A decade later, another missionary, Father Albanel, with a Colonial officer, Denys de Saint Simon, were more fortunate. Following Dablon's route to the height of land, they pushed on to Lake Mistassini, and descended Rupert's River to Hudson Bay, where they found a small vessel flying the English flag, and two houses, but the English themselves were apparently away on some trading expedition.
The Jesuit missionaries seemed to have discovered at an early date the advantages of Lake St. John as the site of one of their missions. In 1808 the ruins of their settlement were still visible on the south side of the lake. James McKenzie, of the North-West Company, who visited the "King's Posts" in that year, says that "the plum and apple trees of their garden, grown wild through want of care, yet bear fruit in abundance. The foundation of their church and other buildings, as well as the churchyard, are still visible. The bell of their church, two iron spades, a horseshoe, a scythe and a bar of iron two feet in length, have lately been dug out of the ruins of this apparently once flourishing spot, and, adjoining, is an extensive plain or meadow on which much timothy hay grows." Elsewhere Mr. McKenzie mentions that the Fathers had mills on Lake St. John, some of the materials used in their construction having been found there by officers of the North-West Company. He adds that an island in the lake, not far from where the mission formerly stood, swarms with snakes, which a local tradition credited to the power of the worthy Jesuits. The Fathers found them inconveniently numerous about their settlement, and conjured them on to the island.
A settlement of some kind was made at Chicoutimi, on the Saguenay, early in the eighteenth century. A chapel and store, still standing in 1808, bore an inscription that they had been built in 1707. Father Coquart records that in 1750 there was a saw-mill on the River Oupaouétiche, one and a half leagues above Chicoutimi, which worked two saws night and day.
III
THE RIVER OF ACADIA
Along my fathers' dykes I roam again,
Among the willows by the river-side.
These miles of green I know from hill to tide,
And every creek and river's ruddy stain.
Neglected long and shunned, our dead have lain.
Here, where a people's dearest hope has died,
Alone of all their children scattered wide,
I scan the sad memorials that remain.
HERBIN.
Some time about the middle of the seventeenth century, an Acadian, sailing perhaps from Port Royal in search of peltries or of mere adventure, brought his little vessel by great good luck safely through that treacherous channel, guarded at one end by Cape Split and at the other by the frowning crest of Blomidon, and found himself upon the placid waters of the Basin of Minas. Champlain had sailed across the mouth of the basin in 1604, and had called it the Port des Mines, because of certain copper-mines which he had been led to expect there. This Acadian found something better than copper-mines. Safely past Blomidon, he came to a land which nature seemed to have set apart as the home of an industrious and peace-loving people. Somewhere about the mouth of the Gaspereau he built his home. Others followed, and in time a long, straggling village grew up; willows were planted, which stand to-day as a memorial of this Acadian colony; and after years of toil they completed that still more impressive monument of Acadian industry, the "long ramparts of their dykes," by which they fenced out the sea from the rich and fertile lowlands, and turned these once tide-swept flats into green meadows.
The Gaspereau country must have been beautiful enough when the Acadians first came to make their home there, but in the years of their occupation they gave to the landscape, quite unconsciously no doubt, certain subtle touches that turned it into something little less than an earthly paradise. Standing upon the ridge and looking down into the valley of the Gaspereau, one sees a scene that it not very materially changed from the days of the Acadians-after one has eliminated such modern excrescences as railways and bridges. The village of Grand Pré would have to be rearranged, no doubt. There was less of it in the first half of the eighteenth century; it did not cover quite the same ground; but no doubt a traveller who came that way in 1750 would have seen in the vale beneath many such picturesque cottages embowered in the self-same trees, and the rest of the scene would have been much the same as he would see to-day. Charles Roberts, the Canadian poet, novelist, and historian, has made a word-picture of it. "The picture is an exquisite pastoral. Among such deep fields, such billowy groves, and such embosomed farmsteads might Theocritus have wrought his idylls to the hum of the heavy bees. Along the bottom of the sun-brimmed vale sparkles the river, between its banks of wild rose and convolvulus, with here and there a clump of grey-green willows, here and there a red-and-white bridge. As it nears its mouth the Gaspereau changes its aspect. Its complexion of clear amber grows yellow and opaque as it mixes with the uprushing tides of Minas, and its widened channel winds through a riband of dyked marshes."
