Page:1898 NB Magazine.djvu/171

of the forest,—died of hunger, cold, privations, ill-treatment, dispair.

Those among them who survived in 1763, the date of the treaty of Paris, were scattered through all the New England colonies and elsewhere—in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Virginia, Georgia, South Carolina, Haiti, Guiana, St. Domingo, Corsica, in English prisons, and some in France at Granville, Saint-Malo, Boulogne, Rochelle, Brest, and Belle-Isle-en-mer.

A certain number of them succeeded, after incredible privations and hardships in traversing the forests, in reaching, some Louisiana; others, Canada.

In order to kill them off more effectively, to render more impracticable their return to Acadia, care had been taken, when they were placed on board the English transports, to separate the members of the same family; and this, despite the entreaties of the mothers and the despair of the children. As a result of this action, their first care on being restored to liberty in foreign lands was to prosecute a search in every direction for their wives, their children, their brothers. In such endless searching they would surely find a thousand occasions to die from misery and discouragement, and none would return to Acadia to reclaim their fields and cattle. Such was the cruel calculation of their despoilers.

They numbered, in 1755, all Acadia, according to M. Rameau, about eighteen thousand, nine years later, as shown by a memoir to the Lords of Trade, dated March 22d, 1764, Governor Wilmot could find only one thousand seven hundred and sixty-two! And these were, for the most part, women and children in the lowest depths of misery.

Some families hidden away in the forests of the Island St. John,^[1] and others along the Northumberland Straits, are not mentioned in Wilmot's Memoir. He