Author: Charles Skinner

The takeover of the land that was soon renamed Nova Scotia by England was one of the cruelest events in history. The land was home to a good and happy people who had strong faith and few laws, plenty to eat and drink, no tax collectors or judges—in short, a people who deserved to call themselves Acadians, for they made their land a paradise. The British ships swooped down on them, capturing them unarmed and innocent, crowding them onto their transports—often separating husbands and wives, parents and children—scattering them far and wide, beyond hope of return, and raising the cross of St. George over the ruins of their prosperity and peace. On the shore of the Basin of Minas, you can still trace the foundations of many homes that were forcibly abandoned at that time, and among them are the ruins of Grand Pre.

Here lived Evangeline Bellefontaine and Gabriel Lajeunesse, who were engaged with the usual celebrations just before the English arrived. They had expected, when their people were captured, to be sent away together; but most of the men were kept under guard, and Gabriel was at sea, neither he nor she knew where, when Evangeline found herself alone in her father’s house, for grief and excitement had been too much for her elderly father to bear, and he was buried at the shore just before the women of the place were crowded onto a transport. As the ship set off, her sorrowing passengers looked back to see their homes going up in flames and smoke, and Acadia knew them no more. The English had planned well to keep these people from coming together for conspiracy or revenge: they scattered them across America, from Newfoundland to the southern savannas.

Evangeline was not taken far away, only to New England; but without Gabriel, all lands were bleak, and she set off in search of him, working here and there, sometimes looking timidly at the headstones on new graves, then traveling on. Once she heard that he was a woodsman on the prairies, again that he was a traveler in the Louisiana lowlands; but those of his people who stayed near her tended to joke about her faith and urged her to marry Leblanc, the notary’s son, who truly loved her. To these she only replied, “I cannot.”