Acadian Driftwood

One Family and the Great Expulsion

Tyler LeBlanc

• Publisher: Goose Lane Editions
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781773101194
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

The untold story of one Acadian family: their experiences following their expulsion and their determination to find home.

Growing up on the south shore of Nova Scotia, Tyler LeBlanc wasn't fully aware of his family's Acadian roots — until a chance encounter with an Acadian historian prompted him to delve into his family history. LeBlanc's discovery that he could trace his family all the way to the time of the Acadian Expulsion and beyond forms the basis of this compelling account of Le Grand Dérangement.

Piecing together his family history through archival documents, Tyler LeBlanc tells the story of Joseph LeBlanc (his great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather), Joseph's ten siblings, and their families. With descendants scattered across modern-day Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, the LeBlancs provide a window into the diverse fates that awaited the Acadians when they were expelled from their homeland. Some escaped the deportation and were able to retreat into the wilderness. Others found their way back to Acadie. But many were exiled to Britain, France, or the future United States, where they faced suspicion and prejudice and struggled to settle into new lives.

A unique biographical approach to the history of the Expulsion, Acadian Driftwood is a vivid insight into one family's experience of this traumatic event.

Chapter One
Bénoni

Daniel LeBlanc and his wife, Françoise Gaudet, arrived in Acadia in the middle of the seventeenth century. They settled in Port-Royal, a small community on the north end of the Annapolis Basin, France’s first permanent settlement in North America. France had tried to establish a claim in the New World in 1541, on the shore of what would become known as the St. Lawrence River. Jacques Cartier and later Jean-François de La Rocque, Sieur de Roberval, built a small settlement at Cap-Rouge, a headland near the modern-day city of Québec. For two years, they tried to establish a French presence in the area but could not make it work. Six decades later, Samuel de Champlain, a young cartographer from the port city of La Rochelle, sailed into the Bay of Fundy in 1605. He found an inlet that he claimed could shelter the entire French fleet. On these shores, Port-Royal was founded.

The colony struggled to set down roots. Settlers suffered through harsh winters not at all like those in northern France. Wars an ocean away shuffled the small settlement back and forth between British and French hands for nearly thirty years before any real growth began. The first to arrive found salty soil, dramatic tides, and a short growing season. But they dug in. Raising the first dikes in North America, Daniel and the rest of Port-Royal’s pioneers shaped a new community by hand, one isolated, independent, and far from the imperial gaze of the King in Paris.

Two generations later, Daniel’s grandson François left Port-Royal. Like his grandfather, François sought new lands and freedom. Following a few families that had left before him, François and his wife, Jeanne Hébert, landed in Les Mines, a quilt of kin-linked communities on the edge of the Minas Basin — the shallow tidal gut of the Bay of Fundy — and made their home near Grand Pré, the largest community. When the Acadians arrived in the Les Mines region in the 1680s, the topography must have reminded them of home. Most came from the salt flats of northwestern France, from Brittany and Poitou.

Twice a day, over a billion tonnes of seawater rushed northeast up the funnel-shaped Bay of Fundy, around Cape Split, and spilled into the shallow Minas Basin. The depth, shape, and location of the bay pushed the surging water fifteen metres above the low tide line. On the surface, the tide came in with grace and ease. Below the surface, the waves pounded through the bay with the force of a category five hurricane. Swirling endlessly through the wash came the full bounty of the sea, and with each lunar push the waves gave vast riches of minerals perfect for agriculture to the land. But the tide ebbed with brutal force, stealing from the land what it deposited just hours earlier. To master this force took ingenuity and hard work.

Never far from the flux of the red-stained basin, the settlers harnessed the plundering tides with dike-building technology passed down by their French ancestors. Their dikes, sometimes ten feet or more in height, blocked the incoming tide with ease and drained the protected land. This last detail was crucial: land could not be farmed without proper drainage. They hollowed logs to form sluices, or aboiteaux, and buried them at the base of the dike. At one end of the aboiteau was a hinged flap. Groundwater and rogue tides drained easily through the aboiteau and back into the sea, while the pressure of an incoming tide held the flap shut, stopping any water from entering. The technology worked well, allowing the community to expand in size and food production capabilities. The dikes were managed collectively, and each member of the community had a role in the construction and upkeep of their local walls. Like a fortress holding off a twice-daily siege, the dikes protected Grand Pré from the force of the sea and enabled the Acadians to settle and raise families.

Before the Acadians arrived, the Mi'kmaq had lived in the region for thousands of years. Moving seasonally between coastal summer communities and winter camps in the interior, they were masters of their maritime environment and thrived, establishing distinct communities in what is now Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and parts of Quebec.

