Page:1898 NB Magazine.djvu/47
Piau's Island, must have suffered terribly from the inclemency of the season. There was no midnight Mass to attend that year. The joyful peal of the bell of St. Jean Baptiste's church at Port Royal, which they were so accustomed to hear, resounded only in sad memory's ear. They were some sixty miles from their former dwelling houses, which, as well as their church, all lay in ashes. The nearest priest to them was at East Pubnico, a distance of nearly eighty miles. This was the venerable and saintly Abbé Jean Baptiste Desenclaves. He had been their parish priest at Port Royal from June, 1742 until April 1754, when he removed to Pubnico. Their late pastor was Abbé Henri Daudin, who resided at Annapolis from the beginning of November, 1754, till he was arrested on Wednesday morning, the 6th of August, 1755, as he was concluding the Mass. He was then taken to Fort Edward, at Windsor, thence to Halifax with Abbés Chauvreul and Lemaire, where all three were confined till they were transported, at the end of October, of the same year on board of Vice-Admiral Boscawen's vessel, which landed them at Portsmouth, England, in the beginning of December. There they hired a small craft which took them to Saint Malo, where they arrived on the 8th of the same month, on the very day of the sailing of the fleet from Annapolis with its cargo of 1,664 Acadian prisoners.
What a terrible catastrophe had fallen on the Acadian people. Pastors and flocks were being tossed at the same time on the rolling waves of an angry sea. The members of families were separated and embarked on different transports. Their houses and churches were given to the flames. The inhabitants of the peninsula who had escaped deportation were wandering in the forest and shivering with cold and exposure, whilst the perpetrators of these misfortunes and miseries were