Notwithstanding all their misfortunes and persecutions the Acadians living on the St. John continued gradually to increase. After the return of the missionary Bailly to Canada they were without a priest until the arrival of Joseph Mathurin Bourg in September, 1774. This intrepid missionary was the first native of Acadia to take holy orders and as such is a subject of especial interest. He saw the light of day at River Canard in the district of Mines on the 9th of June, 1744. His father, Michel Bourg, and his mother, Anne Hebert, with most of their children, escaped deportation at the time of the Acadian expulsion in 1755 and sought refuge at the Island of St. John [Prince Edward Island], from which place they 253 were transported by the English to the northern part of France. Young Joseph Mathurin became the protege of the Abbe de l’Isle-Dieu, then at Paris. He pursued his studies at a little seminary in the Diocese of St. Malo and on the 13th of September, 1772, was ordained priest at Montreal by Monseigneur Briand. After a year he was sent to Acadia as missionary to his compatriots of that region. He took charge of his mission in September, 1773. It at first extended from Gaspe to Cocagne, but in August, 1774, the Bishop of Quebec added the River St. John (including “Quanabequachies,” or Kennebeccasis) and all the rest of Nova Scotia and the Island of Cape Breton. The bishop also appointed the Abbe Bourg his grand vicar in Acadia. Almost immediately afterwards he visited the River St. John and the little settlement at French Village near the Kennebeccasis where, early in September, he baptized a considerable number of children, whose names and those of their parents are to be found in the register which is still preserved at Carleton, Bonaventure Co., in the province of Quebec.
(Signature) Joseph Mth. Bourg prétre Grand. V.
The missionary made his headquarters at Carleton (on the north side of the Bay of Chaleur) but from time to time visited different parts of his immense mission. During the Revolutionary war he paid special attention to the Indians on the River St. John, who largely through his efforts were kept from taking the warpath and going over to the Americans. The raids made by the Machias rebels under Jonathan Eddy and John Allan, in 1776 and 1777, interfered in some measure with the visits of the missionary, for Col. Michael Francklin in his interview with the Maliseets at Fort Howe in September, 1778, assured them that Mons’r. Bourg would have visited them sooner but for the apprehension entertained of his being carried off by the rebels.
The chapel at Aukpaque was not entirely disused during the absence of the missionary. We learn from John Allan’s narrative that while he was at Aukpaque in June, 1777, a number of Acadians came on Sundays to worship at the Indian chapel and that he and his prisoners, William Hazen and James White, also attended. While there they witnessed the funeral of an Indian girl. The ceremony was a solemn yet simple one. The body was borne into the chapel, the bell tolling the while; after a short prayer they sang funeral hymns, that done some of the chiefs bore the coffin to the grave where there was another prayer followed by a funeral hymn. The coffin was then deposited in the grave and a handful of earth cast upon it by the relatives and friends of her sex. Immediately afterwards the family wigwam was struck and removed into the thickest part of the village that the parents might be the better consoled for the loss of their child.
The important services rendered by Father Bourg to government during the American Revolution will be told in another chapter.
The first clergyman of the Church of England to visit the River St. John was the Rev’d. Thomas Wood, a native of the town of New Brunswick in the then British province of New Jersey. Mr. Wood went to England in 1749—the year of the founding of Halifax—to be ordained by the Bishop of London. He bore with him testimonials declaring him to be “a gentleman of a very good life and conversation, bred to Physick and Surgery.” He became one of the missionaries of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel and was transferred from New Jersey to Nova Scotia in 1753. Halifax and Annapolis were destined to be the chief scenes of his labors, but he made frequent tours amongst the new settlements.
Mr. Wood was an excellent French scholar and his gifts as a linguist were of no mean order. While at Halifax he lived on terms of friendship and intimacy with Antoine Simon Maillard, the missionary of the Indians and Acadians. In the year 1762 Mr. Wood attended the Abbe Maillard for several weeks during his last illness, and the day before his death, at his request, read the Office for the Visitation of the Sick in the French language in the presence of a number of Acadians, who were summoned for the occasion by the venerable missionary. Mr. Wood also officiated at the burial of M. Maillard, reading over his remains in French the burial service of the Church of England in the presence of “almost all the gentlemen of Halifax and a very numerous assembly of French and Indians.”