Читать книгу Canadian Footprints - Melvin Ormond Hammond - Страница 10
Оглавление—From “Evangeline,” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
THE wistful bronze figure of Evangeline casting a yearning look to the lost homeland of the Acadians as they are swept toward the waiting transports at the Gaspereau records for all time the Tragedy of Grand Pré. Man in gentler mood has rebuilt the chapel from which they departed, and thousands of visitors annually pay the tribute of a sigh for the unfortunate exiles so feelingly described by Longfellow.
The visitor cannot escape the beauty of the valley, nor the sorrow of its once happy people. In Spring the land is carpeted with eighty miles of apple blossoms, filling the air with unforgettable fragrance. Harvest and grazing cattle give fatness in Summer, and in the “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” the scent of ripened apples is wafted from orchard and warehouse. At all times the purple crown of Blomidon looms above the Basin of Minas, and, unhurrying ox teams wind over the diked lands, long since made rich by the Acadians and lost in the misfortunes of war.
The crisis for the mastery of the continent was fast approaching. France had begun to colonize Acadia in 1605, and despite the widening influence of imperial England, still hoped to rule from the St. Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexico. As the sway of the English extended, the French from their fastness of Louisbourg, and through mischievous clerical agitators like Abbé le Loutre, resisted the foe, and the bitterness increased. Governor Charles Lawrence, an unyielding figure from New England, was in no mood to compromise, and he proceeded to close the net about the hapless but stubborn Acadians.
All but a few of them refused the required oath of loyalty to the new English rulers. Lawrence chose to force the issue, and after the fall of Beauséjour in June, 1755, he moved inevitably toward the expulsion of the Acadians who would not swear allegiance. Colonel John Winslow reached Grand Pré in August, and early in September the men of Minas Basin were summoned to the parish church. There, in the building sacred to their happy lives, where baptism and marriage had come to many of them, they received the stunning news that their lands and livestock were forfeited to the Crown, and that they and their families must be exiled from the Province. Under the threat of gleaming bayonets, the younger men were ordered to the waiting transports.
It was a sad and dramatic procession. Eighty soldiers conducted the Acadians, while hundreds of women and children wept and prayed and clung to the victims as they took the road for the mile and a half to the mouth of the Gaspereau. There were weeks of waiting for more ships and supplies, but finally, on October 8, amid scenes of confusion, the embarking of the Acadians proceeded in earnest. Loaded ships set out for Maryland, Virginia and other colonies; other transports left Annapolis Royal, Pisiquid and Fort Cumberland, and by late December over 6,000 Acadians had been exiled. The lands they had diked and brought to richness in meadow and orchard by their industrious and frugal lives lay waste and vacant, and were not repeopled for several years.
A century and three-quarters have passed since the Acadians were
Scattered like dust and leaves when the mighty blasts of October
Seize and whirl them aloft, and sprinkle them far o’er the ocean,
but the debate over the rightness of Governor Lawrence’s action has not ceased. Racial prejudice has diminished, and, granting the existence of fault on both sides, an increasing proportion of the conquering race feels the punishment was disproportionate to the crime, or that a more statesmanlike Governor would have averted the tragedy.
After untold miseries in unknown lands, many of the Acadians crept back to the shores of Fundy, and today their descendants live the simple, wholesome lives of Evangeline and her people. “That stilly wanderer, small Gaspereau,” as Bliss Carman called it, winds through the beautiful valley to Horton’s Landing and joins the Basin of Minas where great blue herons wade into red, muddy flats in search of a shellfish dinner. “Glooscap,” whose home was on Blomidon, according to Micmac legend, has ceased his warfare with the “Great Beaver,” leaving the Five Islands as mementoes of the rocks he tossed at his enemy. Dominion Atlantic engines bear the names of characters in “Evangeline,” and it will be many a day before the sad, sweet story of the Acadian exiles fades from memory.
Evangeline Statue and Acadian Chapel, Grand Pré
