# Myths and Legends Beyond Our Borders/The Acadians and Evangeline

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THE ACADIANS AND EVANGELINE
WE shall never be quite at the truth about the Acadians, the French settlers in Nova Scotia, for the reports of the differences between them and the English are colored by race and religious prejudice. Certain it is, however, that on taking possession of the country the British regarded these farmers with suspicion, and that they burned their homes and drove them into exile with such haste that many families were separated, never again to be united. The French set forth that this was the act of a tyrannical governor and an imbruted soldiery. The English allege that the Acadians could not be trusted; that under guise of neutrality they were plotting against their conquerors and watching for an occasion to restore French rule in the Dominion. At the dawn of the twentieth century the breach, though narrowed, is still unhealed. Among the charges brought against the Acadians is that of angering the savages against their new rulers by telling them that the English were the men who had crucified Christ. Although the farmers along Minas Basin persisted that they had no part in the war which culminated in the fall of Louisburg under the guns of British regulars and Yankee militia, they were ordered, under penalties, to aid the winning party. One British officer told them that unless they furnished wood for his camp he would tear down their houses
​for fuel. Another said, "If you don't take the oath of fidelity I will batter your villages with my cannon." Cornwallis, on the other hand, assured them that if only they would be peaceable and loyal they might retain their religion and be "the happiest people in the world."
Several acts of these French settlers were not those of a peace-loving or a neutral people. They made trouble at Chebucto; they incited the Indians to the raid on Dartmouth, in which many of the villagers were killed, hurt, and kidnapped, their homes looted, and a third of the settlement laid in ashes. At the end of the war the Acadians who had escaped arrest refused to take the oath of allegiance and claimed the right to be let alone. Vicar-General La Loutre, their clerical leader, so hated the Protestants that, like the Russians retreating before Napoleon in a later time, he burned one of his towns—Beaubassin, a place of a thousand souls—that the English might not take it. It was a wretched season, and were it not for certain picturesque incidents attending the deportation and dispersion of the Acadians, of whom several spent the rest of their lives vainly seeking their families, and of whom "three ship-loads were sent to Philadelphia," one could wish that its record might be lost.
Best known of these episodes is that of Evangeline, the heroine of Longfellow's poem. She, at least, was an innocent sufferer in the clash between ​the races, and it is her story that, more than any other factor, has caused the action of the English to be condemned with expressions of horror. Evangeline Bellefontaine and her betrothed, Gabriel Lajeunesse, were of Grand Pré, whose few ruins on the south shore of Minas are a common show for tourists. When the British seized their village and burned their homes they expected to be sent away together, but in the haste and confusion they were separated, and, without the slightest clue to the whereabouts of her lover, Evangeline set off on a search for him. She sought from Maine to Louisiana, daring roughness, illness, and fatigue, and at last reached a home on the Teche on the very day that Gabriel had left it to prosecute his equally vain search for her. After other years of wandering, broken in spirit, hopeless, yet willing to live for the good she might do, Evangeline became a nun, and was assigned to a Philadelphia hospital. A pestilence was raging. People were dying by hundreds. On a Sunday morning she found in the hospital a new victim. It was Gabriel. A cry, a kiss: he was gone. Yet life was less bitter to her from that moment.