of their trials and of the' great mortality. Decimated during the voyages from Acadia to Virginia, and from Virginia to England, they were again decimated during their sojourn at Liverpool, Southampton. Peryn and Bristol. Consequently, after eight years of captivity, in spite of the births, their number was reduced by more than one third. "Dispersed,” said M. de la Pochette,, “in all parts of this kingdom, a great many of them perished of want, and grief. Three hundred had landed at Bristol, where they were not expected; they spent three days and nights on the wharves of the city, exposed to all the inclemency of the weather, and it was winter. They were at last shut up in some dilapidated houses, where i small-pox killed a great part of them."’ M. de la Rochette afterwards went to Liverpool, where he visited them and told them his errand. “Tears,” he says, “succeeded the first exclamations of joy. Several seemed quite beside themselves: they clapped their hands, raised them to heaven, struck themselves against the walls and sobbed all the time. It would be impossible to describe all the transports to which these good people gave way: they spent the night blessing the King and his ambassador and congratulating each other on the happiness they were about to enjoy. When they arrived at Liverpool they numbered 336, and now they are reduced to 224.”

At Southampton they had dwindled from 340 when they landed to 219; the proportion of deaths was substantially the same in the other ports.

Counting those who were already in France, the total number of Acadians in that kingdom after the peace, and after the arrival of those who had been in England, was about 4,500, scattered in the ports of Granville, Saint-Malo, Boulogne, Rochefort, La Rochelle and Brest. Their fate is but vaguely known. France had no public lauds to offer them within her boundaries, and the few colonies she still possessed were in climates where the tropical heat was unsuited to men accustomed to cold countries; yet these poor people longed for agricultural holdings. Four hundred of them were placed at Belle-Isle-en-Mer, where each colonist received a lot, a house, a cow, a horse, three sheep and the necessary tools, besides military rations during some time. An allowance of six sous a day for five years was given to each of the Acadian children born iu England, and the same sum for life to those who were born in Acadia. This colony dates from 1765, and it is the only place in France where there still remains a compact group of Acadians.

“Many plans and projects were formed,” says Rameau, “in order to procure for these poor people a home and some means of subsistence which they might make profitable ; some proposed to send them to Corsica, others to the Landes. These proposals wore not carried out; but detachments were sent off to San Domingo, Guiana, the Leeward Islands and the Falkland Isles. They could not stay anywhere, nor create prosperous settlements; they were out of their element and sorely tried by climates so different from their own.” Out of several hundred who went to Guiana in 1764, only a few returned to France ; eighteen months later the rest were all dead.

“Count d’Estaing, when Governor of Hispaniola,” says Smith, “commiserated these people in their misfortune, and invited thorn to his island, setting apart a particular district to their use. A considerable colony availed themselves of the Count’s offer; but neither they nor their kind benefactor had taken into consideration the danger attending a change of abode to a tropical climate. The result was that pestilence, broke out among them even before they could prepare themselves dwellings. A large number of them died there, and the rest were forced to emigrate to a different climate. Their kind benefactor, on learning of their shocking mortality, went to visit their settlement. Tie found them in the most pitiable plight, crawling under the bushes, to screen themselves from the, torrid sun. and lying down to die.”

*We might,” says Rameau, *reconstruct, the history of a considerable number of families brought from Prince Edward Island to Louisburg, transported from Louisburg to England in 1758, from England to France in 1763, and from France to Guiana in 1764; then, brought back to France in 1765 after the disaster of Kourou, they were quartered in the island of Aix. whence they were taken to Rochefort. After a sojourn of some years in this place, some of these Acadians were sent to Limousin, to M. de Saint-Victour’s estate; but they remained there only a short time and were advised to go. in 1772, to Saint-Malo, where they were met by M. de Pevrusse, who took with him more than a hundred families.” 1 They remained a few years on the lands he gave them to till in Poitou at Archigny, Cenan, Bonneuil-ma-Tour and Maille; but the soil was poor and the whole country had a gloomy and desolate look that contrasted painfully with the rich valleys and the smiling landscapes of the Bay of Fundy. In the midst of this isolated and silent wilderness, these families could not make, up their minds to consider this their lasting home ; they mourned inconsolably for their dear Acadia and for so many relatives scattered far and wide. Accordingly when, after a few years, the Spanish Government made them advantageous proposals for a settlement in Louisiana, most of these families, together with a great number of others, dwelling elsewhere in France, eagerly accepted them. From 1784 to 1T87 a strong current of Acadian emigration set in from France to Louisiana. Of 4,500 Acadians in France in 1763, there remained scarcely eight hundred; those who were at San Domingo and other West India islands had taken the same direction long before. Thus it was not till thirty years after the first deportation, and 'after suffering all the heartburnings of separation, exile, death, misery in its multitudinous forms, in fact, all imaginable ills, that this si ricken remnant could at length find a lasting asylum.