This is the valley of the Gaspereau, one of the most beautiful spots in the beautiful province of Nova Scotia. This, too, in that far-off autumn of 1755, was the scene of one of the most pathetic and tragic incidents in the history of America. It would serve no useful purpose to discuss that much-debated question of the whys and wherefores of the expulsion of the Acadians. The story of the actual tragedy is all we have space for here. That story is alone sufficient to make the Gaspereau famous among rivers of Canada, and it is best told in the language of Francis Parkman. Governor Lawrence had summoned the deputies of the Acadian settlements to appear before him at Halifax, to take the oath of allegiance and fidelity. They came, but flatly refused to take the oath. The Governor and Council thereupon decided that the only thing that remained to be done was to deport them from the colony. John Winslow, a Colonial officer from Massachusetts, was charged with the duty of securing the inhabitants about the Basin of Minas. On August 14, 1755, he set forth from his camp at Fort Beausejour, with a force of but two hundred and ninety-seven men. He sailed down Chignecto Channel to the Bay of Fundy. "Here, while they waited the turn of the tide to enter the Basin of Minas," says Parkman, "the shores of Cumberland lay before them dim in the hot and hazy air, and the promontory of Cape Split, like some misshapen monster of primeval chaos, stretched its portentous length along the glimmering sea, with head of yawning rock, and ridgy back bristled with forests. Borne on the rushing flood, they soon drifted through the inlet, glided under the rival promontory of Cape Blomidon, passed the red sandstone cliffs of Lyon's Cove, and descried the mouths of the Rivers Canard and Des Habitants, where fertile marshes, diked against the tide, sustained a numerous and thriving population. Before them spread the boundless meadows of Grand Pré, waving with harvests, or alive with grazing cattle; the green slopes behind were dotted with the simple dwellings of the Acadian farmers, and the spire of the village church rose against a background of woody hills. It was a peaceful, rural scene, soon to become one of the most wretched spots on earth."
After conferring with his brother officer, Murray, who was encamped with his men on the banks of the Pisiquid, where the town of Windsor now stands, Winslow returned to Grand Pré. The Acadian elders were told to remove all sacred things from the village church, and the building was then used as a storehouse. The men pitched their tents outside, while Winslow took possession of the priest's house. A summons was sent to the male inhabitants of the district, over ten years of age, to attend at the church in Grand Pré, on the fifth of September, at three of the clock in the afternoon, "that we may impart what we are ordered to communicate to them; declaring that no excuse will be admitted on any pretence whatsoever, on pain of forfeiting goods and chattels in default."
"On the next day," continues Parkman, "the inhabitants appeared at the hour appointed, to the number of four hundred and eighteen men. Winslow ordered a table to be set in the middle of the church, and placed on it his instructions and the address he had prepared." It ran partly as follows: "The duty I am now upon, though necessary, is very disagreeable to my natural make and temper, as I know it must be grievous to you, who are of the same species. But it is not my business to animadvert on the orders I have received, but to obey them; and therefore without hesitation I shall deliver to you His Majesty's instructions and commands, which are that your lands and tenements and cattle and live-stock of all kinds are forfeited to the Crown, with all your other effects, except money and household goods, and that you yourselves are to be removed from this his province. The peremptory orders of His Majesty are that all the French inhabitants of these districts be removed; and through His Majesty's goodness I am directed to allow you the liberty of carrying with you your money and as many of your household goods as you can take without overloading the vessels you go in. I shall do everything in my power that all these goods be secured to you, and that you be not molested in carrying them away, and also that whole families shall go in the same vessel; so that this removal, which I am sensible must give you a great deal of trouble, may be made as easy as His Majesty's service will admit; and I hope that in whatever part of the world your lot may fall, you may be faithful subjects, and a peaceable and happy people."
After weary weeks of delay, which tried Winslow's patience to the utmost, the transports at last arrived at the mouth of the Gaspereau, and the work of embarkation began. Up to the very last the Acadians could not believe that the order of deportation was serious, and when they finally realised their fate and knew that they must bid farewell for ever to their homes-the homes of their fathers, the land that they loved so well-their grief was indescribable. "Began to embark the inhabitants," says Winslow in his Diary, "who went off very solentarily and unwillingly, the women in great distress, carrying off their children in their arms; others carrying their decrepit parents in their carts, with all their goods; moving in great confusion, and appeared a scene of woe and distress." It was late in December before the last transport left the mouth of the Gaspereau. Altogether more than twenty-one hundred Acadians were exiled from Grand Pré and the country round about. They were distributed along the Atlantic coast, from Massachusetts to Georgia. Some made their way to Louisiana; some escaped and reached Canada. "Some," says Parkman, "after incredible hardship, made their way back to Acadia, where, after the peace, they remained unmolested, and, with those who had escaped seizure, became the progenitors of the present Acadians, now settled in various parts of the British maritime provinces." Few of them, however, returned at any time to Grand Pré, and that once thriving settlement remained desolate for several years, until at last British families straggled in and took up the waste lands of the unfortunate Acadians.