In the Carolinas and Georgia they were not more welcome. Jones[1022] says that the 400 received in Georgia went scattering away. Dinwiddie reports[1023] that in these southern colonies vessels were given them, and that at one time several hundreds of them were coasting north in vessels and canoes, so that the shores of the Dominion were opened to their descents for provision as they voyaged northward. When Dinwiddie sent a sloop after some who had been heard of near the capes, they eluded the search. When Lawrence learned of this northern coursing, he sent another circular letter to the continental governors, begging them to intercept the exiles and destroy their craft.[1024] Some such destruction did take place on the Massachusetts coast,[1025] and others were intercepted on the shores of Long Island.[1026]
In Louisiana many of them ultimately found a permanent home, and 50,000 “Cajeans,” as they are vulgarly called, constitute to-day a separate community along the “Acadian coast” of the Mississippi, in the western parts of the State.[1027] After the peace and during the next few years they wandered thither through different channels: some came direct from the English colonies,[1028] others from Santo Domingo, and still others passed down the Mississippi from Canada, where their reception had been even worse than in the English colonies.[1029]
Until recent years have given better details, the opinions regarding the ultimate fate of most of the Acadians have remained erroneous. So little did Hutchinson know of it that he speaks (iii. 42) of their being in a manner extinct, the few which remained being mixed with other subjects in different parts of the French dominions. Later New England writers have not been better informed. Hildreth (United States, ii. 459) says that “the greater part, spiritless, careless, helpless, died in exile.” Barry (ii. 204) says, “They became extinct, though a few of their descendants, indeed, still live at the South!” The later Nova Scotia authorities have come nearer the truth. Murdoch says very many of them returned within a few years. Rameau, in his Une Colonie féodale, speaks of 150 families from New England wandering back by land. Some of them, pushing on past their old farms, reached the bay of St. Mary’s, and founded the villages which their descendants now occupy. Those which returned, joined to such as had escaped the hunt of the English, counted 2,500, and in 1871 their numbers had increased to 87,740 souls. Rameau, in an earlier work, La France aux Colonies: Études sur le développement de la race française hors de l’Europe: Les Français en Amérique, Acadiens et Canadiens (Paris, 1859), had reached the same conclusion (p. 93) about the entire number of Acadians within the peninsula (16,000) as already mentioned, and held that while 6,000 were deported (p. 144), about 9,000 escaped the proscription (p. 62). He traces their wanderings and enumerates the dispersed settlements.
A more recent writer, Hannay (pp. 406, 408), says: “The great bulk of the Acadians, however, finally succeeded in returning to the land of their birth.... At least two thirds of the 3,000 (?) removed eventually returned.”
The guide-books and a chapter in Smith’s Acadia tell of the numerous settlements now existing along the Madawaska River, partly in New Brunswick and partly in Maine, which are the villages of the progeny of such as fled to the St. John, and removed to these upper waters of that river when, after the close of the American Revolution, they retired before the influx of the loyalists which settled in the neighborhood of the present city of St. John.[1030]
After an engraving by Ravenet. Cf. David Ramsay’s Mil. Memoirs of Great Britain, or a History of the War, 1755-1763 (Edinburgh, 1779), p. 192; and John Entick’s Hist. of the Late War, iii. p. 443.
Lord Loudon’s abortive attempt on Louisbourg has been mentioned in another place.[1031] Parkman gives the authorities. (Montcalm and Wolfe, i. 473; cf. Barry’s Massachusetts, ii. 223.)
An agreement (Sept. 12) for the supply of arms, etc., between sundry merchants and others of Maine and certain men, “for an intended scout or cruise for the killing and captivating the Indian enemy to the eastward,” to be under the command of Joseph Bayley, Jr., for sixty days from Sept. 20, 1757, is in the Maine Hist. and Geneal. Recorder, i. p. 11.