The Mi'kmaq and Acadians found common ground between their two cultures and prospered together. Using the land nomadically, the Mi'kmaq embraced trade and found open minds among Grand Pré settlers. The Acadians reclaimed land from the sea and intruded little on the ancestral territory of the original population, living together in small familial villages on sprawling farmland and pasture. Marriage between Mi'kmaq and Acadian peoples was allowed, even encouraged, and deepened the bonds between the communities. Families grew quickly and had plenty to eat: pork fat, mutton, curdled milk, whole grains, and fresh fish. Robert Hale, a New Englander who travelled through the region in 1731, was surprised by the quality of the protein-rich, fatty diets of the locals. Once planted, the diked land proved perfect for large-scale agriculture, filling tables with tubers, bitter greens, and brassicas. Hemp and flax flourished and were spun and woven to clothe the communities. Between harvests, men rode the tides chasing shiny green-striped shad and other ocean fish in small single-sail punts. Oxen plowed the fields and windmills ground grain to flour. The many rivers of the flatlands served as roads, allowing villagers to gather together to trade goods and attend religious services, such as marriages, baptisms, and funerals, at the parish church.

The Acadians flourished. From the small handful of settlers who arrived in the early 1680s, the population of Grand Pré had increased fifty-fold to nearly five thousand by 1755. François LeBlanc and Jeanne Hébert raised a large family of six sons and six daughters. Infant and child mortality were markedly lower in Acadia than in Europe, with some figures suggesting that up to 75 per cent of children born to Acadian families survived to adulthood. In France at the time, infant mortality rates of up to 50 per cent were reported. All François and Jeanne’s children lived to adulthood. In 1733 their firstborn, named for his father, died at the age of thirty. It’s possible that another of their children also died in adulthood and before the Expulsion. Honoré, their seventh child, appears on a baptismal record as the godfather of a child baptized in Grand Pré in 1727, but that is the only record of him. He likely never married and either died before 1755 or, unlike the rest of his family, somehow managed to avoid leaving any record of himself. The rest of François and Jeanne’s dozen children grew up, married, and had families of their own.

Despite the steady rhythms of hard-working agricultural life, the people of Grand Pré could not entirely avoid awareness of the conflicts between two competing colonial powers. For nearly 150 years, the British dabbled in the conquest of Acadia. They and the French traded the land the Acadians lived on back and forth like beaver pelts. In 1710 the British stormed Port-Royal; three years later the French ceded the colony to them and Port-Royal became Annapolis Royal. Maps labelled Acadie became maps bearing the name Nova Scotia.

In 1730 the governor of Nova Scotia, Richard Philipps, asked the Acadians to swear an oath of loyalty to the British Crown. The British presence increased. Red-coated soldiers turned trees into forts, including Fort Edward, built atop a round hill, where the town of Windsor, Nova Scotia, now stands. From the top of the blockhouse, sentries could see the innermost reach of the Minas Basin, where the Avon and St. Croix Rivers empty into the sea. The fort’s three shabby wooden buildings were put up in the frontier style inside a four-point, star-shaped palisade. Thin but wide planks made up the walls. Central fireplaces heated the rooms. The small parade was cobbled, and the fort included a small hospital. The lone blockhouse had murder holes, small open slits in the wall large enough to fire from but too small to fire into. The top floor was slightly larger than the bottom, and the overhang featured removable floorboards that could be taken out to allow hot oil and burning coals to be dumped on anyone attempting to storm the fort. But the fort was not designed to handle full-scale warfare. It was an outpost, a symbol of power built on the site of an old Acadian church.

Fort Edward was not the only British stronghold dotting the landscape of Nova Scotia. In 1749, during a push to assert British dominance in Acadian communities and prevent an exodus to surrounding French territories, they built a fort a few miles from Grand Pré, on a low-lying field at the basin’s edge. Fort Vieux Logis didn’t last long. In the autumn of its first year, a militia made up of Acadians and an alliance of Mi'kmaq, Wǝlastǝkwiyik, Passamaquoddy, Penobscot, and Abenaki fighters known as the Wabanaki Confederacy, attempted a siege on the fort. In the process they captured nineteen British soldiers, including the commander’s son, who were patrolling the area outside of the palisades. With prisoners in tow, the force tried to take the fort but retreated after a week of unsuccessful attacks. Their prisoners were ransomed more than a year later. Though no further attempts were made on the fort, its exposed location led the British to abandon it four years later. They left it to rot in the weather.

