The decision was promptly given effect. Ships soon appeared before the principal settlement in the Bay of Fundy. All the male inhabitants over ten years of age were summoned to hear the King's command. At Grandpré four hundred assembled in the village church, when the British officer read from the altar the decree of their exile. Resistance was impossible; armed soldiers guarded the door, and the men were imprisoned. They were marched at the bayonet's point, amid the wailings of their relatives, on board the transports. The women and children were shipped in other vessels. Families were scattered; husbands and wives separated—many never to meet again. Hundreds of comfortable homesteads and well-filled barns were ruthlessly given to the flames. A number, variously estimated at from three to seven thousand, were dispersed along the Atlantic seaboard from Maine to Georgia. Twelve hundred were carried to South Carolina. A few planted a New Acadia among their countrymen in Louisiana. Some sought to return to their blackened hearths, coasting in open boats along the shore. These were relentlessly intercepted when possible, and sent back into hopeless exile. An imperishable interest has been imparted to this sad story by Longfellow's beautiful poem Evangeline, which describes the sorrows and sufferings of some of the inhabitants of the little village of Grandpré.
FOOTNOTES:
[39] By permission of the author.
CLIVE ESTABLISHES BRITISH SUPREMACY IN INDIA
THE BLACK HOLE OF CALCUTTA: BATTLE OF PLASSEY
A.D. 1756
SIR ALEXANDER J. ARBUTHNOT
Robert Clive is recognized as the man to whom, above all others, England owes the establishment of her empire in India. Born in 1725 in Shropshire, he was raised to the Irish peerage in 1760 as Baron Clive of Plassey. The son of a poor country squire, at eighteen he entered the service of the East India Company at Madras.