The Heir to Grand-Pré

by John Frederic Herbin

"The history of Pierre Gotro does not relate to those of our race who were removed. The first Pierre Gotro who made this island his home was known as 'Peche Gotro,' because of his fondness for fishing, and his skill in that calling. He was but a young man at the time, not being married, and was but one of the numerous name in Minas. Pierre owned a fishing boat, and had been away fishing during the summer. While the salmon ran he lived near this island. Having injured his boat, he was belated in his return to Grand Pré. Before the boat was ready to sail he saw the New England ships sail into the Basin, and from the island he saw them at anchor or sailing about on the waters at the south of the basin. Other ships came after, and he learned from Indians and escaping Acadians what was happening at Grand Pré.

"Pierre Island at that time made a safe retreat. It was almost inaccessible save by a narrow and dangerous path which animals had discovered and kept open by constant use. The slope of the island which has the road leading up here was not connected with the beach, for the lowest point of it at that time was nearly fifty feet high, and was built up as it is now after many years of labor when it was finally safe for an Acadian to return to Nova Scotia.

"Here Pierre made his home. In the cove where you were hurt he kept his boat, the channel thither being through a long and dangerous space of boulders.

"It is strange that the Acadians ever attempted to return to a country where they had received such cruel treatment. It would have seemed more pleasing to them to go among their own people in other places, where they would not have been subjected to such severe and unjust treatment, after they had been separated and broken as a people. Yet they returned. And thus it was that Pierre came to take possession of this island. He saw the ships sail out of the Basin. He saw the glare of many fires that told of the fate of the homes of the Acadians, his own people. He felt himself as much an outcast as if he had been on a ship destined for a strange country and an unfriendly people.

"With the building of the stone house Pierre began the long and lonely life which opens the history of Pierre Island. Months of terrible doubt as to the fate of his own kindred, and the privation which beset him turned the young man into an old man before his time. Winter set in and cut him off from his home, or what had been his home. His supply of salted fish, with other provisions he had providently gathered, sustained him. But for eight years he never tasted bread. In six years the New England settlers had homes on the Acadian lands. Each year brought more people. The exiled Acadians themselves found their way back to their own country, but not to the places which had been their homes. Many of them who had escaped the dangers of the sea, and the disease that broke out on the ships, died on the long march back to Acadia. They toiled on through a thousand miles of wilderness. Government persecution finally ceased, but for many years they were hated by many of the new settlers, and were glad to escape from them into the woods and to make homes again in the wilderness. On their fine lands the English settlers could not at first support themselves, and had to get aid from the government. The Acadians, in spite of the many disadvantages of their new life and the changed conditions of their existence, throve without help, and in the course of a few years had numerous colonies. In this way the people have learned to do with little, and learned the value of hard labor, while in their inmost souls was planted the melancholy of a hunted and oppressed race.

"Pierre in his lonely life learned wisdom and acquired great skill in the chase and on the water. It was many long years before he learned of his own family and relatives, and of the cruel fate of the numerous Gotros. In twenty years but few remained. Their large possessions, which had included almost all of the present village of Grand-Pré, and a large and rich family, were reduced to a few heart-broken and hopeless old men and women.

"At forty years of age Pierre married one of his own people who had returned to her country after years of wandering and privation. She was an Acadian woman whom he had known at Grand-Pré. For twenty years he had lived alone on this island, and had cleared enough land to raise the necessaries of daily life, and by means of his fishing he added to his small wealth. He had built the stone house, and had raised up with stone and earth a road from the beach to the slope by which we come up to Bluff Castle.

"Four generations of Pierres end with me," said the old man, sadly. "When I am placed with those whose graves are in sight of the land lost to them while they lived, and where their ancestors lie without a stone or mark to show the wayfarer, when I lie down with them the Pierres will be no more.

"That is the story of Bluff Castle. Each Pierre in turn went to his own people and chose a wife, and marrying her brought her here. Here the wives of the Pierres died and were buried. The daughters have never married till my sister broke the law established in the family after the deportation. That law required that no female should marry if the Pierre Gotro should continue and the name be perpetuated.

"We had come to look upon this as an old family tradition, without meaning, and belonging to an earlier and superstitious time. They had placed much importance on the perpetuation of the name, and deemed it not too great a sacrifice if the females of the family remained unmarried. I did not think it justifiable to make the whole life of my sister bound to the observance of it. Indeed, her own spirit rebelled against the acceptance of that old family law after she had been away to school and had become imbued with the ideas of a later generation.