But many worried that the British build-up in the region meant something dark and terrible, and only increased the risk of getting caught between warring nations if long-standing tensions finally boiled over. One of François’s sons, Joseph, had fled with his wife and her family, the Bourgs, to the deep end of the basin, to a place called Cobeguit. Before 1754, his daughters Josette and Marie had also moved away, to the neighbouring French territories of Île Royale (now Cape Breton Island), and Acadie Française (now the Province of New Brunswick). They were the lucky ones. The mounting fear that many experienced as the British presence in the region increased proved justified not long after Josette and Marie left Acadia. In the early days of June 1755, troop transports from New England, containing a mix of British soldiers and New England militiamen, dropped anchor off the low-lying salt marshes of Tantramar on the Isthmus of Chignecto, the narrow strip of land between the colony of Nova Scotia and New France. Perched on the border, overlooking the bay’s churning tidal flux, sat two forts, the British Fort Lawrence and the French Fort Beauséjour. Both were frontier outposts, small fortified stations, neither one capable of mounting any real defence against a siege — which is why the British brought cannons.

To France, Fort Beauséjour was a strategic defence point between Louisbourg on the Atlantic and Québec, far inland to the west. To the English, it was the only thing standing in the way of Britain’s full occupation of the Atlantic region. The British were confident that the conquest of Acadia would lead inevitably to their ultimate control of North America. On June 4, they attacked.

Under the command of Robert Monckton, a lieutenant general who would later gain fame as the second-in-command to General James Wolfe during the capture of Québec, 2,300 soldiers crossed the Missaguash River and dug in. The terrain was swampy and flat, but the British worked their way closer and closer to the walls of Fort Beauséjour. Forces of French, Acadian, and Indigenous fighters tried to push back the advancing army, but they were outnumbered by more than four to one. Nine days after they landed, the British were able to position their cannons in range of the fort. Under heavy fire, Beauséjour didn’t last long.

The mortar shell tore through the fort’s ceiling just as a group of officers sat down for breakfast on the morning of the thirteenth. The blast shook the walls and shredded the soldiers to pieces. Louis Du Pont Duchambon de Vergor, commander of the fort, got to his feet as dust from the explosion filtered past his door through the fort’s narrow passageways. Abbé Jean-Louis Le Loutre stood at his side.

Vergor went to his quarters, gathered what he needed, and headed for the base of the fort’s flagpole. He carefully tied the white flag on the line and ordered it sent up. The cannons stopped. The gates were unbolted. Vergor returned to his quarters and packed his trunk for the long journey ahead of him. He would be sent back to France. What fate would befall the Acadians who’d stood with him, he did not know.

When news of the victory reached Halifax, by then the British capital of the colony of Nova Scotia, 186 miles away, Lieutenant-Governor Charles Lawrence read the letter carefully, his normally stern face betraying his delight. He’d been waiting for this day. An engraving in the Scottish National Gallery depicts Charles Lawrence as a man of unremarkable appearance. He’d come to political appointment by his sword, the same sword he had plunged into the hearts of young Frenchmen on the muddy battlefield of Fontenoy during the War of the Austrian Succession. Now, in the New World, he administered an important British outpost, a place rife with a stubborn population of supposedly neutral farmers who spoke the language of his enemy.

He first arrived in Nova Scotia eight years earlier, in 1747, and was stationed at the former French stronghold at Louisbourg, which the British had recently captured. After some time in the colony as a military man, Lawrence was promoted to lieutenant-governor in 1754. During his stay he’d become familiar with the Acadians and their allies, the Mi'kmaq. He had no love for either group. He had fought the French his whole life, and he was ardently ethnocentric. Together, the Acadians and Indigenous Peoples vastly outnumbered the small crop of British settlers struggling to claim the harsh frontier for the Crown, and in Lawrence’s view, they showed an astounding contempt for British models of authority and class. His administrative predecessors had been too lenient, too flexible, too nice. They’d accepted the Acadians’ oath of neutrality and offered them cohabitation in return. In Lawrence’s mind, these people were “inveterate Enemies,” “ungratefull” and “perfidious,” deserving of the “severest treatment.” For him, their defence of Fort Beauséjour proved their willingness to take up arms against the British. They were snakes in the grass, and Lawrence, as the de facto ruler of this remote realm, had the power to stamp them out. The fall of Fort Beauséjour and the capture of the small number of Acadians who took part in the fort’s defence justified for Lawrence the implementation of a plan that the British colonial authorities had first conceived nearly fifty years earlier.