To arrive at an approximate figure, we must follow the exiles through their successive migrations to the place of their final settlement. Few or none remained in England; about 700 in France, and at most 800 in the United States, of whom more than two-thirds were at Baltimoro and about fifty at Ohasy in Vermont, where, after serving i". the army during the war of Independence, they received grants of land. The number of those who definitely settled in Guiana. Ran Domingo and other West India islands is insignificant. About 1.500 joined in the Maritime Provinces the 2,500 who were already there in 1765. ‘

Taking into account all these migrations, we find the following result:

France............... . 700
United States........800
Maritime Provinces, Gaspe. Magdalen Islands, Newfoundland coast, St. Pierre and Miquelon...4.000
Louisiana.. .....................................2.300
Province of Quebec......................3,500
Other places................................ . 500
12,000

Rameau, as we have seen, counts only 11,300: but I think he is 500 short as regards the Province of Quebec. Conversely, 1 may be mistaken in my estimate for other places, particularly for Louisiana, where statistics are less accurate owing to the constant immigration thereto from France during 32 years. What, seems almost certain is that in 1790 the Acadian population of Louisiana was 4.000.

Other parts of the United States........ ore of anguish which they represent, let him ask himself if ever a more dramatic and heart-rending fate befell a whole nation or even a handful of persons, and this, not by the chances of war. but by the cold-blooded greed of rulers robbing unarmed and peaceful subjects. With all this in full view, was it seemly in Parkman to ridicule the sentimentality of his fellow-countrymen and purposely to falsify history in order to stamp upon a down-trodden people

“When a single household,’" says Smith, “has been stripped of shelter and effects by a sudden unavoidable calamity, the occasion is one that calls torth the sympathy of the whole community. Here we have thousands of Acadian exiles, who had lost all, by a common calamity. In obedience to the command of those in authority.

“Many a mother has clasped her babe more closely to her breast as she has recalled the circumstances, yet fresh in the mind of every reader, of those ancient parents, who, for so many Ions years have been wearily searching for their kidnapped boy, until their fortune is spent, and- their foreheads have become wrinkled with the living sorrow the fate of those parents but illustrates the experience of the French Neutrals, who passed their lives in searching for members of their families which had been purposely scattered to prevent their reunion.”

For nearly two thousand years legendary history, embellished by the poets, has been perpetuating the memory of AEueas Heeing from his home with his father Anchises on his back. Not a few pulses have throbbed more quickly at the story of the Trojan warriors flight and filial love, though, even were it true, it was but a transient episode in the lives of two men. And yet here we have undoubted facts about a whole people, with whose misfortunes the brief woes which AEueas calls “unspeakable” can in no wise be compared; and these misfortunes were inflicted upon them eighteen centuries after Christ in a Christian country. No, Mr Parkman; you may continue, if you choose, your work of falsification; hut kindly leave poets and novelists to their noble labor of love, suffer those whose compassionate souls wince at a tale of suffering and turn with loathing from the unjust oppression of the weak by the strong, suffer such, I say, to reveal what you have striven to hide, suffer them to unmask the cupidity that is the mainspring of this drama, and to give to the hapless victim the tribute of a tear. Every Acadian still carries a wound in his heart; rip it open if you will, but let sympathetic hearts, let consoles come to us, for we hunger for the bread of consolation. Let the balm they pour on our wounds counteract the gall you have injected there. Bear with the poets, when they compassionate our sufferings and hold out to us the right hand of friendship. “Friendship,” as Haliburton so eloquently said in the discourse I mentioned above, “is natural to the heart of man; it is like the ivy that seeks the oak, clings to its trunk, embraces its branches and surrounds them with superb festoons; it climbs to the tree-top and there waves its banner of foliage above the oak’s head, as if glorying in having conquered the king of the forests.” Believe me, Mr. Parkman, mankind is and ever will be amenable to noble and generous sentiments; you have not acquired such prestige as would enable you effectually to close against poets and novelists that abundant wellspring which immortalized Longfellow and will yet, I trust, immortalize others of your countrymen. If civilization is due to the development of the mind and the spread of knowledge, still more is it the outcome of the culture of the will. Now the seat of the will is in the heart. Therefore, if you rightly move the heart of man, you civilize him, you make him a man of good will. The heart is the royal road through which all civilization must pass. [Abbe Casgrain thinks he noticed, in the Acadian women of the maritime provinces, an expression of gentle sadness and resignation, which seemed to him to contrast visibly with the sprightly and cheerful faces of their French Canadian sisters. Such generalizations may be rather hazardous; however, in view of the fact that the character and the facial characteristics of a people are the combined result of a multitude of causes, some apparently slight but continuous through long periods of time, others far-reaching though seemingly transient, it would not be astonishing, after all, if the misfortunes that overwhelmed a whole generation had fixed upon the descendants of that generation an indelible stamp of quiet melancholy.]