The Acadians
Acadia - Acadie in French - has at different times included all or part of Maine, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. The etymology of the name is as vague as the geographical definition, derived from either the local Micmac word akade , meaning "abundance", or a corruption of Arcadia , an area of Greece that was a byword for rural simplicity when transient French fishermen arrived here in the early 1500s. Whatever the truth, the origins of Acadian settlement date to 1604, when a French expedition led by Pierre Sieur de Monts and Samuel de Champlain built a stockade on the islet of Saint-Croix , on the west side of the Bay of Fundy. It was a disaster: with the onset of winter, the churning ice floes separated the colonists from the fresh food and water of the mainland, and many died of malnutrition. The following spring the survivors straggled over to the sheltered southern shore of the bay, where they founded Port Royal , considered Canada's first successful European settlement. However, Champlain and Sieur de Monts soon despaired of Port Royal's fur-trading potential and moved to the banks of the St Lawrence, leaving Acadia cut off from the main flow of French colonization. Port Royal was abandoned in 1614 and, although it was refounded on the site of present-day Annapolis Royal in 1635, there were few immigrants. Indeed, the bulk of today's Acadians are descendants of just forty French peasant families who arrived in the 1630s. Slowly spreading along the Annapolis Valley , the Acadians lived a semi-autonomous existence in which their trade with their English-speaking neighbours was more important than grand notions of loyalty to the French Empire. When the British secured control of Port Royal under the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, the Acadians made no protest. But then, in the 1750s, the tense stand-off between the colonial powers highlighted the issue of Acadian loyalty. In 1755, at the start of the Seven Years War, British government officials attempted to make the Acadians swear an oath of allegiance to the Crown. They refused, so Governor Lawrence decided - without consultation with London - to deport them en masse to other colonies. The process of uprooting and removing a community of around 13,000 was achieved with remarkable ruthlessness. As Lawrence wrote to a subordinate, "You must proceed with the most vigorous measures possible not only in compelling them to embark, but in depriving those who should escape of all means of shelter or support, by burning their houses and destroying everything that may afford them the means of subsistence in the country." By the end of the year over half the Acadians had arrived on the American east coast, where they faced a cold reception - the Virginians even rerouted their allocation to England. Most of the rest spread out along the North Atlantic seaboard, establishing communities along New Brunswick's Miramichi Valley, on Prince Edward Island and in St-Pierre et Miquelon. Many subsequently returned to the Bay of Fundy in the 1770s and 1780s, but their farms had been given to British and New England colonists and they were forced to settle the less hospitable lands of the French Shore , further west. For other deportees, the expulsion was the start of wider wanderings. Some went to Louisiana, where they were joined in 1785 by over 1500 former Acadian refugees who had ended up in France - these were the ancestors of the Cajuns , whose name is a corruption of "Acadian". The Acadian communities of the Maritime Provinces continued to face discrimination from the English-speaking majority and today they remain firmly planted at the bottom of the economic pile. Nevertheless, the Acadians have resisted the pressures of assimilation and have recently begun to assert their cultural independence, most notably in New Brunswick, where Moncton University has become their academic and cultural centre
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