Lawrence pointed to Fort Beauséjour as an excuse to act, but in reality he had struck the first blow many days before the siege of the fort. Soldiers, acting on Lawrence’s order, impounded canoes and firearms across Acadia in the days leading up to the siege. The outraged deputies of the largest communities wrote to Lawrence to express their displeasure: “It is not the gun which an inhabitant possesses, that will induce him to revolt, nor the privation of the same gun that will make him more faithful; but his conscience alone must induce him to maintain his oath.” They had not been providing assistance to Beauséjour, and they had no intention of being grouped in with any who had, they argued. Their guns were to protect their livestock and families; their canoes were for fishing and transporting goods across the rivers. Proclaiming innocence, they demanded and expected the immediate return of their personal property.

Lawrence likely anticipated their response, for it gave him yet another opportunity he had been waiting for. In early July 1755, under the guise of benevolent diplomacy, he invited the signatories of the petition to his home in Halifax. They came from Les Mines and Pisiguit to speak on behalf of a large number of Acadians spread around the Bay of Fundy. They protested that they were bound by the oath of neutrality their fathers had sworn, and they themselves had no involvement in the defence of Fort Beauséjour. Or they most likely would have, had they been allowed to speak. Lawrence had no interest in hearing what these men had to say. Because they were all guilty in his estimation, he demanded that each one swear an oath of unwavering allegiance to King George II and defend the British colony against the French.

The deputies said they couldn’t swear an oath without first speaking with their communities. They reminded the lieutenant-governor that their neutrality was more than words. They had stayed out of the fray throughout decades of conflict in the region, never, as a group, raising arms against the crimson-coat invaders. The war wasn’t their concern: Britain had taken control of their land years earlier, and their lives had changed little. They wanted nothing more than to continue to live as they pleased.

Lawrence’s stance was firm: swear the oath or be sent away. The deputies left the room to confer with one another. They returned an hour later, more resolved than before. It was not for them to take an oath on behalf of their entire people, they told Lawrence. They would uphold the old oath signed by their fathers, but they would pledge nothing more. Lawrence sent the deputies away for the night to reconsider, but when they appeared the next morning, they gave him another resounding no.

Lawrence ordered the deputies shackled and sent to the prison on Georges Island, a fortified treeless green bump in the middle of Halifax’s harbour. Lawrence called for new deputies. They were offered the same option, and they gave the same answer. No more oaths. They’d rather leave their lands than pledge to fight for the British. Again the deputies were shackled and sent away.

Lawrence knew the Acadians would refuse to accept his terms. What would the oath gain for them? After all, in the face of war, which seemed inevitable, the oath worked doubly against them. If the French came to these lands, the Acadians would have been forced to take up arms against their kin from a common homeland, those who spoke their language and followed the tenets of Catholicism. If they refused, the British would condemn them as traitors. If they fought and were caught by the French, they’d also be considered traitors. Treason drew the harshest punishment under law at the time, and death could be prolonged and excruciating.

Of course they would refuse, and that was exactly the response Lawrence wanted. With Fort Beauéjour captured and his offers of diplomacy rejected, he had what he needed to rid the British colony of the Acadians once and for all. They’d be arrested, imprisoned, and forced onto ships bound for the British colonies in the south. The thousands of British troops would set fire to their homes, barns, and possessions. Their livestock would be slaughtered and their crops razed. A hundred years of hard work and humanity would be erased, and loyal British subjects from New England would take their place. Acadia would die, and from its ashes would rise a strong and British Nova Scotia.

The plan had been under consideration for years. London had continually resisted the idea; past governors always wavered. Removing a population of nearly fifteen thousand people was a major undertaking. Ships would need to be rented, captains and crews paid, and garrisons readied in case of rebellion. Other powers might object to the British plan, in particular the French. War could ensue. Lawrence, however, saw beyond the challenges to an opportunity to make his mark in history. And he seized it.

Once the second group of deputies was put in chains and shuffled from Lawrence’s sight, the clerk recording the proceedings took down Lawrence’s final instruction: “It would be most proper to send them to be distributed amongst the several colonies on the continent, and that a sufficient number of vessels should be hired with all possible expedition for that purpose.” Even now, the words seem almost casual.

Thus, Charles Lawrence threw into motion the great upheaval of the Acadian people.

The Expulsion began, quite deliberately, at Fort Beauséjour, now under the command of Robert Monckton. The for...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Map of Acadia, 1755
• Family Tree, 1755
• Principal Characters
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Bénoni
• Chapter Two: Jacques
• Chapter Three: Madeleine
• Chapter Four: Anne
• Chapter Five: Jean Baptiste
• Chapter Six: Joseph
• Chapter Seven: Marie & Josette
• Chapter Eight: Marguerite
• Chapter Nine: Cécile
• Chapter Ten: Survival
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Sources
• About the Author